We held our distance for perhaps half a minute, and then he cut loose.
He was abreast of me, he was past me. Time to dig in.
I drove my legs faster. The blood thudded in my ears. I sucked air and pushed with everything I had. The distance between us began to narrow again. The leaning rock was looking bigger and bigger . . .
I caught him before we reached it, but try as I might I could not pull ahead. We raced past it side by side and collapsed together.
“Photo finish,” I gasped.
“Got to call it a tie,” he paused. “You always surprise me-right at the end.”
I groped out my water bottle and passed it to him. He took a swig and handed it back. We emptied it that way, a little at a time.
“Damn,” he said then, getting slowly to his feet. “Let’s see what’s over those hills.”
I got up and went along.
When I finally recovered my breath the first thing I said was, “You seem to know a hell of a lot more about me than I do about you.”
“I think so,” he said after a long pause, “and I wish I didn’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“Not now,” he replied. “Later. You don’t read War and Peace on your coffee break.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Time,” he said. “There’s always either too much time or not enough. Right now there’s not enough.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Wish I could.”
The hills were nearer and the ground remained firm beneath our feet. We trudged steadily onward.
I thought of Bill’s guesswork, Random’s suspicions, and Meg Devlin’s warning. I also thought of that round of strange ammunition I’d found in Luke’s jacket.
“That thing we’re heading toward,” he said, before I could frame a fresh question of my own. “That’s your Ghostwheel, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
He laughed. Then: “So you were telling the truth back in Santa Fe when you told me it required a peculiar environment. What you didn’t say was that you’d found that environment and built the thing there.”
I nodded. “What about your plans for a company?” I asked him.
“That was just to get you to talk about it.”
“And what about Dan Martinez-the things he said?”
“I don’t know. I really didn’t know him. I still don’t know what he wanted, or why he came at us shooting.”
“Luke, what is it that you want, anyhow?”
“Right now I just want to see that damned thing,” he said. “Did building it out here in the boonies endow it with some sort of special properties?”
“Yes.”
“Like what?”
“Like a few I didn’t even think of – unfortunately,” I answered.
“Name one.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Question and answer is a two-way game.”
“Hey, I’m the guy who just pulled you out of a hole in the ground.”
“I gather you’re also the guy who tried to kill me on a bunch of April thirtieths.”
“Not recently,” he said. “Honest.”
“You mean you really did?”
“Well . . . yeah. But I had reasons. It’s a long story and-”
“Jesus, Luke! Why? What did I ever do to you?”
“It’s not that simple,” he answered.
We reached the base of the nearest hill and he started climbing it.
“Don’t,” I called to him. “You can’t go over.”
He halted.
“Why not?”
“The atmosphere ends thirty or forty feet up.”
“You’re kidding.”
I shook my head.
“And it’s worse on the other side,” I added. “We have to find a passage through. There’s one farther to the left.”
I turned and headed in that direction. Shortly, I heard his footfalls.
“So you gave it your voice,” he said.
“So?”
“So I see what you’re up to and what’s been going on. It’s become sentient in that crazy place you built it. It went wild, and you’re heading to shut it down. It knows it and it’s got the power to do something about it. It’s your Ghostwheel that’s been trying to get you to turn back, isn’t it?”
“Probably “
“Why didn’t you just trump in?”
“You can’t construct a Trump for a place that keeps changing. What do you know about Trumps, anyway?”