After that, everything seemed to happen very fast. He was not able to burn the landscape into his mind as he had been before the border. There was too much of it, too many new things — first the mountains, then the broad plain beyond them. And he started seeing things he had never seen before, but had only heard about. They got off at Brasov and changed trains, and to Laurent’s amazement no one even bothered to check anything but their tickets. Also, waiting for them at the next platform was, not just one more weary turn-of-the-century diesel, but a long sleek backsloped electric locomotive resting there on welded track, with the long double fin of the new “wireless pantograph” down both sides of the loco, a genuine broadcast-power unit. Laurent and his “uncle” boarded it, and it roared away, swiftly achieving its top speed, in the neighborhood of 200 km/h. The wheel sound now was not clickety-clack, clickety-clack, but the subdued mmmmmmmmmmmmmtchk!mmmmmmmmmmmm of track welded together in quarter-mile sections. The train flew, and Laurent, ecstatic, felt as if he were flying with it. He waited until his “uncle” felt more lively, then they went into the snack car. Laurent’s “uncle” got a beer and watched with a tolerant eye as Laurent went from one side to the other of the snack car, goggling out the windows. Soon enough, there came the magic moment when another train doing 200 km/h as well passed them with a SLAM! of displaced air and the impossible whuffwhuffwhuffwhuffwhuff of five cars passing in two seconds, there and gone again, as if you’d imagined them.
Oh, Pop, if you could only see this—He thought it again and again.
But Don’t waste your time worrying about me, his father had told him after breaking the news of his departure to him, over a late-night glass of tea. Enjoy yourself. I’ll be coming after you as soon as I can. A few weeks or so…for I don’t dare leave the project the way it is at the moment. Too many people could get hurt. The fear had shown starkly on his father’s face then, unconcealed for a moment, but a second later it was sealed away again. Behave yourself over there, and enjoy the trip. I’ll be with you soon, and there will be lots more trips like this one when we’re together again…except when we make them, neither of us will be running.
The fast train ran from Brasov through the towns of Deva and Arad, to Curtici at the border. As they approached this new border crossing, Laurent began to sweat again…then was furious at himself when they got off that train, onto another — the maglev shuttle from Lököshaza in Hungary to Wien in Austria — and the border guards at the station waved them through in complete boredom, without even bothering to look at their ID’s or their tickets. At the station they met Laurent’s “Aunt Dina,” a small, silent dark-haired woman with a plain face and kind eyes, wearing a dull dress that looked like some kind of uniform with the insignia removed. Who do you work for? he wondered. How did my pop ever set all thin up, and what will they do to him if they catch him?! But he didn’t ask any of these questions out loud.
They all got on the train together, and once it was underway — Laurent’s ID having once again undergone a change he didn’t manage to catch happening — his name became “Nikos,” and his “uncle” left them, patting Laurent’s shoulder and vanishing out the end of the carriage.
Laurent left his “auntie” once, ostensibly to go to the toilet, but though he went right up to the loco end of the train and back again, he could find no sign of his “uncle.” He couldn’t imagine how the man had vanished from a moving train. Shortly, as the “Wiener Walzer” came up to its full speed, he was once more too distracted to care very much about the whereabouts of his temporary Uncle Iolae. He was beginning to tire a little, and later what Laurent mostly recalled was how, where the track curved, he could look ahead and see little birds of prey, kestrels and merlins, circling or hovering over the fields and grassland to either side of the track — waiting for the mice and other little creatures which would be frightened out of hiding by the sudden whack of air displaced by the train’s passing.
They’ve learned the train schedule, Laurent thought. They’ve found a new ecological niche for themselves, and learned how to exploit it.
Am I going to be able to do as well without my pop? he wondered. This new world was so strange…. But shortly Laurent was distracted again by the MGV pulling into Wien Westbahnhof and settling down onto the track with a sigh; and “Auntie Dina” led him off it and over to the platform to where what she told him would be the last ground leg of the trip was waiting — the Tunnel Train, the “sealed” UltraGrandVitesse evacuated-maglev system which would connect under the Alps with the Swiss NEAT system, completed five years ago and the wonder of its time. This last leg would be all in the dark — but it would be only one more hour to Zurich, at near-supersonic speeds, to meet the very last leg of Laurent’s journey.
The train closed up and pressurized itself, levitated above the T-shaped “podium” it rode, slipped softly out of the Westbahnhof, took itself up to 550 km/h without any fuss, and dived into the tunnel beneath the Alps. An hour later, only slowing to enter the “vacuum-locked” part of the tunnel where it could run supersonic without having the nuisance of air pressure to deal with, the NEAT “train” called Edelweiss after a distant wheeled ancestor broke out of a darkness only briefly punctuated by the lights of stations where it didn’t stop, and pulled up in the station below Zurich AeroSpaceport. On the far side of tube security his “auntie” turned Laurent over to a young woman from groundside escort services, along with another ID that Laurent had never seen but had been told to expect — Hungarian, this time — and a purple EU nonresident “transit” chip. She clasped Laurent’s shoulder as she said goodbye, and he nodded and watched her go.
“Come on,” said the escort officer, and Laurent followed her. Upstairs they went from the station, ascending via three levels of escalators past a slightly unbelievable array of shops and kiosks and stores apparently selling everything on earth. Sixteen hours ago Laurent would have goggled at it all. But now weariness and repeated spasms of fear and even a little irrational impatience were making a jaded traveler of him. What was really going to interest Laurent, now, was stopping — just standing still somewhere, sitting down somewhere that didn’t move, and going no further.
He missed his father more than ever. He kept wanting to turn around and say, Pop, Popi, look at this! — but his father wasn’t there — and then the awful thought would occur to him, Maybe he never will be. Maybe—But he pushed that thought aside again and again. I’m just tired. He’ll come for me as soon as he can get out…as soon an he can finish what he’s doing.
The airline staffer talking to him as they went got so little by way of response, as she led him through the white or glass-brick corridors full of bustling people, that finally she gave up trying. But as they went through the last security check, which Laurent hardly noticed, she smiled just a little — and moments later they came out into the great shining curvature and acreage of the main spaceport concourse, the newest and latest-completed part of that century-old Zurich facility. Straight across the white-shining floor the view went, nearly half a mile straight through one of the biggest enclosed spaces in the world under the famous glass “buckyball” dome, and out the far side through the world’s biggest single window, to the boarding pan where not one but three “jump” craft sat — a EuroBocing “hybrid” spaceplane in Swissair livery, the new Tupolev lifting body in Lufthansa gold and blue, and the “nonhybrid” American Aerospace “Double Eagle” spaceplane, in silver with the blue and red stripes.