The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (44 page)

They relaxed in the cockpit, drinking early-morning coffee from the two-gallon urn that had been recently installed in the plane’s mini-galley. Linda checked the weather forecast on the VHF radio, then ran idly down the dial to see what she could find in the way of music. What she got instead was Dan Rather reporting the shooting of President Kennedy. The President, Rather said, was being driven at high speed to
Dallas’
Parkland
General
Hospital
for treatment. The prognosis, Rather hinted, was likely to be grave. “Jesus! This can’t be happening,” Linda grated, her left hand flying unconsciously to her throat.

“Sounds like it has,” Pete said in a flat tone that held no optimism. “Let’s see what else he has to say.”

1320 hours came and went; the golfers were a no-show. Then, on the heels of the announcement that President Kennedy had died from multiple gunshot wounds, three staccato beeps from a white Rambler station wagon’s horn cued their arrival. “Tell me when they’re aboard,” Pete said; Linda stepped up onto the copilot’s seat, putting her head and shoulders through the Albatross’s upper hatch. The briefing called for the flight crew to take in the bow line, and for the passengers to bring in the stern line on the pilot’s command. They would then secure the after hatch, advising the flight deck via the intercom when the after cabin was ready for takeoff. “They’re in; there’re three of them,” she said, clambering up through the hatch and onto the aircraft’s nose to await the released bow line.

Red Shirt gave the nose a healthy push out into the lake; Pete advanced the port engine’s throttle for a few seconds to bring the aircraft to an easterly heading. Handing the coiled line to Pete through his overhead hatch, Linda returned to the cockpit and took it back from him, stowing it behind her seat. “Flight deck to after cabin,” Pete called, “recover the stern line and secure the after hatch. Advise ready for takeoff.” as soon as he felt the stern line go free, he advanced the throttles to move them into the channel and get the aircraft onto “the step,” with the hull riding high in the water, as quickly as possible. The wind had died down, and he wanted to take advantage of that; the Albatross could be a real handful in a crosswind takeoff. “Flaps 100%,” Pete said to Linda.

The intercom crackled. “All set aft, Ace,” a gravelly voice declared.

Acknowledging the transmission with a quick double click of his mike button, Pete pushed the throttles forward to takeoff power. “Call airspeed,” he grunted. That beach’s gonna come up fast.”

“80 knots,” Linda responded. “90 knots. 100...” The Albatross broke free of the water, rising slowly over the scrub pines and bungalows crouched on the lake’s windward side. Pete initiated a gentle right turn, heading south for
Houston, the Gulf and
Miami.

After hearing early radio reports of the President’s shooting and death, Linda and Pete were forced to conclude that their passengers were likely to be connected in some way to what had happened. As twilight approached, Pete dialed in 870, WWL New Orleans, on VHF, and they listened to Neil Strawser, the anchor for CBS News’ radio coverage of the unfolding drama in Dallas and Washington. The President’s accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, a one-time Marine turned defector to the Soviet Union, denied any connection with the killing of the President, or that of police officer J.D. Tippit, who had been shot dead near Oswald’s boardinghouse within an hour of the President’s shooting. Dan Rather, the CBS reporter in
Dallas, quoted Oswald as saying to reporters at the police station, “I didn’t shoot anyone,” and “They’re taking me in because I lived in the
Soviet Union. I’m just a patsy!”

They were still digesting Oswald’s words when the aircraft suddenly yawed to port, vibrating as though it were being buffeted by storm-force winds. Switching off the autopilot, Pete applied hard right rudder and held it as he said to Linda, “Go back there and see if you can see what’s going on.”  Hopping out of her seat, she moved to the cockpit door for a preliminary look at the situation. Looking beyond one of the “golfers,” who was seated with an open umbrella in the passenger seat nearest the door, she could see that his two companions had opened the top half of the after hatch. One of them held the door open against the air stream, while the other held an upended golf bag in the opening, dumping its contents into the Gulf.

As she was about to move aft to get the hatch closed, she felt the impact of an object hitting her left shoulder. She was looking down at the spot where she’d been hit as her knees buckled. The man holding the umbrella quickly closed it and ran, ashen-faced, back to his associates. Grabbing the man with the golf bag, he said to him, “The fucking thing still had a dart in it; it’s in her now, and she’s a goner. What the hell are we going to do now?”

“Shit!” The other responded, running immediately forward to look at Linda momentarily, and then to the flight deck, pistol drawn, to confront Pete. “What the fuck was that girl doing back there? Now she’s dead. A stupid fucking accident, but she’s dead just the same. How long before we get to
Miami?”

Without responding, Pete pulled the yoke back into his stomach, propelling Linda and the golfers immediately into the tail section of the aircraft, stunning the golfers sufficiently to allow Pete to level out, engage the autopilot, and pull his MAC-10 from the bag mounted on his seat back. Killing the three golfers with as many short bursts, he turned to Linda. Cradling her head in his left hand, he gently pulled up her eyelid, confirming that she was dead.

Leaving the golfers where they lay, he carried her gently forward, placing her in the aircraft’s forward lower bunk and securing its safety straps. Returning to the flight deck, he sat in serious thought for two or three minutes, then switched off the autopilot and took up a heading of 030 for
Bisque
Municipal
Airport.

28 DIMENSIONALLY STABLE

It was
five past two
in the morning. They’d crossed the coastline about an hour back at 6000 feet just south of Myrtle Beach, the autopilot holding a steady 084 magnetic per Nick’s instruction. Linda sat in the copilot’s seat, looking as healthy, if not more so, as she had before she’d been hit by the assassin’s fatal flechette, even under the cockpit’s red illumination. “Feeling OK?”  Nick, now visible to her and Pete as well as Jack, asked her.

“Hell, I feel fine,” she said with a bright smile. Glancing toward the rear of the aircraft and the bodies of the assassins, she asked, “Did that guy really shoot me with that stupid umbrella?”

“Yes, he did,” Nick responded. “Good thing that you made a liar out of Jack and kept your amulet on. That was the CIA’s fatal toxin, not the one tactical teams use to put guard dogs to sleep.”

She looked askance at Jack, who was standing behind Pete. “I just said that I didn’t think any woman would keep any piece of jewelry around her neck 100% of the time,” he said, still mildly delirious over Linda’s recovery.

“Well then, Sparky, I didn’t make a liar out of you after all,” she said, raising her left ankle sufficiently high for everyone to see her Flx miniature. “ Now- ah-”

“Nick.”

“Nick, yes, I’m so sorry, but my head’s still a little scrambled. Jack’s right about one thing. He gave these-  amulets? to Pete and me while we were on Mr. Pawley’s boat. He insisted that we put them around our necks right then, so I did it, more to humor him than anything else. He wouldn’t tell us where he’d gotten them, just insisted that we never take them off. Now you’re implying that it had something to do with saving my life?”

“It had everything to do with it,” Nick told her. Now that I’m part of all three of your realities, it’s time to come clean about the little- well, Jack’s always called them mini-Flx’s, so let’s just call them that. Put simply, they’re perpetual storage devices that hold everything necessary to reproduce you, in case of something such as you just experienced happening.”

All three of them absorbed this news without comment. Jack was the first to recover, saying, “Goddam, you never told me that.”

“No, I never did. I would’ve, if I knew that you’d taken it off.”

“Well, believe me, mine’s never coming off,” Linda said eyes wide at the implication of what Nick had told him. “But you’ve got to be around to make it work, right?”

“I, or someone like me. The simple answer is yes. Pete.”

A few seconds passed while Pete put his deliberation on the events of the past few hours on hold, after which he spoke as if he’d been shot. “Yes.”

“Please don’t ask why; you’ve trusted me this far. In a couple of minutes you’ll see what looks like a large ILS display out in front of the windshield. When you do, slow to 120 knots and drop your gear and flaps. Then just keep the needles centered until you feel the controls being taken over. When that happens, and there’ll be no mistaking the feeling, shut the engines down. We’ll be going aboard what looks like the hangar deck of an aircraft carrier; just larger.”

Pete knew that search and rescue aircraft were likely combing the Gulf for them, and that Nick’s implicit offer was their best, and maybe only, chance to stay alive. He couldn’t conceive, as yet, of the magnitude of the monstrous events of yesterday, but he knew enough about the sort of people he and Linda had been working for to have a pretty good idea that they were now on the expendable list. Besides that lethal umbrella, they’d brought aboard three very businesslike Mauser 7.62 mm autoloaders, all fitted with large well-crafted silencers. Not the kind of weapons to be issued to a Presidential security detail. They, the umbrella and the golf bags were all destined for the Gulf, once we passed the 100-fathom line. So I’ve got Linda back, and maybe we can hang on to the plane, thanks to Nick, Jack and whatever the hell we’re headed into, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let the words “flying saucer” pass my lips.

Not more than a minute went by before he saw it. The horizontal bar of the giant Instrument Landing System display was centered, the vertical tending to port. Reducing power, Pete made the correction that it indicated, simultaneously calling for gear and flaps down, which Linda handled as she always had. As his airspeed bled down, the previously crystal-clear night was obscured by heavy fog; the ILS display, however, stayed clear. Moments later, both the yoke and rudder pedals turned to stone. Pete reached overhead for throttles, pulled them back to idle, did the same for the mixture levers, switched off the ignition on both engines and feathered the propellers. Almost immediately, the cockpit was bathed with yellow light as a large door opened up to receive them. Nick hadn’t exaggerated about the size of the space in which they found themselves; hell, Pete thought, this could hold TWO friggin’ Hindenburgs. They floated in midair, 10 or 12 feet above the surface, upon which stood a tall, slender man in a form-fitting coverall. Goddam, Pete thought, if it’s not fuckin’ Klaatu...

Pete opened the plane’s rear hatch, doing his best to block Linda’s and Jack’s view of the three assassins’ corpses. Seeing what he was trying to do, Nick said, “Don’t worry; they’ll be taken care of. Give me a minute before you come out, will you?”  Stepping onto the ship’s floor, he exchanged jovial greetings with the tall man, turned and motioned for the trio to join them. “Commander,” he said, “This is Linda, Pete and Jack, all pilots and all-around good people.”

“Welcome, good people,” the Commander said in a sort of midwestern baritone. Linda extended her hand, which he took, then Pete’s and Jack’s. They would learn that he spoke, or projected, 20th Century English through a translation device that served the crew in speaking to occupants of whatever region of the space-time-gravity continuum in which the ship happened to be. Fourth-millennium English, spoken by virtually every current inhabitant of Greater Earth, would sound stranger than Geoffrey Chaucer to someone from the 20th century.

“I took the liberty of arranging the Commander’s hospitality some time ago,” Nick told them. “We met at an early stage of my own meanderings, and we’ve spent many a pleasant hour discussing events that’ve taken place over the years between my birthday and his, and their implications. Whether you can traverse it or not, a millennium’s still a millennium, and we’ve become fast friends in the process of appreciating that fact. When I told him that friends of mine from the second millennium would soon be in need of sanctuary, he was happy to provide it. That’s why we’re here, aboard this early-fourth-millennium temporal cruiser, that in the parlance of the times is irreverently called a ‘gravity scow.’ Inelegant, maybe, but accurate. These ships are powered by a gravity differential engine that can move their mass at incredible speed, particularly in the eyes of the people of the 20th century in whom everyone has so much interest.”

The Scow, as its guests came to refer to it, was populated by comparatively few recognizable humans, and those, Nick assured them, differed in more ways from 20th-century people then they were alike. The rest of the crew confirmed the image made famous in post-World War II science fiction; small, gray, leathery, with large ovoid heads, spidery hands and opaque black eyes. They were adept communicators at the telepathic level, never opening their vestigial mouths more than a fraction of an inch, these micro-expressions seeming to be part of their communication capability between themselves. They would learn in time that the “Greys” were manufactured to order, then trained intensively as specialists for duty in the Fleet.

They toured the ship without walking to its various parts, these locations seeming to coalesce around them while they stood still. There were gauges at various control stations that were marked in both current English and what appeared to be the hieroglyphic-like markings that had showed up from time to time in locations where UFOs had been seen to land or crash. These were, Nick told them, an obsolescent glyph system that was designed to allow the early Greys to assimilate instructions more quickly.
K2
invited them to walk forward toward the bow, which turned transparent before their eyes, showing the ship to have climbed well into the stratosphere without having betrayed any sense of motion whatever.