Planet America (18 page)

They were cuffed, put into a squad car, and driven to the jail. It was at that point the three silently agreed Pater Tomm would do most of the talking from then on, at least until they could figure a way out of this mess. And the padre was good at spinning. Once they were brought to the interrogation room, he was able to avoid giving the cops any more information by simply repeating over and over the bare essentials of what they had so foolishly blurted out to them already. By never deviating from this speech, they'd hoped to eventually wear down the Betaville cops, to the point of disinterest. Or at least that was the plan.

But that was where they'd made their second mistake. The three of them had naively assumed that once they'd talked themselves blue to the police, they'd be allowed to go free. But that certainly didn't seem to be the case now. The Betaville authorities clearly thought they were crazy, and they were not about to let them run loose in the streets. Instead, they were going to be processed, poked, and questioned.
Investigated
. For days, months, even years.

There was no time for any of that.

So instead of answering the pretty girl's question, Hunter posed to her one of his own.

"Would it really be so unusual?" he asked her suddenly. "I mean, would you be
that
shocked if it turned out that we were telling you the truth?"

She almost laughed, at the same time pulling the top of her blouse together.

"You mean that you were somehow transported here, from outer space?"

All three men nodded.

"Have you ever heard of
anything
like this before?" Hunter asked her.

She paused a moment.

"Well, it's an interesting question coming from you," she said finally. "I mean, sure, I've read stories. Mostly in the tabloids. People visited by beings from outer space. Or being carried away in their ships. Or just disappearing and never coming back."

"And you just don't think any of that is possible?"

She rolled her eyes. "No one does," she said.

"But why not?" Hunter pressed her. "It's a big universe out there."

She looked out the nearby window. The stars were shining brightly beyond.

"Big? It sure is," she replied, pointing toward the night sky. "But it also looks very, very empty from down here."

"But that all depends on how you look at it," Hunter told her. "From our perspective maybe it looks very busy, very full."

She laughed again. "Yeah, that's rich, pal. But OK, even if someone was able to somehow get off this planet, which no one has ever even tried, the distance to get anywhere else is prohibitively great, isn't it?"

She checked her notes. "Of course, the guys downstairs said you claimed you can travel more than a light-year a second. Boy, that's fast."

"And again, you think that's impossible?"

She looked right back at him. "Yes sir, I do."

Hunter paused for a moment. This wasn't going anywhere, and they were running out of time. The Betaville cop would be back with her refreshments soon, and that would just make a difficult situation even worse.

So he worded his next question very carefully.

"Let's say we were able to convince you that we are telling you the truth... and that we came here from outer space because we had this overwhelming need to. Or at least 1 did. What would you do then?"

She laughed, then reached into her handbag and came out with her car keys.

"I would tell you to take my car and just drive right around the planet, baby—see this lonely little place that had drawn you over billions of miles—and then I'd write a book about you, and we'd all become millionaires."

Hunter was surprised by her answer.

"Really?" he asked her.

"Really," she replied.

Hunter thought about this for a moment then looked over at Zarex and Pater Tomm. That was good enough for them.

"Padre?" Hunter said to Tomm. "After you ..."

The priest did a slight bow. "May I get something in my pocket?" he asked Lisa. "Not a weapon, I assure you."

"I'm a sucker for a good laugh," she said. "Be my guest."

Tomm reached into his pocket and withdrew an electron torch, the handy tool just about everyone in the Galaxy carried. He turned it on, then carved a square out of the air in front of him. The molecules instantly bonded into a pane of superglass, about two feet by two feet, glistening, yet pliable. Tomm grabbed the pane out of the air, and then began pushing it in from its corners, quickly forming a perfect, if overly large superglass diamond. Then he blew on it gently, causing the molecules to disperse and making it disappear.

They all looked at Lisa. She was staring back at them, mouth open, but skeptical around her eyes.

"A trick..." she managed to mumble. "A good one, but..."

Tomm looked at Hunter. More was needed. The pilot took a small white box from his pocket and activated the button on top. There was a sudden flash and then a burst of green smoke. When it dissipated, his flying machine was standing in the middle of the big room, its tail fin crushing some of the Christmas boxes.

Lisa dropped her glasses; they hit the table, then the floor, shattering into a thousand little pieces. Her jaw fell open. She turned pale. She tried to say something, but no words would come out. In fact, she had a hard time catching her breath. She managed to stand up, though, and stumble forward, approaching the spacecraft gingerly. She reached out and touched it, making sure that she wasn't in a dream.

Then she began shaking her head. "No ... this ... this can't be real...."

They took her at her word; they couldn't help it, that's the way they were. So Zarex snapped his fingers, there was another burst of green smoke, and suddenly the danker 33418 was standing before them, all ten feet of him. Metallic muscles, arm weapons, death-ray visor. The works.

Lisa looked up at him, and the robot made an unusual whirring sound.

That's when she fainted dead away.

She hit the floor with a bang, taking out one of the old rickety chairs with her. "Oh great!" Zarex moaned. 'Wow what do we do with her?"

Not a minute later, they were bounding down the stairs of the police station, trying to make the least amount of noise possible, but tripping and slamming into things in the dark, nevertheless.

They reached the bottom floor and found themselves in a pitch-black hallway. Above them, they could hear many footsteps running down the stairs, coming their way. Hunter began groping around the wall and somehow found the rear door to the building. He hit the bar and the door sprang free. It also set off the building's security alarm.

There were only two cars in the parking lot. One had police writing all over it; the other was very sleek-looking in an odd kind of way, white with fiery decals on the front and a winglike contraption on the back. It was Lisa's Firebird. Zarex climbed in behind the wheel of the car; he'd fished the keys out of Lisa's jacket pocket soon after she collapsed. As Hunter and Tomm piled into the backseat, Zarex tried to figure out exactly how to insert the keys into the ignition. It took a few moments, but finally the key went into the slot.

Nothing happened.

Zarex pulled the key out and put it back in again.

Still nothing ...

"What infernal machine is this?" he roared. "Surely these things tap into its power supply!"

Lights were blinking on all over the police station now. And the alarm was ringing even louder.

"Manipulate the key, brother!" Tomm yelled to Zarex.

That's when Zarex realized the key had to be not only inserted into the ignition but turned as well. As soon as he did this, the car's engine roared to life. Hunter reached forward and pulled the control stick down to the initial D, and off they went.

Wheels screeching, tires burning rubber, they peeled out onto the street in front of the police station, knocking over a line of trash cans in the process. Zarex didn't know how to drive; he was having trouble just keeping the wheel straight while pushing the accelerator to the floor. The result was a high-speed, careening journey down Main Street, sideswiping several parked cars and running two red lights. They were making so much noise, store alarms were popping on as soon as they roared past. Zarex took a sharp comer at the intersection of Elm and Main, creaming a park bench and taking down a no parking sign as well. Finally, they swerved onto Route 67A and took off toward the west. Though it had not been as subtle as they would have liked, they had not met any other vehicles since thundering out of the police station parking lot, and none were in pursuit.

Zarex managed to keep the car fairly straight on the road now and was intent on making the needle, which indicated their speed, climb to the far end of its limit, which was 160 miles per hour.

Only once he'd achieved this speed did Hunter and Tomm finally sit back and relax for a moment.

"We're safe now," Tomm said with a sigh of relief.

They drove for about twenty miles.

It was almost midnight. Traveling through the particularly isolated part of southwestern Illinois, they saw no other cars on the little-used highway nor any structures except for a few scattered barns and sheds. There were immense fields of alfalfa and wheat on either side of the straight, flat road. The winds rippled across these fields in such a way, they made the stalks move like waves on an ocean. Just above the roadway itself, a thick but shallow mist had gathered. Rain clouds hung low overhead. This was called inclement weather, Tomm reminded them. A rarity in most places, and in some parts of the Galaxy, it didn't exist at all.

Zarex had finally gotten the hang of operating the Firebird. Just keep the wheel steady and the pedal to the floor; it was really as simple as that. Yet the car did not ride very smooth at its maximum speed; this surprised them, as did the motor, which seemed a hundred times noisier than the power generator on any spacecraft they'd been in.

While putting distance between them and Betaville was an immediate priority, there was something even more urgent pressing on their minds. Their violent landing on this planet had come just after dawn, so they'd yet to glimpse this world's night sky. And that was the problem. They had told the Betaville cops the truth about one thing: They had no idea where they were. Not a clue. All that day, during their interrogation, they had yearned for night to fall just so they could see the stars and get a reading on their galactic location. Now it was dark again, and the rain clouds were finally beginning to break up ahead of them. So even though the police might be coming over the next hill in high pursuit, the three fellow travelers knew they had to stop and study the sky the first chance they got.

Spotting a fairly high hill ahead, Zarex pulled to the side of the road and killed the engine. All they could hear now was the wind. Suddenly, it was howling. They climbed out of the car and found the clouds above them were moving away very quickly. Strangely, it was getting very bright out. They climbed a wire fence, then forded a small stream before reaching the base of the hill. Scrambling up to the summit, they found the clouds were blowing away in every direction now, magically revealing the night sky for the first time.

"Am I seeing things?" Zarex was the first to gasp, shielding his eyes from the glare. "Or does this before us seem alien and unreal?"

That it did. Unlike the black-magic planet of Myx, the sky here was absolutely filled with stars. From horizon to horizon to horizon, there seemed to be nothing but stars. More stars than black space in between. More stars than it would seem possible, especially in the middle of the sky, where there were so many clustered together, they seemed to create one gigantic orb of light.

They had never seen anything like this.

"My God," Tomm breathed. "Where can we be?"

The three travelers had no idea. But it was important that they find out. Before being arrested, they'd given their personal items to Pater Tomm, hoping the police would not frisk someone who looked like a priest, which they did not. This was how they had been able to retain their various quadtrols and Twenty 'n Six boxes. Zarex pulled out his quadtrol now and scanned the vast, star-studded sky above them. He looked at the initial readings and let out a long, astonished groan.

"No wonder no one in the Five-Arm knew where this place was," he said finally. "It's because we're not
on
the Five-Arm anymore."

Hunter and Tomm didn't like the sound of that.

"If not the Five-Arm, then where are we, brother?" Tomm asked him anxiously.

Zarex pushed some more buttons; again it took a few mo-merits for the calculations to bounce back to him.

"Goodness," he breathed. "Can this be accurate?"

He turned the quadtrol around so they could both see.

"If this is correct," he said. "We're not on any arm at all."

Hunter and Tomm just stared back at him.
Not on any arm
?

"Nor are we inward, near the Ball," Zarex continued. "We are at neither place."

"Is that possible?" Hunter asked.

Zarex just shrugged. "Certainly every known star in the Galaxy is located either on the arms or in the Ball, or very close by. Yet, if my quadtrol is to be believed, we are at neither point in space."

He paused and looked up again. "In all my years, I've never seen a sky such as this."

But why did the sky look so thick with stars? Hunter was the first to spit out a theory. Because the Galaxy was flat and spiral, they were used to looking through one of the arms toward the center. Could it be that they were actually somewhere looking down onto the Milky Way, so the stars were not spread before them on a straight plane, but instead literally filled up the sky?

"An interesting conjecture," Zarex said. "Except top or bottom, there aren't any systems anywhere near the area we would have to be. It is supposed to be totally empty space; the gap between us and the other galaxies—"

"But dear God, it's the only explanation!" Tomm cried. "As crazy as it may seem."

This was all becoming very unsettling for Zarex. As a lifelong star shooter, it was a bit frightening not knowing exactly where he was. Even in his longest explorations, he'd always left from a familiar starting point, knowing he could always return to the same.