As Centauri leaned contentedly back in his seat the car increased its angle of ascent and split the clouds.
“Damned system locks. Don’t make ’em like they used to.” He touched various controls, some of which had just made their first appearance on the dash, and tried to explain to his passenger. “I tell you, son, you just can’t get decent work done these days. A good mechanic’s hard to find. Everyone is under a lot of pressure, though. Got to take that into consideration.” He nodded toward the window. “Nice view out tonight.”
Hesitantly, Alex moved to look outside, acutely conscious of the fact he ought to be dead but wasn’t. Far below were the lights of a major city. Beyond lay a broad, dark expanse. The Pacific Ocean. At least, he assumed it was the Pacific.
“Where . . . where’s my town?”
“Oh, I’m afraid that’s out of view now. Way behind us.”
“It doesn’t feel like we’re moving very fast.”
“Well at least something’s workin’ right. Physiologic support systems compensate for our acceleration. You’re right, though. We’re not moving very fast.”
“Oh.” Alex had reached the point of not bothering to question the impossible, since he was living it.
Something pushed him back in his seat for just a moment. When he could move again he took another look outside, wondering if he’d still be able to see the city. He could not, though he knew it had to be down below them somewhere.
Down below them somewhere, on the Earth.
He was surprised at how small and vulnerable it looked, the Earth. Even as he stared it was shrinking to a point, like a cartoon world vanishing on an animator’s drawing stand. Again he was jerked back into his seat.
The next time he was able to move about and look outside, the Earth had disappeared. No sign of the moon, either.
“Sorry about the stop and go acceleration, son,” Centauri apologized. “Transmission needs work.”
Alex reached a decision, leaned forward and pounded insistently on the partition. “That’s enough,” he said, wondering if he sounded half as hysterical as he felt. “Take me back, take me home!”
“Now don’t be in such an all-fired hurry, son. All in good time. Sit back and enjoy the ride.” Alex noticed his abductor was wiping at his face with a thin rag of metal mesh. When he turned to face Alex again he was still smiling.
Only now his mouth was all wrong. In fact, his whole face was all wrong. Most especially his eyes were all wrong. They were much too big for the face, for any human face. But that was all right because the face they were attached to wasn’t in the least bit human. It was grotesque and distorted and resembled some of Louis’s wild scribbles, childish parodies of half-remembered nightmares.
The creature that was Centauri continued to smile back at him as it gently polished its eyeballs.
Alex’s fist froze halfway to the glass. All of a sudden he wasn’t so sure he wanted the glass partition to come down. He settled back in his seat to gape silently at the thing sitting in the pilot’s chair.
Minutes passed. The creature used the metal rag on its face again. When it turned a second time, the familiar Centauri was smiling back at Alex.
Some kind of optical illusion, Alex told himself. He had become very calm. Something that looks solid but isn’t, quite. The metal mesh activated and deactivated the disguise. Or maybe it was solid, a preset fleshy buildup that could be added to or removed from the alien face simply by applying the rag. Or maybe he was insane, and indulging his fantasies in the c oldly logical fashion of the completely crackers. They say the real crazies are the most methodical in their thought processes. He’d read that somewhere.
But he could hear his heart pounding in his chest, feel the pressure from the car’s periodic jumps (he could hardly call it a car anymore) as it shot through the void, taste the dry fear in his mouth. He bit down on his lower lip until it bled, found he could taste that too. The action frightened him. Hurting himself would prove nothing.
Something bright and massive loomed up off to the right. He recognized it immediately. The rings were brighter than he’d imagined them, and far more lovely. Breathtakingly beautiful. As he stared, Saturn receded rapidly behind them.
“Now,” Centauri announced amiably, “it’s time to take some speed.”
“I’m not into drugs,” Alex replied softly.
“Oh, sorry.” Centauri hesitated, thinking, then grinned at his own error. “Wrong reference. I mean, it’s time to make some speed. Better?”
“Yeah, better,” Alex told him.
Centauri shook his head, looking very human. “You people concoct the strangest expressions.” He touched controls. Alex leaned forward. His curiosity was all that remained between sanity and total terror.
“What now?”
“Now we go to supralight drive.”
“Faster than light? That’s impossible.” He regretted his words the instant they left his mouth. In light of his present situation the comment sounded more than silly.
There was no derision in Centauri’s reply. “Taint. Why, if it were, nobody’d ever get anywhere, would they?”
Alex felt the universe change around him. Stars danced in his eyes and he couldn’t be certain if they were in front of or behind his corneas. Maybe both. But the colors were pretty. Space travel as psychedelia. Or psychotic.
“What . . . what happens now?”
“Now?” Centauri was scrunching down in his seat. “Nothing to do now until we outgabe, son.” He closed his eyes. Alex wondered how that affected the eyes behind the disguise. Perhaps when he stopped staring Centauri would take them out and put them in his pocket for safekeeping. At this point it would have seemed only normal.
But Centauri simply crossed his arms over his chest and let out a relieved sigh. “Enough work for one night. Time for a snooze. Why don’t you relax and try and catch some sleep, son? From here on in-out the ride’s pretty boring.”
“Sure.” Alex tried to sound composed and in control. Might as well, since there wasn’t anything he could do about his situation. Getting out and walking, for example, seemed out of the question. “Sure, why not?”
But for some reason, he couldn’t go to sleep.
He might have dozed off in spite of himself. He couldn’t be certain. Consciousness came and went, ebbed and flowed as the lights of a distorted universe flicked past. Stream of cosmosness. His mind was lulled further by the steady tick-tick of the softly lit control panel while the perfect environmental controls of the ship relaxed his body. It was like riding across country with someone else doing all the night driving, the lights of motels and fast-food joints and street signs all melting into a warm yellow visual blur.
The ticking was interrupted by a sharp beep. Outside, the stars resumed their normal appearance. To the right a pale green moon rich with copper ores was sliding past. A sun lay ahead. It was a little whiter than the one that baked the desert around the Starlight Star-bright trailer park.
Centauri awoke, sniffed twice, blew his nose on a handkerchief and settled in to prepare for landing as they dove straight for a cloud-shrouded planet. It was rich with ochre hues and not as blue as Earth.
It wasn’t Earth in more ways than one, Alex reminded himself.
Yet the city-lights that hove into view looked no different from this height than those of Los Angeles. There was more than one expansive cluster of lights, though he couldn’t estimate population from lights alone. He didn’t know anything about population densities, building sizes, or if the local inhabitants simply liked to leave a lot of lights on at night.
They crossed the terminator into dayside, clouds beginning to slip beneath them. Centauri was speaking toward the dash in an alien tongue.
“Hey!” Alex tapped the glass. Centauri looked back long enough to grin and the ship lurched violently, throwing Alex back against his seat. As soon as the shift had been corrected Centauri gave his passenger a disarming shrug. Alex resolved not to distract the oldster again until they were safely down.
He had to content himself with formulating and rearranging all the questions he’d stored up during their flight, and with watching the alien landscape rush past below. There were brief, tantalizing glimpses of sunlit cities and of other flying craft, all of which shot past too fast for careful inspection.
Signs of civilization came farther apart as they crossed desert, then jungle. Jungle gave way to coniferous forest hugging the slopes of high mountains.
Centauri barked crisply at the pickup in his strange alien voice and they slowed further. Now Alex could examine the vegetation below in detail. He was surprised to see how little it differed from similar dense temperate zone growth on Earth. Only the presence of the occasional oddity, like a tall thin tree with a rust-red trunk or a flying creature that resembled a cross between a curious buzzard and a catfish, reminded him how far he was from home.