A hailer marked the end of McCutcheon property, and a few hundred meters farther the logging road met the highway. It had been at least a decade since 47 had been maintained for wheelies, and the ancient pavement of Vernonia Road was cracked and fissured and carpeted with moss. Most of what little traffic the artists and cityfleas of Vernonia generated had taken to the air, though the moss bore the crushed tracks of the fat-tired omnis which brought freight in from Forest Grove, fifty kilometers to the south.
Christopher cruised slowly, noting with idle interest how fungus and rot were fast pulling down what had been a home near the roadside, that one nearly denuded hillside was beginning to come back from the fire that had blackened it, where a sterile new white package house had been tucked in among the trees above tumbling Beaver Creek. But it was less than half a year since his last visit, and little had changed except the season. His pace was set less by the desire to sightsee than by the fact that he really had nowhere to go.
The house on B Street had been his home for fifteen years. A dozen years had passed since he left there, long enough for all of his peers to have moved on or mutated into strangers. As for adults, Jimmy, who had given him his first guitar lessons, and Nick, the haiku poet who had befriended him, both still lived in town, so far as Christopher knew. But he had not progressed very far along the path that either man had urged on him, and he did not think either would think much of the path he was on.
As he headed north toward Vernonia, Christopher considered stopping at old Hamill Observatory, the one-time private astronomy center sitting on a thousand-foot ridge just to the east, a mile up McDonald Road. In its prime, the observatory had been a mecca for amateur astronomers, and its presence had helped retard development in the forested Nehalem-Pebble Creek watershed for half a century.
But it was an idea whose time had passed. Astronomy now belonged to the satlands brightening Earth’s night sky. While Christopher lived on B Street, Hamill was limping along, ingloriously, on tourists’ curiosity and pay-per-view satland-sightseeing. And while Christopher was at Stanford, Hamill’s owners finally bowed to the inevitable, retiring its ninety-year-old telescopes and shuttering the silver domes. There had been talk of making it a county museum, a state education center, but nothing had come of the talk. Christopher let the turn-off flash by. There would not be much to see now.
Then, rounding the last big curve south of town, his attention was caught by the red-rusted gray steel of the Nisqually trestle. There had been dozens of bridges and trestles along the old narrow-gauge logging spurs through Columbia County, as both the river and the railway switched back and forth at the dictates of the land. Most had been torn down; a few had been preserved as part of the Columbia County Linear Park.
But the trestle just south of town was the trestle, a temptation and a challenge to every child of Vernonia. The rails were long gone; the timber approaches had rotted away to stumps. Inertia and engineering kept the rest there, a giant box bridge beam hanging just two meters above the flowing waters, anchored at either end by concrete footings.
On impulse, Christopher pulled off the road and parked the skimmer. He clambered out and studied the span with a smile, remembering how much higher and longer it had seemed when he was seven and ready to cross it for the first time. The metal had been slick with condensation, the river surging from a recent rain. But I was most afraid of being caught, he thought. I had no idea that I could die here. I was fearless then.
The last thought stuck uncomfortably in his ego, and before he quite realized what he was doing, he was standing atop the north end of the trestle, looking down through the web of metal at the river and across at the thicket of birches into which the roadbed vanished.
What the hell, he thought, and took a step forward. By the time he reached the far end he was laughing with rediscovered childhood joy. By the time he returned he was crying, and the reason was the same.
CHAPTER 6
—ACG—
“The trail of Gaea’s pain…”
The Houston police found one of the tramway thugs before Allied’s submersible found the Gulf jammer, but only just. Reports of the two captures reached Mikhail Dryke within an hour of each other. Either would have been sufficient reason to make Houston his next stop; both together were compelling enough for him to set aside his business in Munich and go there directly.
Dryke’s Saab touched down at Houston in pitch-darkness, a few minutes after one. A young driver wearing Allied green picked up Dryke at the hangar and ferried him to the hardware lab, where he found the jammer sealed in an immersion tank and under guard by a gnomish sentry named Donovan. No technicians were in evidence, nor was there any sign that the unit had been touched.
“What’s going on here?” Dryke demanded. “Why hasn’t that jammer been torn down yet?”
“Mr. Dryke, Mr. Francis gave instructions that we were to hold it for your arrival,” the driver said.
“Where is Francis?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Donovan volunteered. “He said that he would be back before you arrived, sir.”
“When was that?”
“About seven o’clock.”
Dryke muttered something unintelligible and stepped forward to look down into the tank. Though only shreds remained of the jammer’s float bladder, the blue-green pear-shaped metal casing gave no evidence of its five-day immersion in 160 feet of warm Gulf brine. Nor did it bear any obvious identifying marks.
But Dryke recognized it all the same. Float jammer, Teledyne-Raytheon K-14 style, military model. Made by fifteen manufacturers in eleven countries. Knock-offs and licensees both. About as generic a piece of hardware as you can buy—
“Who’s the lab director?” Dryke asked, turning back to the other men.
“Dr. Kimura,” they said together.
“You,” Dryke said, pointing at the sentry. “Donovan. Call Dr. Kimura. Tell him I want him in here with his best technician by the time I get back. Tell him I want to know where this came from.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you,” Dryke said to the driver. “You’re taking me downtown.”
The driver nodded, and they started toward the door. But before they could reach it, Jim Francis appeared there.
“Mr. Dryke. I’m delighted to be able to bring you back with good news. It’s in perfect condition—hardly even a scratch from the manipulators—” His voice trailed off as he saw the annoyance on Dryke’s face. “Is something wrong?”
“May I see your gate ID, please?”
Puzzled, Francis retrieved the card from an inner pocket of his suit coat and handed it to Dryke.
“Donovan,” Dryke said, folding the card in half with one hand until it snapped in two with a sharp crack. “Mr. Francis has just left the company. See that he leaves the grounds.”
“What?” protested Francis. “You can’t fire a man for being late.”
“Yes, sir,” said Donovan, stepping forward.
Dryke nodded and turned away.
“Wait just a minute,” Francis said angrily. “You owe me an explanation—”
Whirling, Dryke snapped, “If you were bright enough to be worth keeping, you wouldn’t need an explanation. You’ve made it clear that you don’t really understand what’s going on. You’ve got your head buried in procedures and schedules and you just don’t see. That makes you dangerous, Francis. I want you gone.”