“Doesn’t help,” the electrolysis expert said. Her voice was slow and dragging. “Doesn’t help much, I mean. I feel like I’m drunk. I feel like my whole head’s weightless. But I still hurt.” She looked like it. She had lines at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there the last time Johnson saw her. Skin stretched tight across her cheekbones. She kept one hand on the right side of her belly, though she didn’t seem to notice she was doing it.
After she got into the scooter, Johnson fastened her safety harness when she didn’t do anything but fumble with it. Anxiously, he asked the fellow who’d helped her into the airlock, “She’s not throwing up, is she?”
“No,” the man answered, which relieved him: dealing with vomit in the scooter was the last thing he wanted to do.
He used his attitude jets to slide out of the airlock, then went back to the Lewis and Clark faster than he’d gone away. When he returned to the ship, Dr. Miriam Rosen was waiting at the inner airlock door to the shuttle bay. “Come on, Liz, let’s get you over to the X-ray machine,” she said. “We’ll see if we can figure out what’s going on in there.”
“All right.” Liz Brock sounded altogether indifferent. Maybe that was the codeine talking. Maybe, too, it was the pain talking.
Johnson wanted to tag along to find out whatever he could, but didn’t have the nerve. He watched the doctor lead away the electrolysis expert. Before long, he’d get answers through the grapevine.
And he did. Things came out piecemeal, as they had a way of doing. It wasn’t appendicitis. He heard that pretty soon. He didn’t hear what it was for three or four days. “Liver cancer?” he exclaimed to Walter Stone, who told him. “What can they do about that?”
“Not a damn thing,” the senior pilot said grimly. “Keep her from hurting too bad till she dies-that’s about the size of it.” He seldom showed much of what he thought, but he was visibly upset here. “Could have been you or me, too, just as easy. No rhyme or reason to this-only dumb luck.”
“Yeah.” Johnson felt lousy, too. He didn’t mind being an ambulance driver, but he hadn’t signed up to be, in essence, a hearse driver. And there were also other things to worry about. “This won’t hurt the plan too much, will it?”
Now Stone looked stern and determined. “Nothing hurts the plan, Glen. Nothing.”
“Good,” Glen Johnson said. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
4
With a shriek of decelerating jet engines, the Japanese airliner rolled to a stop on the runway just outside of Edmonton. The pilot spoke over the intercom, first in his own language and then in English hardly more comprehensible. “What the hell is he talking about?” Penny Summers asked.
“One from column A, two from column B,” Rance Auerbach guessed. Penny gave him a dirty look. He ignored it and went on, “It would have been a lot faster and a lot cheaper to fly a U.S. airliner out of Tahiti.”
“And it would have made stops in the States, too,” Penny pointed out. “I didn’t want to take the chance.”
“Well, okay,” Auerbach said with a sigh. “But I’ll tell you something: there aren’t a hell of a lot of places left where we can go without somebody wanting to take a shot at us as soon as we get there. That gets old, you know what I mean?”
“Things ought to be pretty peaceful for the layover here.” Penny sighed, too. Rance knew what that meant. Whenever she came to someplace peaceful, she got bored. When she got bored, she started turning things on their ear. He’d had enough of things’ getting turned on their ear. Telling her so wouldn’t do him any good. He knew as much. He didn’t think she started stirring things up on purpose-which didn’t mean they didn’t get stirred up.
Groundcrew men wheeled a deplaning ladder up to the airliner’s front door. Rance grunted even more painfully than usual as he heaved himself upright. Except for a couple of trips back to the head, he’d been trapped in a none-too-spacious seat ever since Midway Island. He hadn’t been sitting here forever-he couldn’t have been-but it sure as hell felt that way.
“Baggage and customs and passport control through Gate Four,” a groundcrew man bawled, again and again. “Gate Four!” He pointed toward the airport terminal, as if none of the deplaning passengers could possibly have noticed the big red 4 above the nearest gate without his help.
“Well, well, what have we here?” a Canadian customs man said, examining their documents with considerable interest. “Papers from the Race, valid for South Africa only-rather emphatically valid for South Africa only, I might add. Then all these endorsements from Free France, a Japanese transit visa, and a transit visa for the Dominion here. Fascinating. You don’t see things like this every day.”
“You see anything wrong?” Rance put a little challenge in his raspy, ruined voice.
“And you, sir, do not sound like a South African,” the customs man said. “You sound like an American from the South.”
“Doesn’t matter what I sound like,” Auerbach said. “Only thing that matters is, my papers are in order.”
“That’s right,” Penny agreed. A lot of places, they could have made things go smoothly by greasing the functionary’s palm. There were parts of the USA where that would have worked like a charm. Eyeing this customs man, Auerbach thought a bribe would only get him in deeper. He kept his hand away from his billfold.
“I think we had better have a look at your baggage,” the Canadian official said. “A good, thorough look.”
He and his pals spent the next hour examining the baggage not only by eye but with a fluoroscope. A customs man patted Rance down. A police matron took Penny off into another room. When she came back, steam was coming out of her ears. But the matron shrugged to the customs men, so Penny had passed the test.
“You see?” Rance said. “We’re clean.” He was awfully glad neither he nor Penny had tried to sneak a gun through the Dominion. Canadians didn’t like that sort of thing at all.
The lead customs agent glared at him. “You have close to fifty pounds of ginger in your suitcases,” he pointed out.
“It’s not illegal.” Rance and Penny spoke together.
“That’s so.” The customs man didn’t sound happy about it, but couldn’t deny it. “Still, I strongly suggest you would be very wise to keep your noses clean while you are in Edmonton. Give me those preposterous papers.” With quite unnecessary force, he applied the stamps that cleared them for entry.
Because Auerbach wasn’t up to carrying much, they rented a little cart to get all the luggage to the cab rank. Fortunately, the first waiting cabby drove an enormous Oldsmobile whose equally enormous trunk devoured all the suitcases with the greatest of ease.
“Four Seasons Hotel,” Penny told him as he held the door open for her and Rance.
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered. “Best hotel in town.” His accent wasn’t that far removed from her Midwestern tones. Next best thing to being back in the States, Auerbach thought.
He hadn’t known what to expect from the hotel; choosing one from thousands of miles away couldn’t be anything but a gamble. But this gamble paid off. “Not bad,” Penny said as bellmen all but fought over their suitcases.
“How long do you expect to be staying, sir?” the desk clerk asked Rance.
“Only a few days,” Rance answered. With luck, they’d sell their ginger here and then head on to France with a nice stash. Without luck, they’d have to try to smuggle the ginger past the noses of the Race’s French chums, and probably past the Lizards’ own snouts, too. Rance didn’t like thinking about all the things that could happen without luck.
“Phew!” Penny said when they finally made it to their room.
“Yeah.” Rance hobbled over to the bed, let his stick fall to the thickly carpeted floor, and stretched out at full length on the mattress. His back made little crackling noises. “Jesus, that feels good!” he said. “I feel like I was stuffed into a sardine can for the last month.”