Foundation (31 page)
Trumaine glanced at the rearview mirror, where the semi had begun to enlarge once more; it blew its horn in defiance as it got closer and closer, until—to Trumaine’s dismay—it was again bumper-to-bumper with the car. Would he ever get rid of that thing? he wondered. He watched helplessly as the eighteen-wheeler thrust on, ramming the back of the car.
“
Christ!”
“
Look out!” yelled Faith, pointing her finger at another truck that had turned up on the opposite lane.
In his cabin, the drowsy trucker came to suddenly at seeing Trumaine’s car and, further on, the wrecked semi widely in his lane. He desperately hung to his horn and brakes and started to pray.
Trumaine couldn’t take his eyes off the windshield, beyond which the trailer of the oncoming truck started to skid across the lane, sweeping the road, bearing down toward him.
Trumaine braked hard, returning to his side of the road, veering and crashing into the slowing cars that still crowded it.
With a howl of burned rubber, the oncoming trailer passed inches away from Trumaine’s car and kept going ...
Both the out-of-control trailer and the chasing eighteen-wheeler collided head-on in a huge burst of metal and plastic, scattering debris all over the many lanes of the highway.
For a few moments, all was quiet on the interstate.
The huge, twisted frameworks of both trucks rose from the floor of the freeway like the skeletons of two charred giants that had locked together in one last battle fatal to both.
The still smoldering pieces of both vehicles dotted the surrounding area, sending up billowing columns of smoke, looking like ominous burial fires.
The vehicles that had been spared from the crash stood in a circle around what remained of the trucks; their dumbfounded drivers and occupants looked on, both disbelieving and awed ...
Then, suddenly, the driver’s door of the capsized eighteen-wheeler tractor slammed open from within.
The homicidal driver, his face unseen, emerged from the tangle of iron and lowered himself to the ground. Dodging the smoldering debris, he slunk to an abandoned vehicle whose driver had run to safety, climbed in it and drove away with a squeal of tires.
Trumaine’s head was lying on the deflated fabric of an exploded airbag; he came round slowly, extricating himself from more airbags. He dove around them looking for Faith, until he found her—she too was buried in the silvery blanket formed by the flattened airbags that had gone off on her side of the car.
“
You all right?”
Still shaking, Faith nodded her head.
Trumaine reached for his cellular phone, made sure it was still working, then chose
GRANT FIRRELL
from the address book and dialed.
“
Grant?” he asked. “It’s Trumaine. Listen to me very carefully. I don’t know what you will have to go through to get this done, but you must do it—”
The guard in the booth gasped in amazement from below his bellhop cap at seeing Trumaine’s beaten-up and rattling car approach Credence’s gate. He lifted his cap and scratched the top of his head before he realized he ought to push the button that opened the gate instead.
Trumaine’s car lurched past, entering the parking lot, trying to reach a spot where it could finally rest its crumbling pieces.
Trumaine got out the car and jogged around it, helping Faith with her jammed door. With one last kick and a creepy screech it opened at last. As Faith climbed out from the car, Trumaine pointed at a second damaged car parked in the next row of vehicles.
It was the same car the killer driver had picked up after the crash of the eighteen-wheeler.
He was at Credence too.
They had lost the element of surprise, thought Trumaine. If the killer driver was Benedict’s crawler, their plan had been discovered already and Benedict knew everything about it.
Trumaine looked at Faith.
“
There’s only one thing we can do now,” he said. “Get the crawler before Benedict summons Firrell, demanding an explanation about why you have been released; before he starts a formal inquiry with both the
TSA
and the Federal Authority against us. We have very little time left ...”
Trumaine took Faith’s hand and they bounded up the entrance steps to Credence.
Nobody stopped them until they arrived at the barrier in the gallery. Only the turnstile guard objected; he told them they had no authorization to get in the chamber and that he couldn’t let them through.
All Trumaine had to do was show him his taser. He didn’t have time for long explanations, he said. The guard was holding up a public officer from performing his duties and if he wasn’t going to step aside, Trumaine was going to stun him and it wouldn’t be nice.
At long last, the guard had yielded and had opened the maintenance door for them—the only thing he had succeeded in was to waste a lot of their precious time.
Once in the gallery, they rushed to a couple of free deckchairs.
“
I hope you can focus your mind here,” said Trumaine. “If you can’t find me in the feed, we’re done for. Right?”
Faith nodded her head.
“
There’s one last thing ...” she said.
“
What?”
“
This is the real feed we’re going to enter, you’ll be exposed to a lot more information. I hope you—”
“
Don’t worry about me,” said Trumaine, curtly. “I’ll get used to it—let’s just go.”
As he lay down on the closest deckchair, the by now familiar one-eyed stem emerged from the chasm of the believers’ chamber, hooking the couch and lifting it. The transmitter embedded in the headrest started to blink and Trumaine fell in a trance in moments.
Faith watched him leave the gallery and float away into the chamber, then she sat and leaned back as well. A second, identical stem rose from the abyss of the chamber, coupled with Faith’s couch and carried her away, too.
As she went, the gallery guard stepped forward with a nasty grin. He pushed a button on his wrist radio, then brought it to his lips and spoke into it.
“
Mr. Benedict? It’s Richards, sir, reporting from the gallery. Detective Trumaine has just entered the feed with Ms. Alveraz ...”
Trumaine realized immediately that something wasn’t quite right with the place where he had opened his eyes—it looked very much like an emergency escape, but he had never seen it before. He looked upward; from possibly a good fifty feet above him, a small square opening shed some light below, to where he was.
He grabbed the handrail and started climbing. He climbed and climbed. He bounded up the stairs so quickly he almost missed a solitary double door opening in the corner. He retraced his steps, lunged for the door handle and pulled it. The door swung easily and a bright light wrapped him, bedazzling him, preventing him from seeing what lay beyond the opening.
It took a while to get his eyes accustomed to the brightness. When it did, the most amazing vision wobbled and dangled in front of his eyes, slowly becoming real.
It was the wide the gallery of a spaceport. Not any spaceport; this was so huge it was fifty times any spaceport Trumaine had ever seen, as if all spaceports in the world had been assembled together, side by side, in a colossal, monstrous building.
Half a million people swarmed about, boarding or leaving the twenty or more spaceships aligned on either side of the main hall like thoroughbred horses at the racetrack gate.
The view was so breathtaking and overpowering, that Trumaine had to lean against the next parapet to steady himself. At a loss for any words that could describe what he was seeing, he just glared from his overlook, contemplating the vastness of that place ...
Trumaine hurried along the main hall, weaving through the mindless crowd. He kept looking around him, still incapable of understanding what that place was. Out of breath, he reached over to an elephantine help desk, where an information clerk out of twenty more noticed him:
“
How can I help you, sir?” he asked politely.
Trumaine stroked his jaw and groaned.
He wanted to laugh and to shout. He wanted to slam his fists on that desk and slap himself, because Benedict had already won and he, the little helpless cop with the little arrogant brain, had lost—there was no way he could find Benedict’s crawler in that crowd, not in a month, not in a whole year.
Trumaine waved off the clerk and leaned his elbows on the desk, disbelieving and feeling light-headed.
Maybe he should sit down ...
Then, suddenly, a silvery voice called from behind him. He could be wrong, but he thought he had heard that voice before; it belonged to a young a woman he had dreamed of, a long time ago.
“
Chris! Thank God, there you are!” said the voice.
Trumaine turned his head slowly and saw the woman he had dreamed of approach at a jog. She was flushed and out of breath; the huge spaceport was getting the best out of her too, but she shouldn’t worry about that, thought Trumaine—it was all in his mind.
“
What the hell is this place!?” he asked.
“
Why, it’s the real feed,” replied the young woman with the same practical tone one would use to say that two and two is four.
“
And ... you work in here?” wondered Trumaine.
“
Welcome to the All Worlds Spaceport—this is how it happens,” she said with a nod.
Trumaine stared. “How
what
happens?”
Faith pointed at some of the bystanders.
“
Don’t you recall them? You must have seen them, at the canteen—they’re Credence believers. Not all of them are, of course. What you see here is the administered feed as believers see it.”
She motioned around her.
“
The feed is a huge projection, Trumaine. All the passengers you see here, are also in all the real spaceports all around the universe, right now! The same goes for the spaceships—they are all real. They are going to take off according to their timetables, bringing with them their passengers. Credence’s believers see it happen here moments before it does in reality! The moment they believe it’s happening, it does in reality too! Do you understand now? It’s how Jarva’s miracle of Pistocentrism works!”
Trumaine’s head was spinning.
“
I never thought it was going to be this big ... We’ll never catch him ...”
“
No, I’ve found him!”
“
What!? Where?”
“
Come!”
Faith took Trumaine’s hand and pulled him along; they jogged and hustled into the crowd.
“
He’s over there,” she said, leading the way. “I can understand now why I never realized before it was him—he’s so ... unsuspecting.”
“
Did you enter his mind?”
Faith shook her head. “I couldn’t.”
“
How do you know it’s him, if you didn’t read him?” protested Trumaine.
“
Because of that! Don’t you understand? He’s the one guy whose head I couldn’t get into, that’s why I found him so quickly!”
“
You can’t read him? How come?”
“
I don’t know. Maybe he wears a shield?”
“
A shield ...?”
The questions that needed an answer started to pile up in Trumaine’s brain faster than he could count them.