A maseni robot, efficient and well maintained, loaded their bags into the spacious trunk, slipped into the driver’s niche where a front seat would have been in a manually steered vehicle, and connected itself to the control leads which dangled from the instrumentless dashboard: acceleration, brakes, steering, turn signals, and systems monitors. He pulled them away into a heavy flow of traffic and quickly accelerated above two hundred miles an hour….
“We’re all very pleased that you’ve chosen to participate, my friend,” the maseni said. “We believe that your refreshingly alien viewpoint may tear this case wide open.”
Jessie said, “Where are we going—into those mountains?” He indicated a range of snow-capped peaks that flanked the rushing fluttercar, needling the leaden sky a great distance west of them, beyond the flat grass plains that now lay all around.
“That’s correct, my friend,” Tesserax said. He was speaking in his own language now; and whereas his form of address in English was “sir”, now it had become “my friend” in translation. Jessie, Brutus and Helena had all taken speed-teach hypno lessons in the maseni tongue on the way from Earth and, in two short days, had absorbed enough to speak it well. “Those mountains are among the highest on our world and are called the Gilorelamans, which is an Old Tongue word that means ‘Home of the Gods’.”
“That’s where the beast has been marauding?” Helena asked. She leaned toward the window and stared at the rugged slopes, and she thought that was just the sort of place for some invisible gargantuan to play havoc with an unsuspecting populace. The mountains looked remote, more alien than anything she had yet seen on this world though, in actual fact, they did not look that much different from mountain ranges back on Earth.
“Yes, up there, my friend,” Tesserax said. “The beast has slaughtered nearly five hundred flesh-and-blooders and more than four hundred maseni supernaturals, all residents of the Gilorelamans.”
The robot chauffeur made several turns onto smaller freeways and, in time, took them close to the foothills that lay around the greater peaks. They started the climb on a two-lane road that was closely framed by black-boled, white-leafed trees that swayed in the wind like fragile dancers, now and then bending to canopy the road with a frothy lace of snowy leaves.
They were more than an hour into the foothills when a car passed them doing quite a bit more than their sedate hundred miles an hour. It forced them toward the burm, horn blaring, then whipped over a rise and was out of sight.
“You have highway crazies here, too,” Jessie said.
When they topped the hill over which the car had gone, they found that it had turned and was barreling back at them, on the wrong side of the highway.
The robot wheeled the car into the other lane.
The unknown driver countered, turned back to his proper lane and came at them at full speed.
“He’ll kill us all!” Helena cried.
The robot jerked their limousine violently back into their own lane and narrowly avoided a collision.
As the other car flashed by, Jessie thought he saw a middle-aged, bald, red-faced man looking over at them and laughing. “Was that an Earthman?” he asked Galiotor Tesserax.
“I think—” the maseni began.
The red-faced man in the car roared past them again, slued back and forth on the road in front of them, disappeared over another hillock.
“It was a human being,” Helena said. “Is that how our scientists behave when they come here to study maseni society?”
When they crested the next rise, the stranger, as before, had turned and was roaring back at them, blowing his horn and weaving from side to side of the narrow road.
“I can’t watch,” Helena said.
“I wish I had a dish of bourbon,” the hell hound moaned. The stranger weaved past them, somehow avoiding a collision, was gone, his horn fading, gradually, until they could no longer hear it at all.
“I think that wasn’t a real Earthman,” Tesserax said. “I believe that was one of our more recent myth figures.”
“You maseni have a myth figure that looks like an Earthman?” Jessie asked, watching pebbly gray lids slide down and lift off the deepset yellow eyes.