Red Lightning (35 page)

Then I remembered Jubal's "lucky piece," the little holosnap he'd told me to carry around with me as a "lucky piece." Luckily, I had it in my pocket.

"What's that? Holosnap?"

"Jubal sent it to me."

I thumbed the red button, expecting to see the little image of Jubal.

"–ull of Grace, The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among..."

The black hole was gone, and hovering there in the air, curled up in the fetal position, was Jubal.

Who promptly began to scream, then to vomit.

Things got pretty confused for a while. Evangeline didn't scream, but she let out a little squeak. Hell, I probably squeaked myself.

"I'm fallin', I'm fallin'!" Jubal was shouting. "Make it stop!"

There was nothing I could do about that, but I tried to put my arms around him, to at least give him some comfort.

Bad idea. First I got smacked in the face by one of his flailing hands. I was sent swirling head over heels to the far wall. Jubal is strong, and he was in total panic, like a drowning man. I waded back in. Evangeline had hold of one of his feet and was hanging on for dear life. I grabbed an arm, and we all three did a violent dance around the small space, banging into walls.

Finally, I worked myself into position in front of him and grabbed his face.

"Jubal! Jubal! Ease up, you're hurting me!"

He stared at me and started to cry.

"Oh, Ray, oh, Ray, I'm so sorry, me! I can't...
I'm falling
!"

"Just hold on to me, Uncle Jubal, just hold on, everything will be okay."

I didn't believe it, and neither did he, but he did calm down a little. He puked again, all over my shoulder, and then he buried his face in my chest and shook with great racking sobs. He was vibrating like a tuning fork.

Evangeline wasn't doing a lot better. I saw building panic in her face, and I couldn't have that. One panicky person was more than enough.

"Ray, what are we going to
do
?"

"First we've got to get him calmed down. We could use some falling sickness pills. You know anybody who's got any?" Evangeline, who'd never had a second of falling sickness in her life. But I had to ask.

Having something to do seemed to focus her mind and calm her down.

"I'll be right back," she said, and was gone out the door.

I spent a long ten minutes. At some point one of the little gizmos he'd made and sent me floated by in the chaos of stuff we'd stirred up and, without thinking about it, I grabbed it. It was the little box with the hand that came out and turned the machine off.

"Jubal, Jubal, look at this!" I said. "Look, Jubal! It's that great thing you sent me. Remember, Jubal? Remember? Look, I'm going to turn it on." I flipped the switch, and the little box rumbled and groaned and the lid flipped up and the little plastic hand came out and grabbed the switch, pulled it, and popped back into the box. "See, Jubal? What a neat thing this is. Thank you for sending it to me."

His eyes were fixed on the box like he was seeing Jesus.

"Do it again," he whispered.

I punched the button again, and the little hand came out. It turned off the machine. I did it again, and again, and again. We were still doing that when Evangeline returned. She held up a small hypodermic and showed it to me.

"They told me this will tranquilize an elephant," she said.

Mistake.

Jubal's eyes rolled toward her, saw the needle, and rolled back to me.

"No shots!" he wailed, and began to struggle again. Evangeline quickly hid the syringe behind her back, but the damage had been done. It took another couple minutes to get him back to the cowering, passive state of panic he'd been in before.

"I've got some motion sickness pills, too," Evangeline said in a small voice.

"Give them to me. Here you go, Jubal. Take a couple of these. They'll make you feel better."

"No shots?"

"No shots, I promise."

Jubal put the pills in his mouth and chewed on them. I looked over my shoulder and nodded to Evangeline. She jammed the needle into his butt.

So I lied.

In a few minutes Jubal was a lot calmer. In fact, he was too damn calm. He was so loopy from the drug that he was unable to answer any of the thousand questions I had for him. About all he could do was giggle and float around the trailer like a short, chubby balloon. He seemed to enjoy bouncing off the walls.

"What was that stuff you gave him?" I asked her.

"I don't know. The guy said it would calm anybody down."

"What guy? How did you find him?"

"I know people," she said, unhelpfully, and I left it alone.

"I'm going next door to borrow a puke-sucker," she said, and was out the door again. Naturally, we'd never needed one of those handy little airvacs, but we had a neighbor who was subject to sudden eruptions if he moved around too quickly. Embarrassing, but some people never entirely adjust.

We got the place more or less back in order. I was terrified for several hours that there might be a concealed camera or mike that my spy sweeper had missed. I didn't bother Evangeline with that thought. What was the point? If one was there, somebody would be along to collect us all in a very short time.

When enough time had passed, and Jubal was snoring gently, loosely tied into a corner so he wouldn't hurt himself, we devoted ourselves to two questions. How had Jubal gotten here, and what the hell were we going to do about it?

Evangeline didn't know the whole story, so I filled her in on what Travis had told us. I know, I'd been sworn to secrecy, but Evangeline was a part of it now.

She was quick on the uptake.

"That rocket that blasted off from the Falklands," Evangeline said. "That must have been a diversion."

"I think so, too. Who would have suspected that Jubal would
mail
himself out?"

Because that's what must have happened.

But how had he gotten himself into that... black bubble, and how had he gotten the bubble inside the box, sealed it up, and dropped it off into whatever mailbox they used at the Power Company?

Jubal was first and foremost a tinkerer. With the facilities he had, it would be child's play for him to build a machine that would load up the box and ship it.

Now, if I was running the place, the moment that phony rocket ship blasted through the ceiling of Jubal's lab, I'd have scaled off the whole island tighter than a gnat's ass. Nothing would come in or go out until I'd figured out where Jubal was. So Jubal must have sent the package out
before
the ship took off.

It could be done. It was an insane idea, but it was the only way out of his prison for a guy who couldn't fly. Leave it to Jubal to come up with such a solution, thinking outside the box, as it were.

But what was the black bubble? Jubal wasn't in any shape to answer that, so we tried to find out what we could from the clues we had.

He was dressed in his usual Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. We went through his pockets. There was no money, no wallet, no keys. What use did Jubal have for any of those things? There was a little notebook with pages covered in Jubal's childish scrawl, most of it seeming to be about penguins.

There was another little black box.

Jubal must have been holding it when the black bubble opened, then lost it in his panic. But when I was gathering up the garbage I saw it, grabbed it, and gave it a look.

"Is this yours?" I asked Evangeline. She frowned, and shook her head.

It had all the earmarks of one of Jubal's gizmos. I say "box," but it was irregularly shaped, and I saw it would nestle neatly into my left hand. Jubal is a lefty. It was maybe eight inches long, three wide, an inch thick. There were maybe a dozen buttons on the front of it, and several dials on the side, and a blank screen. None of them were labeled.

"You couldn't pay me enough to punch one of those buttons," Evangeline said.

Me, either. It seemed likely that this was the thing he'd used to make the black bubble around himself. I had no desire to see the inside of one, even though I knew Jubal had survived it. I carefully wrapped it in a cloth and put it in one of my drawers with some other junk.

"So what are we going to do with him?" Evangeline asked.

"I don't know."

We stared at him for a while longer. Then Evangeline cleared her throat in that way people do when they have something to say and are having a hard time getting it out.

"What?"

"Ray, don't hate me, but I sort of have to suggest this."

"Spit it out."

"What if we... turned him in?"

I had known that was coming. How did I know? I'm not proud of it, but the same thing had occurred to me.

"We can't keep him here," she pointed out. "He's just barely manageable when he's doped up, and we can't keep him doped up forever. Tell you the truth, I'm not happy about doping him up at all.

To get control of him, for the time being... you do what you have to. I understand that. And it was my idea, and I got the stuff... but what now? Where can we take him? Where will he be okay?"

"Only place I know of is Earth," I said. Which was true. He wouldn't like the low gravity of Mars any better than he liked the almost zero gee of Phobos.

"I mean, I can't understand why he left in the first place," she went on. "You say he destroyed all the Squeezers on Earth, and that's another thing I don't understand. Why did he do that?"

"I have no idea. Lately he seemed to have sort of adopted me as his conscience. He never really got over his shock at how the Squeezer could be used as a weapon."

"Jiminy Garcia-Strickland."

"Yeah. We had long talks about things."

"So did he ever hint that he was going to escape?"

"I've been thinking about it, and scanning through our correspondence, and all I can see is that he sent me that key
before
all of this came down. So he had been
thinking
about escaping. But he never talked about it. I know he'd gotten paranoid. He thought people were listening in."

"They probably were."

"Most likely. So he couldn't just call me up and say 'set an extra plate for supper, bubba, I'm on my way.' "

She sighed. Then she looked at me out of the corner of. her eye.

"Ray... it just doesn't add up. All this fuss over him. There's something you aren't telling me."

She was right.

So there it was. I'd sworn a solemn oath not to tell anyone. Evangeline was mentioned specifically.

But screw that. Evangeline was as deep in hot water as I was now, and she deserved to know everything I did. The. problem was how to tell her. It was just so goddam
crazy
...

I sighed. "There's no way to ease into this, I just have to come out and say it. It's simple, really. Jubal is the only one who can make Squeezers."

She kept looking at me, waiting for the punch line. Then she shook her head.

"That's crazy."

"That's exactly what
I
said."

It was actually what I
typed
, and so did Dad, at about the same time. Mom, too.

I decided to tell it the way Travis had. It was the only way that made any sense. If it made sense at all.

"Quantum leaps," I said.

"Don't get all mathematical on me, Ray. You know I'm not good at it."

"Neither am I, at least not on that level. But you understand the concept, right?"

"Uh... something about jumping from one state to another, without exactly occupying any of the spaces between?"

"Works for me. You go along for a long time and things stay pretty much the same, maybe you make a little progress here and there. Then, out of the blue, you're kicked up to the next level."

"What next level?"

"The next level of anything, but we're talking about knowledge here, or technology. The Squeezer was a quantum leap in both senses... but it seems like it was only a quantum leap in
knowledge
for Jubal. For the rest of us, it was a leap in technology, we suddenly had a new thingamajig that did neat stuff..."

Go back to the Stone Age, Travis had suggested. Or farther, back to the missing link between apes and men. Monkeys that walked upright on the African plains.

Enter language, tool use, and fire. I don't know if anyone knows what order those came in, and it doesn't really matter. They were all quantum leaps, and nothing was ever the same after any of them were first used.

Sure, language must have evolved gradually, it wasn't a case of one ape man suddenly coming out with "to be, or not to be, that is the question." Tools, too, to a lesser extent. One ape starts to use a rock to pound on stuff, and the other apes notice, and it's monkey see, monkey do. Then an ape finds out you can do better with a stone with a sharp edge, then another figures out how to chip an edge... and on and on. Took a long, long time before prehumans were making spears and bows and arrows, but not that long in evolutionary terms. Not as long as it took them to learn to stand upright.

Fire must have been different. Maybe that's why it's still almost a mystical power to us. Think of how many religions use fire for sacrifices. Picture it: A guy walks into the cave, and he's got some fire on a stick. He pokes the stick into a pile of wood he's gathered up. You'd be impressed, wouldn't you? Probably you'd run away from it at first, but after you'd had some cooked meat and saw how you could handle the stuff, and how you could poke it into the face of a saber-toothed tiger and watch the sucker run away... well, you just couldn't help loving the stuff, right? My guess is that, once some genius figured out how to handle fire,
all
the tribes of cavemen,
everywhere
, were using fire by the end of the week. It was just too damn good to ignore and so easy to use.

But did they know how to
make
fire? Maybe not. Maybe they had to wait for lightning to strike and start one, then try to keep it going. It goes out, and they're screwed.