Chester backed, lowered the blade, then raced the engine. The massive machine leaped forward and crashed against the brick wall with a thunderous impact. Chester felt the seat lurch; then bricks and mortar were falling, bounding off the polished hood, clattering against the plastic canopy. Clouds of dust rose. Timbers dropped, bent nails showing, where broken two-by-four studding dangled.
Chester backed off, looked over the situation. The gun boomed again, four times, rapidly. Two stars appeared in the plastic dome near his head. The cell-block wall showed a six-foot-high, ten-foot-wide gap, through which office furniture was visible. As he watched, another section of mortared bricks dropped. He moved in, hit the wall again. When he backed out from the load of debris, the upper floor joists were visible, sagging under a horizontal steel member. Chester moved in, jarred the wall again. A large section fell, exposing the open sides of two cells. He could see the iron-legged cots aslant on the tilted floor.
Chester maneuvered the caterpillar close to the shattered wall, raised the canopy and shouted to Genie. She appeared, on hands and knees, looking down over the edge at the huge, rumbling machine.
“Come on, quickly, Genie!” Chester beckoned urgently. He took a look over his shoulder. The fat cop was struggling to stuff cartridges into the cylinder of his foot-long revolver. Other cops were running in various directions.
“Is it really you, Chester?” Genie’s voice quavered.
“Hurry!” Chester held up his arms. Genie moved then, turning to lower her trim, booted legs over the side, then slide down, hang by her hands and drop. Chester caught her, bundled her inside and slammed down the bubbletop just as the cop’s gun went off. He backed quickly, turned, gunned off across the lawn. There were more shots. A bullet clanged off the canopy.
“Chester—it is you! You look so different—so handsome!”
“Genie, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to run out on you; I got back as soon as I could. But—”
“Why, Chester, you were marvelous! I knew it was you as soon as you said ‘it is I’ instead of ‘it’s me.’ Wherever did you get this marvelous machine?”
“Nice, isn’t it? Just the thing for traffic. Air conditioning, soundproofing—and bulletproof glass, luckily for us. But what I wanted to say was, I’m terribly sorry about you having to spend almost a year in jail.”
“A year? Why, Chester, it hasn’t been more than two hours since the policemen took us away!”
Chester blinked. “But . . . but . . . ”
“Where will we go now, Chester? And where did you get those clothes, and that suntan, and those big, strong arms?”
“I . . . but I mean—you . . . Well, never mind. We’ll figure it out later. Right now we have to clear a path through to the rug.”
Chester swung the caterpillar into the street where the cop-guarded rug waited. A fire engine, approaching at flank speed, swerved, mounted the curb, clipped off a fire plug and came to a halt in a striking display of waterworks. Chester slowed, crimped the wheel, lumbered past a police car and crunched to a stop. He opened the canopy and, amid shouts, assisted Genie out. She leaped lightly across the remains of splintered yellow sawhorses to the rug. Chester followed. A pair of the ever-present pink-coated policemen charged, sticks ready.
“Now!” Chester said, seizing Genie’s hand. “Take us back to where we left Case, Computer! And don’t make any mistakes on your coordinates this time!”
13
The shadows of the tall buildings dissolved into sunny skies. Chester and Genie stood on the grassy slope in the shade of the spreading branches. She turned to him, put soft arms around him.
“Oh, Chester. This is such fun!”
“Fun? Great heavens, Genie! Those people were shooting real bullets at us!”
“But you wouldn’t let anything happen, I know.”
“Well—at least it’s a great relief to know you didn’t actually spend a year in that cell. If you knew how I’ve been picturing you, languishing in durance vile—and Case! I assumed I was far too late to help him—but now, if we hurry—”
“I’m sure he’ll be all right.” Genie looked anxiously toward the ridge. “Still, I don’t see the smoke any longer. I hope the fire hasn’t burned down to the proper size for Mr. Mulvihill already.”
“If those blasted natives have singed one hair of Case’s head, I’ll mow the whole tribe down!”
Twenty minutes’ brisk walk brought them to the edge of the forest. On the trail ahead, two clean-shaven, sarong-clad men and a beautifully proportioned woman appeared. They paused, then flung up hands in greeting and began to dance and sing.
“Looks like a different tribe,” Chester said. “Much better-looking people.”
“They seem to want us to follow them.”
With excited beckoning gestures the natives had turned and were darting away along a path.
“Well, we happen to be going in that direction anyway.”
Chester and Genie moved on along the rough trail, came to the clearing where they had watched Case battle the giant.
“Not a sign of them,” said Chester, looking around. “The cages are gone, everything.” They pressed on, climbed a wooded slope and emerged from the forest into a wide village street, tree-lined and shady, bordered by beds of wild flowers behind which neat huts of brick, boards or split saplings dotted a parklike lawn. From a large house halfway along the street an imposing old man emerged, clad in neatly cut shorts and vest of coarse cloth. He pulled at a vast white beard as he came toward them.
“Good Lord!” said Chester, bewildered. “This is the wrong place, Genie! What kind of setting have you landed us in this time?”
“I don’t know, Chester.”
“Look at the old man with the beard. He’s immense. I’ll swear he must be an early Mulvihill; he looks enough like Case to be his grandfather.”
The old man came up, looked piercingly at Chester, then at Genie. He pulled at his beard, nodding to himself.
“Well,” he said. “So you came back after all.”
* * *
Chester and Genie sat with Case on benches under a wild-cherry tree at the crest of a rise that fell away to a blue lake under steep pine-covered hills. A native girl poured brown wine from a stone jar into irregular mugs of heavy glass.
“Tell me that again, slow and easy, Chester,” said Case. “You say it’s the same day as when you left here?”
“For Genie it is. I lived through ten months.”
“You do look different, Chester. I guess there’s more to this business than meets the eye. That damn computer must have its time meters scrambled.”
“Case, we thought they’d be roasting you alive. How did you manage to get into their good graces?”
“Well, let’s see. The last I saw of you two, you were sneaking off behind a tree. I kept juggling for an hour. Then I did a few back flips and handstands, and then I got them to give me a rope and rigged it and did some rope-walking. By that time they’d noticed you were gone. I made a few motions to give ’em the idea you’d flown away in good demon style. They didn’t care much; they wanted to see more ropework.”
“By that time you must have thought we’d abandoned you.”
“I admit I was a little mad at first when you didn’t come charging over the hill with the Marines in tow. I guess it took a couple of years to get used to the idea I was stuck here. I figured something had happened to you, and I’d better just make the best of it. By that time I rated pretty high with the locals. They let me have the best den back in the thicket, and brought me all the food I wanted. It wasn’t fancy but it was an easy life. Course, after thirty years . . . ”
“Thirty years!”
Case nodded his white-maned head. “Yep. Near as I can tell. I used to cut notches in a tree for the years, but sometimes I was so busy I forgot.”
“Busy? Doing what?”
“Well, there I was laying around all day, doing nothing, watching the natives scratch for a living, dirty, hungry, ignorant, dying of diseases, getting chewed up by bears or wildcats. And the food they gave me—half-raw dog meat, pounded raw turnips, now and then a mess of sour berries. Every now and then I’d have to put on a show, a little juggling or acrobatic work, just enough to keep the evil spirits out of town.
“Then one day I got to thinking. The country around here was the kind of real estate some smart developer could make a fortune out of back home. All it needed was the brush cut back and the trees trimmed and the lake shore cleaned up and garbage piles carted off somewhere and some fruit trees and flowers planted . . .