Race Against Time (5 page)

This time they took no chances. Betsy arrived in an automobile with her folks. John could tell at a glance that she was real, whereas her parents were painted Standards like his own. There were many telltale traces apart from the skin, once he knew what to look for. The contour of the head was subtly different, the spacing of the features, the shape of the nose, the thickness of lips and brows—the Standards were certainly of a distinct race, regardless of their color.

"Come, John; mustn't be bashful," Dad said with forced heartiness.

"I'm not," John said, doing his best to
look
bashful. Who was fooling whom, after yesterday's episode?

The older folks got out on either side of the car and came forward to shake hands with Mom and Dad. John hardly looked at them; his attention was on Betsy—as it was supposed to be, but not for the reason the elders thought.

Betsy bore a certain resemblance to her picture, but the portrait had obviously been retouched, and she was older now, seventeen. He was sure she saw him the same way. For a moment he had a really uncomfortable doubt: Would this carefully nurtured girl actually risk a safe, easy life to become a fugitive with him? Could he trust her?

"How do you do?" Betsy said, startling him into a foolish smile.

John held out his hand, changed his mind, then reversed again and shook hands clumsily. "Uh, fine, how are you?" This was unexpectedly awkward, and he was, after all, bashful. He had made plans—
they
had made plans—with cool assurance. Now it all seemed ridiculous.

The four parents were beaming. Now John felt guilty, too. It was all so realistic, and he was sure these particular Standards meant well, by their own definitions. What he contemplated was a tremendous betrayal to people who had invested at least fifteen years of their lives in this....

"Why don't you show me around, John?" Betsy hinted softly.

He nodded dumbly, furious with her for nudging him like that and with himself for losing his grip. Yesterday he had been in command!
(Was
it a dream, then?) She took his arm, and he realized he should have proffered it. They walked away from the house. He felt those eight parental eyes on his back. What a freeze artist he turned out to be in the crunch! If Betsy hadn't taken over, they'd still be standing beside the car trying to think of something worth saying.

He and Betsy were together now. They had been building up to this moment for a year, both openly and in code. The program of the Standards had them visiting together for a week, then separating for a month before meeting again in college: to make sure the specimens were compatible, he thought angrily.

The code plan was for them to take an innocent preliminary walk, evincing proper adolescent shyness, and vault the Newton township fence in a sudden coordinated action. Properly executed, this would catch the secret observers by surprise and make time to set up the second phase.

"Down there is Newton," he said.

"The town," she said solemnly. "How nice."

He felt the heat in his face.
Sarcastic minx!

Canute pushed against the front door and bounded after them, tail wagging. He caught up to them and frisked about, his paws scattering pebbles in his eagerness.

"Get away!" Betsy exclaimed as the dog nosed her dress. "Get away from me, you dirty animal!"

"That's Canute," John said, irritated at her attitude. "He always comes along."

"He always comes along," she mimicked, brushing a smudge of dirt from her shoe.

Canute, sensing her hostility, became chastened. He dog-trotted on the side away from her, tail near his legs. John was furious.

They got away from the adults and passed the copse of spruce trees. "You knew about Canute!" he said in a low, terse voice. "I've trained him—"

"We can't take a
dog!"
she whispered back. "You never said he'd—come along." She meant along on the escape but of course could not refer to that openly.

"Well, he's coming," John said with determination.

"Well, he's coming!" she mimicked again.

John was so angry he could not talk. He had had no idea a girl could be this obnoxious. It hadn't shown in her letters at all.

They cut through a section of the copse, then across the pasture toward the town limit, seemingly aimlessly. Perhaps it
was
aimless, he thought miserably. If Betsy was this difficult already, what would she be like when the going got rough? He might be better off to make the break alone. Except that he had promised, and he couldn't risk leaving her behind to give away all their secrets.

Two things were certain: He was not going to stay in the zoo, and he wasn't going to desert Canute.

"This is the township line," he said aloud. "Up farther there's a path back toward Newton. We can go back that way." He suspected that the supervisors could see and hear in the vicinity of the fence, by day at least, and this would put them off guard. They would figure they could relax for ten or fifteen minutes. That was part of the plan.

Halfway to the path he detoured silently into a patch of forest while Betsy walked straight ahead, chatting innocently about the weather. He brought out two poles. He handed one to her. If she were serious, this was the crisis point. If not....

Without waiting he ran at the fence, jammed his pole into the ground, and vaulted neatly over. He could have hurdled it without a pole, since he had practiced high jumping in the past year, but this was safer. He landed, kept his feet, and ran for the cover of a tree.

"...but I do admit it's cooler under the trees, here," Betsy was saying, but she was running as he looked back. "Shade and a little breeze, and who needs air conditioning?" She vaulted over as easily as he, her dress spreading out like a parachute as she dropped. Her pole fell next to his on the inside. In a moment she joined him at the tree.

"Watch," he whispered, not certain whether he was pleased or frustrated at the certainty of her commitment. She was smart and athletic, obviously, but her personality....

Canute came up and caught the first pole in his teeth, dragging it away from the fence. He tugged it back into the forest, out of sight. Then he returned for the second. John didn't say anything. He was sure this had made his point: Canute's presence was justified. It had never occurred to him before that she might challenge the dog's right to make the escape with them.

Canute emerged from the trees again, charged the fence, and leaped easily over it. Betsy didn't comment.

They had perhaps ten minutes before probable discovery. More if they were lucky, less if unlucky. And a few more minutes for the pursuit to develop actively. In that time they had to accomplish the second phase of their escape.

John led the way to a forest cache. He scraped away leaves and dirt to reveal a package. He hauled it out, shook it off, and opened it. Inside were clothes of modern Standard type, cosmetic paste and spray, and an ID key. He was no longer shy or awkward, now that the escape was in progress. He had worked hard to assemble these supplies and knew exactly what to do with them. So did Betsy. They had discussed this thoroughly by code correspondence.

"Hurry," he said. "I'll spray you, and you spray me. It has to be all over, because they'll probably check." He began to undress.

"I'm not stripping in front of any boy!" she said.

John exploded with exasperation. "Do you want to escape, or don't you?"

She looked at him coldly. "If you were smart, you'd have come prepared. I have already sprayed myself where it doesn't show." She pushed back one sleeve to show him where her white skin turned brown. "All I need is the paste for my face and hands."

She was right, but it didn't make her any easier to get along with. She had taken a terrible chance, wearing Standard brown while traveling with her folks! "All right. You go behind a tree and change, Miss Modest. I'll change here."

She sorted quickly through the clothes and lifted the feminine set. Standards didn't actually differentiate the style for the sexes—it was part of their absolute-nondiscrimination culture—but physical differences required modifications. Thus his brown tunic was larger and wider, hers shaped for feminine contours. She took the paste and left.

John, though he wouldn't admit it to her, was relieved. He hadn't wanted to strip before a girl but had feared she would ridicule him if he hesitated—exactly as he had ridiculed her. Or tried to.

He threw off his clothes and turned the spray on himself. The brown mist bathed him in cloud, then dissipated as the coloration settled on his body. In a moment he was Standard, skin-deep. The moderns used this tan-brown makeup to conceal trifling variations in skin shade; some were naturally darker than the established ideal, and some lighter, so some were considered aesthetic deviants. It was very important, it seemed, not to be a deviant, even marginally. It was good dye; it would last for several days without retouching and would not harm the skin. He had stolen the can and other supplies by rifling an open-air dispensary. He wasn't proud of that particular foray, but he had had to have the goods.

Later he had found the functioning identity key. Apparently some Standard had lost it and had forgotten to have the account closed out, or perhaps there had been a bureaucratic oversight. John had used the ID to obtain several random items and had watched for any consequence, but nothing had happened. Maybe no check was made unless a large bill was run up. He had been very sparing, anyway, saving it for an emergency. Now he strung its cord around his neck, for it might be his most valuable possession in the next few hours. Finally he put on his tunic and slippers.

Betsy emerged. She was completely Standard now. Even her hair was darker and shorter—she must have cut it just now, somehow. And she had done something to make her face seem fuller. He had to give her credit: She had obviously practiced this changeover thoroughly.

"Aren't you done yet?" she demanded.

"You have the paste," he pointed out. He would not have had time to use it yet, but it was a perfectly decent excuse. The paste had to be used on hands and face, because it was more substantial and better able to withstand wear and weathering.

She handed him the jar. "We'll have to hide our old clothes," she said.

"No. Watch." He bundled them together and tied them tight. "Canute!"

Canute jumped up, tail wagging.

"Hide this." He proffered the package.

The dog sniffed the bundle, snorting a bit to discover Betsy's scent, then took it in his mouth, tossed it about to get a better grip, and ran off into the forest. Betsy was silent.

John smeared the paste over his face and neck and chafed it into his hands. It was impossible to overstain, so he just had to be certain that he didn't miss a spot.

"Don't forget your hair," Betsy said.

"I haven't." But he
had.
He rubbed the paste over his scalp and worked it around, then recombed his hair.

They had no Standard chronometer, and their watches had had to go in the bundle. The antique timepieces would have been an instant giveaway. But John didn't need to look at a watch to know that their safe margin had been exhausted. From this moment they both were Standards—or else.

He kicked leaves over the hole where the cache had been. "Let's go. We can't hurry, and we can't go in a straight line, because—"

"Stop telling me things I already know," she snapped. "Do you think I'm stupid?"

They meandered away from the region of the fence. At any moment the Standards' spy-beam—or whatever it was—might pick them up. They were gambling on the chance that it was keyed into the unpainted whiteness of their skins or the cut of their clothing, not to anything internal. Maybe a blip showed on a screen, locating them, and a human operator checked when anything looked odd. This escape would tell the story; if they got away, John's guesses were correct.

It would look odd when no blip appeared anywhere on the Newton township screen, but the operator wouldn't know what had happened. Not right away. And when he scanned in earnest, all he would find would be painted whites inside, and maybe a couple of misplaced Standard tourists outside. He hoped.

There was a noise in the woods—a kind of pounding and crashing, as of a large animal coming toward them. Betsy gripped his arm nervously, for they were weaponless. But it was only Canute, returning from his clothes-hiding mission. With that realization the noise seemed to diminish; it had been the mystery that made it loud!

As the dog bounded into sight, John had a horrible thought. It would be difficult for a scanner to pick out John's true-white skin from among false-white skins in the zoo.
But suppose it was oriented to the dog?
There was only one such animal in Newton, so this would be easy to identify, and Canute was never far from his master.

Now John heard the roar of a motor, coming from the same direction Canute had been.

"They're following the dog!" Betsy whispered, catching on in the same instant. "That darned animal!"

"Strangers!" John shouted at Canute. Had he subconsciously anticipated this problem? "Play strangers!"

"Your dumb, stupid, traitorous dog!" Betsy said, beginning to cry in frustration. " 'Well, he's coming!' you said, and now look at what—"

"Shut up!" he whispered fiercely, unable to explain his plan.

She glared at him but obeyed. Canute stopped about fifty feet away and sat down. He seemed to be paying no further attention.

A jeep crashed through the forest. It caught up to them quickly and stopped. A whitewashed Standard got out while a second stayed in the vehicle with the motor running.

"Bluff," John whispered to Betsy, lips hardly moving. Then, to the man: "Who are you, Stan?"

This was one of the useful minor things he had learned in the past year. All people were Standards, but it had not always been so. "Standard" was less a description than a designation of courtesy, and "Stan" was the politest title for a stranger.

The man seemed surprised. Perhaps he had thought he had run down his quarry and now might be mistaken.