I stayed on the bottom for a long time, deliberately calming down and slowing my breathing and metabolism. The boat crew threw grenades overboard and the concussions battered me, but they were too far away to do any damage. After about twenty minutes they gave up and sailed away at high speed. Once I was certain that they had gone, I slowly surfaced, scanning sensitivity at maximum range. There was nothing out of the ordinary visible except for the blazing wreck of the house. I could hear the distant sound of police sirens approaching.
I floated for a while, considering what to do next. Fortunately I still had my headnet, securely protected inside its sealed bag. It was time I disappeared from view. I turned over and began swimming steadily, out into the Sound.
8
I swam ashore at Twin Island, a small, wooded promontory at Pelham Bay Park, on the opposite side of the Sound. I found a concealed place among the woods, the leaves glowing with the rich colours of autumn, sat down, put on the headnet, and linked with Secundo. During the swim, I had worked out what I needed to do next but first I needed feedback. Secundo confirmed that what I had suggested was possible, and that the saurian authorities were prepared to do it. I picked up from his mind how appalled he was at the attack on me, and asked him to keep me posted about what the news media had to say. The headnet now proved doubly useful as it enabled me to make use of the internet via the saurians. I asked Secundo to search for some information for me, then settled down to wait until it was dark.
A night of travelling followed. I would have preferred to follow the coast, on foot or by swimming, but there wasn’t time – Secundo had come back with the news I wanted and I had an appointment to keep. I ran inland until I hit a major road, then paralleled it until I found a truck stop. From then on I travelled by commercial vehicles, unknown to the drivers; where I couldn’t get inside the vehicles, the strength and endurance of my adapted muscles proved useful in hanging on underneath. En route, I rather apologetically did some breaking-and-entering into a food store to collect some packets of fruit and nuts and bottles of water, plus a backpack to carry them in.
Dawn wasn’t far away by the time I reached the outskirts of Boston. Primo had taken over from Secundo and was following my progress using on-line maps. Following his instructions, I left the vehicle near Columbus Park and slipped into the water there. I swam as fast as I could, burdened as I was with my backpack, around Pleasure Bay and into the Main Channel. It didn’t take me long to locate my target – a huge Holland America cruise liner tied up to a quay, glowing with light. I made use of my chameleon abilities to get onto the quayside and then slip aboard via a heavy mooring rope, away from the brightly lit and guarded gangway.
Such an enormous ship needed many lifeboats. The larger ones might be needed as tenders in some ports, but the smaller ones were less likely to be used, so I located the remotest one I could find and got inside, just as dawn was breaking.
The day was filled with the sound of preparations for sea; the passengers arriving and exploring the ship, crew messages echoing over the tannoy. I ducked right down on the ship side of my refuge as the passengers assembled on deck for lifeboat drill. Late that afternoon the ship sailed, and I settled down to a long wait.
Most of the time I was trapped in the lifeboat, but in the hours before dawn I was able to get out, use the facilities and take some exercise in reasonable safety, senses alert for the approach of any passengers or crew. I longingly considered the swimming pools, but that would have been too risky. Once, a crewman came to check on the lifeboats. I nudged his mind and he looked away from me before wandering off, satisfied that all was as it should be.
The saurians kept me in touch with the news about my disappearance. The official word had been very bland: yes, there had been an attack on the house in which I was staying, but the house appeared to be empty at the time; no, they didn’t know who had carried out the attack but were “following up leads”; no, they had no idea where I was. Comment in the news media was more interesting; it was believed that the attackers had been a group of right-wing extremists, possibly with some fundamentalist religious motivation. Even more intriguingly, it was suggested that they may have had help from people with access to intelligence sources; possibly an unofficial or “black” group with close links to the intelligence community.
The motivation of such a maverick intelligence group was the subject of some speculation; it was suggested that since the US had now obtained the information they needed to construct fusion power-plants and other advanced power systems, I was no longer strictly needed, particularly as they could communicate with the saurians via broadcast email or mobile phone. Such people would be likely to regard me as a “loose cannon” with a dangerous level of influence which was being used against their perception of the national interests of the USA. They would probably prefer to control me in order to benefit from my close links with the saurians, but they feared that my abilities in detecting and countering attacks would make that very difficult, so putting me permanently out of the way was the next best solution.
I pondered this for some time. It was all speculation, but it sounded uncomfortably realistic – or was I just becoming paranoid? Still, as the old joke goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that someone isn’t out to get you – and somebody certainly was. If I had the reach of a part (albeit unofficial) of the US intelligence community against me, I was in deeper trouble than I had thought.
I had plenty of time to think on that cruise, to consider all that I had done, where I had gone wrong, and what I could have done differently. At each decision point I had tried to make the best choice I could at the time, but it had all resulted in my becoming a discredited fugitive, hiding from the hunters. Had my judgement been so much at fault? Was I mistaken in what I hoped to achieve, as Luke believed? Would humanity muddle through anyway – perhaps we would be the one iteration of the human worlds to maintain our civilisation by ourselves? In the dark of the nights, my spirits sank lower and I was plagued with doubts and regrets. If it were not for the saurians, always there to link to, I don’t know what kind of mental state I would have finished the journey in. They were endlessly fascinated by humanity, by our inconsistencies and contradictions, our impressive achievements and spectacular disasters. Tertia confessed that they liked linking with me – my mind “felt different”, despite the saurian modifications. I had always regarded myself as a clear and logical thinker, and was rather mortified to find that the saurians were intrigued by the way in which my thinking “jumped about all over the place” compared with their systematic and thorough approach.
‘Tell me more about your relationships,’ she asked. ‘Your males and females seem to be in constant conflict, always deceiving each other, breaking up and coming back together again in different combinations. Isn’t it very difficult to live like that?’
‘You’ve been watching too many soap operas. Most people enjoy uneventful relationships but that would make boring television, so they pick out the small percentage of extreme behaviours and have their characters act those out as if they were normal.’
She thought about that for a moment. ‘But if lots of people watch these “soap operas”, might they not assume that they are supposed to behave in a similar way – that this is normal?’