“Perfect,” Paula said.
“I thought it wasn’t very good,” I said.
“You need to have more confidence in yourself,” Ulrike said, helpfully.
I saw from the corner of my eye that Paula raised an eyebrow. I made a slight face, just tightening my lips, and Paula grinned.
“It was perfect,” Paula said, “because it can’t be done any better than that. On this kind of surface that’s the practical limit. You didn’t do anything that might roll us or send us over a cliff, and you did get the speed down pretty quickly. So I’d have to say you did a perfect job—it’s just that the local definition of perfect is different from the global one.”
“See?” Ulrike said. “All you need is more confidence. Does anyone know how this area came to be abandoned? Is something creeping down out of America, maybe?”
“Like a pollutant or a vapor?” I asked. “That’s an interesting notion. Has anyone been having trouble communicating with Toronto these days? Or with Vancouver, or any other Canadian border town?”
Everyone volunteered what they knew, which didn’t reveal anything, though at least it got me away from Ulrike’s attention for a while. Communication to Canada was working just fine. Several of our group had friends somewhere in Southern Canada but it had never occurred to anyone to ask any of them what they saw when they looked south, or whether they had been across the border, or any of a dozen other questions that might have shed light on the whole situation.
“Then why aren’t we entering from Canada?” I asked Iphwin. “This is really the long way round.”
“It is,” he agreed, “except for two things. One, experiments with sending agents in from Canada have already been tried, and the result has been that they’re never heard of or seen again. They drop out of the public databases and out of communication with us as soon as they get near the border with the intention of crossing it. We tried sending in a man who was not continually linked by phone, and had his partner watch him try to walk through a border crossing way up along the Manitoba-Minnesota line. No luck there, either—the camera went dead, she can’t remember, and he’s gone. Sort of like the attempts we’ve made to reconnoiter by phone call.”
“You could have told us about all these things before we agreed to do this,” Ulrike said. “You’re telling us that you’ve lost everyone who’s ever tried?”
“We’ve only lost contact with them. We don’t know what happened to them. They may well be fine, and in the United States. Anyway, since the quick approach across Canada didn’t work out, now we’re trying something different—sneaking in via Mexico—and seeing how this works. As far as we can tell, this is a completely different experiment.”
“I still really hate that you do this kind of thing with other people’s lives,” Ulrike said. The whine was coming back into her voice, and as much as I found Iphwin annoying, I preferred listening to him.
So I asked a question. “You said there was a second reason?”
“Well, yes. We had records in several different event sequences of a Cabinet office that was created very late in the life of the United States—or the Reich, Christian Commonwealth, Freedom Reservation, or People’s Republic, or whatever that territory was called in its event sequence. The Department of the Pursuit of Happiness. It had four major offices—one each in Washington, Buffalo, Topeka, and Santa Fe. And it seems to have been mixed up in the whole issue of quantum computing, bandwidth, compression, all the technologies that have scrambled the worlds. As a secondary mission, besides just seeing what is going on in the United States, we also thought perhaps we’d try to get a look at one of those. But we had very bad luck up by Buffalo, as I’ve told you, and that was the closest by land. Now—if we get through, and if things look good—we thought we might try Santa Fe. The clues that seemed to indicate that the Department of the Pursuit of Happiness has anything to do with it are very ambiguous, of course, but all the same—”
I saw the flickers of light from the low rock outcrop ahead, and was shouting “Ambush” even as I reached for the brake with my foot. My guts fell into my shoes, but I couldn’t afford to freeze.
“Try to run it!” Paula bellowed. I moved my boot and stood on the speed pedal; the washboarded road with its big holes shook the esty violently, but I managed to hold it on the road and gain some speed. Ahead of me, the road bent along the edge of the rock outcrop, and then swept on through the desert in a big open area; if we could get past this ambush, we would have clear room to run.
Two shots banged off the outer windscreen, and Ulrike made a whimpering scream that was stifled by Terri grabbing her and covering her mouth, pinning her to the floor. Everyone got to stations in an instant, and Paula fired two short bursts from the machine gun. “Just making them keep their heads down,” she said. “With the magnification I can see four snipers with rifles, and I can point at them, but hitting them is out of my hands.”
“Everybody armed, over to the left side and find a gunport.” Roger’s voice was calm and clear, and people quietly moved into position.
Another shot caromed off the roof. “No damage,” Paula said, looking at her screen. She gave them another burst of machine-gun fire. Two scars appeared on the over-windshield but so far nothing had penetrated. The thundering guns above, the rumble and crash from that appalling road, and the grinding scream of electric motors working above their ratings combined to be so deafening that I barely heard our shots fired, and couldn’t hear theirs hit.
We rushed under the outcrop, and shots plinked off the roof like the beginning of a hailstorm; as we swung into the turn, the gunners on the left side opened up and the esty was filled with even more of a din, but not enough to drown out the desperate hope in my head that somehow I would not fuck up. Above it— faintly, though he was not even two yards from me—I could hear the Colonel bellowing for people to move to the rear gunports, and a moment later his shouting was drowned out by the big motor above my head, whirling the machine gun around to face the rear.
I became aware that they had shot out the rear window, that cheap chunk of civilian glass that had first worried us, when pieces of it flew against the windshield in front of me, and back away over my head. A big piece of the rear window slammed into the back of my headrest, making my head bounce, but I kept the esty on the road and the speed pedal floored.
“Keep it going a few miles, Lyle!” the Colonel shouted. I drove like a madman until the odometer had clocked off ten miles. The whole way, my bowels felt like they were on the brink of letting go and my shoulders waited for a bullet.
We had seen no cloud of dust from any pursuers, nor any trace of any other ambush ahead. A hollered conversation reached the agreement that I could drop down to normal speed again, which I was delighted to do. The rumbles and crashes fell to a tolerable volume, the world stopped bouncing around as if it were on some mad roller-coaster, and it was now possible to converse merely by raising voices.
Terri shrieked, a horrible sound that became a sob, and a moment later Roger was next to her. I couldn’t tell what was going on back there but it didn’t sound good.
“Better stop, Lyle,” the Colonel said.
I stayed on the road, preferring a quick getaway. Besides, I had seen no other car since we started that morning.
When we had come to a halt, I turned around.
Kelly and Ulrike were lying still where they had huddled together; Esmé and Jesús had rolled Ulrike over, revealing a big exit wound in her forehead.