I dreamt that the Grand Inquisitor was trying to break my nerve by eating juicy roast beef in my presence. ‘Confess!’ he said, as he stabbed a bite and chewed. ‘Make it easy on yourself. Will you have some rare, or the slice off the end?’ I was about to confess, too, when I woke up.
It was bright moonlight and we were just approaching the Grand Canyon. I went quickly to the controls and overrode the order about altitude-I was afraid that the simple little robot might have a nervous breakdown and start shedding capacitances in lieu of tears if it tried to hold the ship just eight hundred feet away from that Gargantuan series of ups and downs and pinnacles.
In the meantime I was enjoying the view so much that I forgot that I was starving. If a person hasn’t seen the Canyon, there is no point in describing it-but I strongly recommend seeing it by moonlight from the air.
We sliced across it in about twenty minutes and I turned the ship back to automatic and started to forage, rummaging through the instrument panel compartment and the lockers. I turned up a chocolate almond bar and a few peanuts, which was a feast as I was ready for raw skunk- I had eaten last in Kansas City. 1 polished them off and went back to sleep.
I don’t recall setting the pilot alarm but must have done so for it woke me up just before dawn. Dawn over the desert was another high-priced tourist item but 1 had navigating to do and could not spare it more than a glance. I turned the crate at right angles for a few minutes to check drift and speed made good over ground to south, then figured a bit on the edge of a strip map. With luck and assuming that my guesses about wind were about right, Phoenix should show up in about half an hour.
My luck held. I passed over some mighty rough country, then suddenly, spread out to the right, was a wide flat desert valley, green with irrigated crops and with a large city in it-the Valley of the Sun and Phoenix. I made a poor landing in a boxed-in, little dry arroyo leading into the Salt River Canyon; I tore off one wheel and smashed the rotor but I didn’t care-the important thing was that it wasn’t likely to be found there very soon, it and my fingerprints . . . Reeves’s prints, I mean. Half an hour later, after picking my way around enormous cacti and still bigger red boulders, I came out on the highway that leads down the canyon and into Phoenix.
It was going to be a long walk into Phoenix, especially with one sore ankle, but I decided not to risk hitching a ride. Traffic was light and I managed to get off the road and hide each time for the first hour. Then I was caught on a straight up-and-down piece by a freighter; there was nothing to do but give the driver a casual wave as I flattened myself to the rock wall and pretended to be nonchalant. He brought his heavy vehicle to a quick, smooth stop. ‘Want a lift, bud?’
I made up my mind in a hurry. ‘Yes, thanks!’
He swung a dural ladder down over the wide tread and I climbed into the cab. He looked me over. ‘Brother!’ he said admiringly. ‘Was it a mountain lion, or a bear?’
I had forgotten how I looked. I glanced down at myself. ‘Both,’ I answered solemnly. ‘Strangled one in each hand.’
‘I believe it.’
‘Fact is,’ I added, ‘I was riding a unicycle and bounced it off the road. On the high side, luckily, but I wrecked it.’
‘A unicycle? On this road? Not all the way from Globe?’
‘Well, I had to get off and push at times. It was the down grade that got me, though.’
He shook his head. ‘Let’s go back to the lion-and-bear theory. I like it better.’ He didn’t question me further, which suited me. I was beginning to realize that off-hand fictions led to unsuspected ramifications; I had never been over the road from Globe.