The would-be slayer was slain, but Kevin hadn’t solved the problem of getting himself out of the machine. He still couldn’t access any regular communications services, and the thought of being trapped in Neurodyne until Tuesday was far from appealing. There was only one thing he could think to try.
Leaving the dead killer beetle on the utility tray between the armrests where it had fallen, he went back to the base of the driver’s seatback and climbed it until he could drop onto the padded top of the armrest. From there he scaled the hillside of Eric’s elbow encased in a windbreaker sleeve, and followed along the ridge of folds and creases toward the hand resting on the steering wheel.
Vanessa and Martin’s whole, elaborate plan had almost been unnecessary. A new thought struck Eric just as he was going into a slippery hairpin, and he almost forgot to straighten out of it.
If the mass-increase with velocity that was observed in laboratories was really just an indication of approaching an asymptotic limit to the rate at which a disturbance could propagate through an electromagnetic field—analogous to the limits of acoustic waves in material media—then it wasn’t necessarily an absolute limit on the velocity of mass-energy at all, so much as a limit that applied to the velocity of electrical charge. All the experiments conducted had relied on information carried by electromagnetic means; and all the mass-velocity experiments were carried out in accelerators that operated on charged particles. Nothing in the literature had considered what happened in the case of neutral carriers. . . .
At that instant something crawled off his sleeve onto his hand and broke his train of thought. A wasp? . . . He moved his other hand from the wheel to flick it away—but then realized there was something odd about it, looked again . . . and almost went off the road for the second time in as many minutes. It was a mec—one of Kevin and Taki’s battlemecs.
Was Kevin operating it? But how? . . .
Whoever it was must have seen that it had Eric’s attention, for the mec started waving with one of those dreadful weapons that they hunted insects with and thought Eric didn’t know about. He slowed the car, spotted a flat stretch of verge ahead, and pulled over, at the same time opening the window to give the car a change of air. If it was one of the boys’ mecs, it would have had a microphone added. He picked it up between a finger and a thumb, and set it down on the fascia above the dashpanel. It was the one they called Tigger, if he wasn’t mistaken.
“Kevin?” he said. The figure nodded, trailing the saw in one hand and emphasizing its response with an up-and-down motion of its free arm. “Yes, it’s a good trick, and I’m impressed. You can tell me how you did it when I get back. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get on. The weather here is—” He stopped as the mec dropped its saw and waved both arms above its head frantically.
“Are you in some kind of trouble?” Up-and-down again, with both arms: Yes. “Are you at home?” The arms made wide, over-the-head, crossed movements: No. “At the lab?” Yes. “Look, you know my number. If it’s something urgent, why don’t you just call?” Both arms extended sideways. Can’t. “Is Doug there?” No. “Can’t you contact him?” No. “Why not?” Response unintelligible. “Are you saying you need me to help?” Yes. “Do you want me to call somebody?” Again, unintelligible. “Surely you’re not asking me to come back?” Yes! Yes! Yes! “But I’m on my way to an important conference.” I can’t help that, or, You don’t understand, or, Too bad. Eric stared at the tiny figure perplexedly. “Can’t Vanessa help?” No! No! The mec picked up its saw again, seemed to point at it, and then waved it in Eric’s direction. Eric could make nothing of what it was trying to say. He sighed. “Very well, Kevin. But I’m warning you, this had better be good.”
Eric used his car phone to call the resort at Barrow’s Pass and told the conference secretary regrets, but there was an emergency and he had to cancel out. He also left a message of apology for the people that he had arranged to meet for a late lunch. Then he turned the car around to head back for Seattle. Just before he closed the window, unseen by him, a blue-brown butterfly drifted in and settled down by the rear seat.