If taken into custody, we wouldn’t have an opportunity to plead self-defense in the matter of the Flying F Ranch. We’d never even be charged with a crime. Perhaps we would spend the rest of our lives in the caring custody of the ISA, in some research facility where scientists of numerous disciplines would spend the next fifty years trying to reach a consensus about what galaxy we came from. If we were to forsake our duty and violate the secrecy surely required of our kind, if we told them about the first universe and the Nihilim among them and the aluf shel halakha, whatever that might be, they would consider everything we said to be disinformation. We would be subjected to a pharmacopoeia of drugs—if not eventually torture—to squeeze the truth from us, until our brains were no more capable of cognition than were bowls of tapioca.
For the immediate future, we were limited to off-road travel, to the likes of Winkelville and Sulphur Flats and Vulture’s Roost and points between, until we could acquire a new set of wheels. We’d paid Butch Hammer seventy-five thousand dollars for the anonymous, untrackable Explorer. It was now worth about eighty-seven dollars to us, having depreciated almost twice as fast as a new Mercedes-Benz in the first twenty-four hours after purchase.
Bridget brought the Explorer to a full stop. She took deep calming breaths and wiped the incredibly attractive sweat from her face. “Panthea, what do you see?”
From the back seat, Ms. Ching said, “I saw my entire life flash before me.”
“I should have said what do you foresee?”
“Nothing at the moment. I suspect that if and when I do foresee something coming, it will be nothing good at all.”
I could have told Bridget as much, even though I had no talent whatsoever as a seer.
Sparky said, “What happened back there was a piece of cake. We’re not in a fix. I’ve been in a lot worse situations than this, should’ve lost a limb or an eye on a hundred occasions, but I’ve still got all my pieces. As long as we’re not soaked in blood and trying to stuff our intestines back into our bodies through a gut wound, we’ll be okay.”
“That’s very inspirational,” I said.
“Because it’s the truth,” Sparky said. “The unvarnished truth is always inspirational. Bridget, sweetheart, you better turn your mind to thoughts of getting a new vehicle, and let psychic magnetism take us to it.”
“I’m already on it, Grandpa,” she assured him as she let the Explorer coast forward once more into blinding darkness and rain, still not daring to switch on the headlights.
Panthea said, “I wonder if they have other drones, the small ones, capable of doing reconnaissance in weather this bad.”
“Not yet, not for a few years anyway,” Sparky said with what I hoped was conviction based on deep knowledge of the technology. “But if the rain stops, which it soon will, that’s another thing we’ll have to worry about.”
Bridget motored forward, the speedometer needle quivering from a point just below the five to just above it. Even this return to a more moderate pace seemed suicidal, considering how abruptly we could find ourselves at the edge of a deep arroyo with steep walls, with or without a raging river.
My mind was formed in part by sensible, cool-headed nuns who couldn’t work themselves into hysteria even if Godzilla suddenly erupted through the pavement of the street in front of the orphanage and ate a busload of commuters. Unfortunately, my mind was also in part formed by the apocalyptic, death-obsessed culture of the past several decades. Tens of millions were supposed to have died in an ice age back in the 1980s, just as predicted in 1969, and still more were said to be doomed by a bath of acid rain shortly thereafter, as well as in radiation that would fry the world when the ozone layer disappeared. Hadn’t hundreds of millions more perished at the turn of the millennium—Y2K—when every damn computer went haywire and all the nuclear missiles in the world were launched, to say nothing of the lethal effects of canola oil in theater popcorn? Living in the End Times was exhausting. When you were assured that billions of people were on the brink of imminent death at every minute of the day, it was hard to get the necessary eight hours of sleep, even harder to limit yourself to only one or two alcoholic drinks each day, when your stress level said, I gotta get smashed.
As a product of my culture, therefore, I trusted as best I could in Bridget’s psychic magnetism, but there were times during the next fifty minutes when I closed my eyes and covered them with my hands in expectation of catastrophe. Inevitably, I thought of the door in the day that Hakeem, Bailie, and Caesar had seen. I wondered what would happen if a door in the night opened and we didn’t see it and we drove through on an old cobblestone road that led away into the stars. Would our lungs implode in the vacuum of deep space?