Nothing But Blue Skies (28 page)

‘Took you long enough,' Hpq complained as she released the handbrake, let the clutch out smoothly and joined the stream of traffic. ‘But then, you always were a bit slow off the mark with gadgets. Hey, do you remember that time when we were doing isomorphic wave resonance mechanics in second grade, and you thought the electron splitter was a nucleitide wrench? Laugh? I nearly fell off my stool.'

‘You did fall off your stool,' Karen reminded him, deftly overtaking a Porsche. ‘And the teacher made you stand in the corner for the rest of the lesson.'

‘You're right, I'd forgotten.' Hpq clicked his tongue. ‘Haven't thought about those days in quite a while, actually. Do you remember that time when you and me and your cousin S'sssn and old Snotty Frpzxmqxcp stole all those cloud-traffic cones out of the - LOOK OUT, YOU BLOODY FOOL, YOU'RE HEADING STRAIGHT FOR THAT BUILDING - out of the caretaker's shed and stuck them up on the statues on the roof? We got into a lot of trouble for that, but it was worth it just to see the expression on the old misery's face.'

Karen nodded. ‘It was a silly thing to do,' she said. ‘We could easily have fallen off the roof and been killed. I'm glad I don't—'

‘No, we wouldn't,' Hpq interrupted, frowning. ‘If we'd fallen off we'd have just spread our wings and drifted down. My God,' he added, staring at her, ‘now you're starting to remember things like one of them. We've got to get you out of here fast, before it's too late.'

Karen took a deep breath. ‘I've been meaning to talk to you about that,' she said. ‘About what I'm going to do when this is all over, I mean. You see,' she continued, sweeping anticlockwise round a roundabout, ‘I don't plan on going back.'

‘What?'

‘I'm staying here,' she said. ‘I'm not going to be a dragon any more.'

It was several seconds before Hpq could reply; partly because what she'd said had stunned him, partly because he'd seen how close his side of the car had come to the lamp-post they'd just passed at sixty miles an hour, and he didn't want to bother her while she was making such finely graduated course adjustments. ‘Because of what's-his-face? The human? You can't be serious.'

‘I am,' Karen replied. ‘And not just because of him. Even if things don't work out there, I'm still not going back.'

‘You mean you actually
prefer
it here? You must be out of your pointy-topped skull.'

‘I didn't say that,' Karen pointed out. ‘I think it's more a case of not being able to go back.'

Hpq pursed his inconvenient human lips. ‘All right,' he said, ‘yes, your dad's going to be monumentally pissed at you for quite some time, and it won't be a pretty sight. That's not enough to make you maroon yourself down here among the woolly-tops. He'll get over it—'

‘Yes. But I won't. Can't you understand that?' Karen looked away for a moment, trying to remember the colour-coding system for traffic lights, which had temporarily slipped her mind. It wasn't easy to figure it out from first principles, but once she'd remembered that red was also the universal convention for hot, the rest followed logically enough. (Red is hot; engines run hot when you're moving, slow when you're standing still; thus red must mean Go. Stands to reason, really.) ‘It's not that I don't want to go home,' she continued, swerving to avoid an oncoming car whose driver clearly hadn't figured out the red = hot thing yet. ‘Or even that I like it here very much. I don't. And no, it's not because I'm scared of what dad will say, or anybody else for that matter. I guess I'm going to stay for the same reason a tree stays. I made a choice, and this is where I am now, so I'll have to get used to it.'

‘That's supposed to be a reason . . .? Oh, by the way, where are we going?'

‘I don't know,' Karen replied.

‘Oh. In that case, do you think we could go there a little more slowly? It's not like I'm scared or anything, it's just that if the theory of relativity's got any truth in it at all, at the speed you're going it'll be yesterday before we get anywhere.'

Karen scowled, but throttled back to a timid fifty-five. ‘Truth is,' she said, ‘I can't think of anywhere in particular to go. Before those idiotic policemen turned up, I was planning on staying put and letting them come and get me - I figured, why bother going to them when they'll quite happily come and give me a lift? - but now that's all messed up. Nobody's ever going to believe all that was an accident, and I really don't want to spend the rest of my life in a human prison, thank you very much.'

‘So,' Hpq said, ‘now you've got to go to them.'

‘Agreed. Only, of course, I don't know where they are.'

‘Closer than you think,' Hpq replied, pointing up through the roof. ‘Helicopter,' he explained.

‘Damn. Open the windows and turn the fan on, quick. Anything to keep myself from sweating.'

Hpq did as he was told. ‘Actually,' he suggested, ‘a cyclone or a small typhoon'd probably get rid of them. And they'd stand a better chance of survival, probably.'

‘No.' Karen was slowing right down, looking for a place to pull in. ‘All right, you vanish. I'll be all right, really.'

‘If you say so,' replied a patch of empty space where Hpq had been sitting. ‘What about the going-to-prison stuff, though? I thought you said—'

‘I'll think of something. And before you say it, no, I don't want you to come and fetch me out, no matter what. It's been wonderful seeing you again, really it has, but it's time you were going home. Believe me, it is. There's no place for your kind down here.'

She parked the car, got out and stood on the pavement, waving to the helicopter. The policemen inside must have seen her, because it hung in the air like a big fat dragonfly, looking at her dubiously like a nervous hiker looking over a gate at a field full of cows. Then they must have figured out how to use the bullhorn, because the helicopter started talking to her.

‘This is the police,' it said. ‘Throw down your weapons. We are armed and will shoot if necessary. Resistance is futile. I repeat—'

Karen yawned. The helicopter didn't look like it was in any hurry to land, but it did seem inordinately fond of the sound of its own voice. After a minute of this, Karen's patience ran out. She closed her eyes and looked for the helicopter's radio.

Quiet!
she thought.

Obligingly, the helicopter stopped burbling, though it backed away fifty yards or so.
That's better
, Karen told it.
Now, can you land that thing without damaging anybody?

The bullhorn sputtered a bit, coughing out a gob of static. ‘Yes,' it said. ‘We'll do that.'

Fine. Oh, by the way, I surrender
.

‘Thanks.'

‘Sorry, didn't see it there. How's that?'

They were a bit diffident about coming to get her, for some reason. Fortunately, they didn't ask how she'd managed to hack into their radio without any equipment at all; instead, they sat looking at her nervously and not saying anything, all the way to wherever it was they were taking her—

—Which turned out to be some kind of airfield in the middle of nowhere. There was a small jet aircraft waiting.
Canberra
, she remembered, and wished she'd thought to ask Hpq exactly where
Canberra
was. But she hadn't; so she asked a policeman instead.

‘Australia,' he replied. ‘Hey, how the hell did you know—?'

‘Doesn't matter,' she replied; and, since the policeman seemed far too nervous of her to want to take it any further, there the matter rested. And that was all right; because all the policemen (or soldiers, or secret service agents, or whatever) were so obviously scared stiff just being near her that it was impossible for her to feel anxious enough to work up a sweat. She tried smiling reassuringly but that just seemed to make things worse, so she gave up.

Why Australia?
she wondered; and then she remembered having heard something about Australia being the place where the British traditionally sent their criminals.
Figures
, she thought;
that's what I am, now
.

They let her sit next to the window. It was the first time she'd left her own airspace, or flown as a passenger. The sensation of looking down on the clouds while in human form was extremely unsettling to begin with (
Help! No wings!
) but after a few hours it started to get easier, and she stopped feeling instinctively for the grain of the airflow with the empty space where her wings should have been.

 

‘The idea,' Neville muttered, ‘was a good one, in theory.'

It was pitch dark. Somewhere nearby, something - no, things, plural - was making a soft, scuffling noise.
Probably
, Gordon told himself,
that's claustrophobia and asthma, fighting over which of them gets the privilege of finishing me off
.

‘Hey, you said,' Neville went on, ‘look, you said, there's a ventilation shaft behind that grille. If we could get inside it, you said, there's just enough room to crawl. That could be our way out of here, you said.' He sneezed. ‘Of course, you weren't to know it'd turn out to be a dead end, and that after hours and hours and hours of doing toothpaste impressions we'd find ourselves stuck here without enough space to turn round. Really, you mustn't blame yourself.'

‘Thank you.'

‘You're welcome. Of course,' Neville went on, ‘if by some miracle we ever get out of here, I'm going to kill you. But you won't really have deserved it. I thought you might like to know that.'

Gordon didn't reply immediately. Instead, he began to laugh. ‘You might just get your chance,' he said. ‘Here, listen.'

They listened.

‘It's a voice,' Neville said.

‘Precisely. And that's good news; first, because it isn't yours, second, because it's directly underneath us.'

‘And?'

‘And,' Gordon went on, ‘if we can only find some way of breaking through, that means we can get out of this godforsaken shaft.'

‘True,' Neville conceded. ‘And if I had fifty-eight tiny metal hands and an inky ribbon running through my nose, I'd be a typewriter. How do you propose breaking through a fourteen-gauge stainless-steel conduit without any tools?'

‘We'll think of something.'

‘Bet you a fiver we won't. Trust me on this, there's no way we're going to be able to - aaagh!' There was a thump, a clang and a distictly feminine scream. Gordon backed up a bit, and smiled the contented smile of the man to whom his enemy owes money. Then he lowered his legs over the edge of the hole where the panel had just fallen through, wriggled back a little further until he felt himself beginning to slide, and grabbed for the edge with his hands. It was a bit like climbing down out of a loft without a ladder, and he had to drop the last five feet or so. Fortunately, Neville broke his fall, so that was all right.

The first thing he saw after he'd picked himself up off the ground was a dragon. The next thing was his ex-fiancée. It was, he realised, going to be one of those days.

‘Gordon?'

‘Hello, Zelda,' he said, quickly checking his ankle to see if he'd sprained it. ‘There's a dragon tied to that table over there.'

‘Yes, I know.' She gave him a look you could have cut glass with. ‘Is that all you've got to say for yourself, you bastard: “Hello, Zelda, there's a dragon tied to that table”?'

Gordon frowned. He was still feeling a little shaken up by the fall out of the conduit. ‘But there
is
a dragon tied to the table,' he pointed out.

‘You left me standing outside the church, you jerk! How could you do that to me? You thoughtless, inconsiderate, good-for-nothing—'

‘Yes, all right.' He held his hand up, to indicate that he wanted to speak. ‘You won't get any arguments from me on that score. The dragon, Zelda. Is it real?'

The dragon made a strange, deep gurgling sound, rather like a thunderstorm giggling. ‘That's him, isn't it?'

‘Yes,' the scientist sighed. ‘That's him.'

‘Told you.'

‘Yes, you did.'

The dragon looked at Gordon for a moment. ‘You're better off,' it said.

‘You bet I am. Gordon, what the
hell
do you think you're playing at, jumping out on me like that?'

‘Sorry.' He shrugged. ‘It was that, or stay squashed up in a ventilation duct with
him
.' He indicated Neville with his toe. ‘If you'd been in my position, you'd have done the same thing.'

The scientist breathed out slowly through her nose. ‘Right,' she said. ‘Just out of interest, what were you doing up there in the first place?'

‘Escaping,' Gordon replied. ‘Look, do you mind if I sit down in your chair? I think I've done something to my ankle.'

‘What? Oh, all right. So who were you escaping from? Some other poor bitch you'd decided not to marry after all?'

A pained expression crossed Gordon's face. ‘Don't be like that,' he said, trying hard not to stare at the dragon. ‘No, as a matter of fact I was trying to escape from a bunch of raving psychopaths with guns who've been trying to kill me. Would you happen to know anything about that, by any chance?'

‘Someone trying to kill you?' the scientist said. ‘Now who on earth would want to do a thing like that? Apart from all those other women whose lives you've screwed up, of course, and possibly half a dozen jealous husbands and maybe the pest-control people.'