The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (43 page)

“Nope; copying just now completed.”

“Well, buddy, here we are, 5000 feet over
Chicago
and
Lake Michigan. Do you like this altitude?”

“Yeah, this is good for right now. I know it’s in the right place relative to the
Lake, but that sure as hell’s no city; just a town, and not a real big one. No Sears Tower, and so forth.”

“Yeah, no more than 5-6000 people in the whole state of
Illinois,” Nick observed. “And less than 200,000 in the continental US. And notice the air directly over the town. See any pollution?”

“No, nothing. Not even any smoke.”

Nick chuckled. “Since nobody produces any combustion beyond the occasional fireplace log, it stands to reason. It’s all done these days by fusion, electrogravitics and some electricity here and there.”

“No cars, huh?”

“Nope. Not in the strict sense. Plenty of personal transportation, in the form of electrogravitic vehicles. You’ll particularly like the straddlers, the ones you can ride like a motorcycle. These days, people travel long distance by teleportation, unless they’re on a vacation tour. Same thing with freight; not nearly as much stuff gets moved around anyway, since production can usually be done locally, if not in a person’s individual UPF.”

“UPF?”

“Universal Production Facility. Think of it as a garage, which is about the size of an average UPF, inside of which most anything can be produced- anything that can fit inside, of course.”

“More sub-quantum stuff.”

“Most of the everyday stuff’s taken care of at the quantum level. But it’s made the world a different place. Remember what Sartre said about Hell?”

“Not off the top of my head.”

“‘Hell,’ he said, ‘is other people.’ so in the ensuing years between your time and mine, society’s arrived at a solution to the problem that Sartre was dramatizing; something close to the ideal solution for populating the world, with a very generous dose of technology making it feasible. In 4231, people do pretty much exactly as they please, and the world turns out to be a pretty nice place, once you’ve eliminated metropolises, airports and seaports as they once existed. And they’re smart; people in general surpass the geniuses of your time by a couple orders of magnitude, too. When you combine incredible intelligence with no population pressure you get...”

“Paradise?”  Jack ventured.

“Of a sort. There’s still plenty to do, in the sense of galactic exploration and defending the planet from external hazards- asteroids, comets, things like that- and there are many times the number of people on Earth out there in the galaxy, pioneering in essentially the same way that human beings have always done. My personal preference, as I’ve indicated, was to pursue physics here on the home planet, and to pioneer in quite a different way.”

“With some pretty spectacular results,” Jack said.

“Speaking of spectacular, let’s do a low pass over Chi-town and head out to the Pacific coast, where the changes in the last two millennia are way more spectacular.”

It was as if they pushed off the roofs of the squat settlement of
Chicago
town, bounced over the
Rockies
and where circling the San Francisco Bay Area in seconds. “Hey,” Jack exclaimed, “what happened to the bridges?”

“All torn down somewhere back in the early 2800s, after the stresses that the northward movement of the western peninsula along the San Andreas fault made them too dangerous to use. They’d become relics, anyway; virtually all vehicular transport was soaring over the Bay by then. Looks pretty without them, doesn’t it?”

“You know, it really does. I can’t get over how sparse the buildings are on the coast.”

“It’s like I said; intelligent people value their privacy. And by now, people know that living near the San Andreas can have its ups and downs. When you can live virtually anywhere you choose and do what you really want to do, the herd instinct’s no longer operative. Let’s move on down the coast; great view without 20th-century smog, isn’t it?”

“Incredible,” Jack said as he continued to marvel at the all-but-undisturbed magnificence of the
Pacific
Coast, and, as they doglegged left, at the resurgence of timber and other natural growth in the
San Joaquin
Valley
as they headed south to the
Los Angeles
basin. Many of the buildings that passed beneath them, while retaining the modest sizes of the
Chicago
and
San Francisco
areas, were set into the sides of the hills and cliffs overlooking the beaches, with no apparent concern about access to the area’s limited road system. “Highway 101 and its hot rods are long gone,” he said with a note of regret.

“That’s for sure,” Nick agreed, “but people with the need for speed, and there are still plenty of them, don’t have to mess around with old confinements like roads, tracks or even pylons. Just jump in, or on, the electrogravitic vehicle of your choice and bang away. You can go as fast as the streamlining on your particular vehicle will allow.”

As they circled the desert village that occupied a small spot within the site of the former city of
Los Angeles, Nick said, “I’m going to need to hear a lot more about electrogravitics once we’re back on the ground. But tell me this; most of what you’ve described up until now sounds great for- how shall I say it? People of a certain maturity. Where do kids, such as they may be, go to have fun and get laid?”

“Good point. Kids use a supercharged version of the system that’ll be in place when you’re about 40 years older than you are right now, a computer-network-based neighborhood that, no matter where they are, kids can exchange information, opinions, pictures and video recordings of each other and decide if, when and where they’d like to get together. Distance between people being much less a factor than it used to be, the fascination of putting music and hormones together can still produce reasonably large crowds of young people, and on pretty short notice. Not that it doesn’t work for adults, too; remember that line from the old Hank Thompson song, ‘I’ve got a million friends’?”

“Oh, yeah; ‘Just Bummin’ Around.’”

“Well, the world’s sort of like that now; out of the  million people now on earth, every one of them’s a potential friend. Intelligence levels in general are high enough now that you’re not likely to encounter a bore.”

A transcontinental dash took them to the East Coast, where the minimization of landmarks like
New York City
and the nation’s one-time capital,
Washington,
DC, looked very similar to that of the
Midwest
and West coast. “They moved the capital?”  Jack asked.

“Sure did.”

“Where?”

“Kansas City. Not much to it; just data storage and a few people- administrators, technicians, security- to make sure nothing happens to it. Even though, for all practical purposes, government as such doesn’t exist anymore, the archives record who we are and how we got here. Given the evolution of English, which is now the universal language, their value to linquists alone justifies security provisions which put the former
Fort
Knox
to shame.”

Jack sighed. “OK; what’d they do with the gold?”

“Sold it off, a little at a time, over about a 20 year period, after the 29th amendment was ratified in 2042. The Balanced Federal Budget Amendment. How about one more stop before we head back?”

“Sure.”

They headed south, tracking the ridge of the
Appalachians, then the Smokies. Jack saw
Kennesaw
Mountain
first, then
Stone Mountain
far in the distance, and between them a modest little settlement that he hoped was still called
Atlanta. They turned, tracking east, dipping down to treetop level, and Jack felt the feeling of home, stronger than he’d felt it since grade school. As they approached Bisque, there wasn’t a landmark of any sort to remind him of the little town where he’d grown up- until they headed south, when he saw a very familiar pair of buildings. “Nick! Are we back in the 20th century? That’s Chez Mose, sure as hell!”

“Nope, not yet. Glad it looks the same to you; a lot of the materials, both interior and exterior, have changed over the centuries. But then so have the technologies that make it possible to preserve the 20th century look. A fitting monument to a remarkable man; Peter Weller, in his role as Moses Kubielski. I think we’ve done a creditable job in preserving it, if I do say so.”

“I’ll say so, too,” Nick said. “But who’s ‘we’?”

“You. And I.”  As he said the words, they metamorphosed into images of their respective personae. Jack reflexively attempted to feel himself on various spots of his ephemeral self, and felt nothing.

“Let’s take a couple of these,” Nick said, nodding at a group of one-piece formfitting chairs that looked to Jack as if they’d been molded out of dark blue plastic. Two of them separated themselves from the group, rose a foot or so above the patio surface, and proceeded to the water’s edge, where they landed. “and walk down to the lake. I’ve a bit more explaining to do.”

They sat, looking at what Jack guessed were easily twice as many ducks as he’d ever seen on the lake. They took their turns landing on the swimmers’ raft, then diving into the water. “Those ducks; they look a little bigger than the ones I’m used to.”

“They are; and fledged a bit differently too, but you have to get close to them to see the difference. We try to keep everything looking the same as it did in 1956, but evolution has a mind of its own, even in the relative eyeblink of two millennia. Which brings me to why we’re sitting here. Although it’s been, I think, the best for all concerned, I’ve been flying under false colors within those millennia for most of your life.”

A look of profound resignation swept over Jack’s face. “How so?”

“Well, first I was a bird, then I was a character from some of your favorite films, and I think both of those identities served us well. Going on with the charade, however, is kind of pointless in the light of what we’ll be doing later this evening. So, if it’s all right with you, I want to give you a look at my true self.”

The resignation on Jack’s face deepened. “You’re not slimy or anything, are you?”

“I don’t believe you’ll think so. May I?”

“At least the pit of my stomach isn’t really here. Sure, go ahead.”

In a fraction of a second, Jack was looking at himself. He grinned, already understanding the cosmic scope of the joke. “Holy shit.”

A graying, slightly weatherbeaten Jack Mason smiled back at him. “Sorry about slipping you the red herring; my spurious birth in the fifth millennium, that is. I thought it best to give you the truth in digestible doses. Anyway, not bad for a 2295-year-old, huh?”

Pete rolled out on a heading of 095 as the altimeter passed through 1200 feet, the Albatross carrying 50% flaps as it descended on
Lake
Lavon, airspeed steady at 80 knots. At 1230 local time, the terrain around Dallas had built up sufficient heat, even in late November, to make the first part of the approach fairly bumpy, but the controls’ spasms died down as the aircraft passed over the lakeshore. Settling into the calm water with its customary thump, it slowed quickly, grudgingly accepting transition to boathood. Pete glanced over at Linda with the trace of a smile. “Wanna drive?”

“Why not? I’ve got it,” she said, adding power to the starboard engine as she spoke. The preflight briefing, delivered secondhand to her by Pete, called for mooring the Albatross, port side to, at the end of the jetty on end of the U-shaped lake by 1300 hours. As the nose passed through the middle of the 180 degree left turn, she gradually pulled back the power and prepared to meet it with power from the port engine. Pete had already broken out the binoculars and was scanning the shore for the jetty.

The plan provided for a man in a red shirt to be offshore in a dinghy; once he was sighted, they would bring the aircraft back to an easterly heading and hold it against the wind, which was forecast to be 10 to 15 knots out of the east-northeast. Red Shirt would take the plane’s bow line, make it fast to the jetty, tow them in hand-over-hand and secure a stern line. They would then wait for their two passengers, dressed as golfers and carrying golf bags, who, except during takeoff, would not speak and were not to be spoken to. On the golfers’ arrival, scheduled to be no later than 1320 hours, Red Shirt would cast off the Albatross, freeing it for takeoff and a return to Miami, directly over the Gulf of Mexico under visual flight rules, just as they’d come.

Red Shirt having retired to a well-worn black & white 1957 Chevy two-door that was positioned to block the jetty, Linda and Pete took the opportunity to relax for a few minutes prior to the return leg. They had topped up the fuel tanks at
Galveston
on the way in, so the run back in beautiful autumn weather promised to be just as smooth as the ride over. A long day, but it paid some bills and didn’t include the possibility of being shot at, which was an unavoidable risk with most of the jobs they’d flown for the CIA’s Miami Station since John Bisceglia had shown up there as one of the heavy hitters a couple of years back. “Johnny Boots,” as he was known in Cosa Nostra circles, answered to “Colonel Bisceglia” when he was on CIA business. That business was the assassination of Fidel Castro.