Текст книги "Bouncing Off the Moon"

Автор книги: David Gerrold

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"I'm right here." I reached over and pressed against the back of Douglas's bubble, patting the bulge on his back that I assumed was Stinky. "Feel that?"

"Yes. I gotta go!"

"Listen to me. You've got to hold it. If you go now, you'll have to sit in it for six hours, for the rest of the day. And you won't be able to escape the stink. Is that what you want?"

"But I really really gotta go! I mean it!"

"Wait a minute—" That was Douglas. "Maybe I can work something out in here. Bobby, can you wait a minute—I've got a bathroom bag. You'll have to climb down from my back—"

"I'm all tied up, I can't get out. I gotta go."

Mickey said, "Can you turn around, Douglas? I'll invert the gloves and untie him. Or do you want to use the inflatable?"

"Bobby!" I said. "Which do you want to do first? Go to the bathroom or ride the roller coaster?"

"What roller coaster?"

"The one right here. The Lunar roller coaster."

"I can't see it. Douglas has his blanket over me."

"Do you want to go on the roller coaster?"

"Yes!"

"Can you hold it—?"

"Um … "

"'Um' isn't good enough. Can you hold it?"

"I'll try—"

"'I'll try' isn't good enough either. We have to know. Can you hold it for a few minutes more? Yes or no."

"Yes."

Mickey turned to me. "Charles, we can do it here. Douglas can take care of him in the bubble. Or they can go into the inflatable."

"Mickey, he went to the bathroom back in the pod, just before bounce-down. He doesn't have to go—not as badly as he says he does. He hasn't eaten anything in the last twenty-four hours, he doesn't like the MREs. And even if he had eaten, he'd be constipated anyway."

"And what if you're wrong?"

"I've spent the last eight years monitoring his bowel and his blad-; der. After you've cleaned him up a couple of times, you start paying attention to these things."

Mickey wasn't convinced. "He sounds awfully insistent to me."

"He does this everywhere," I explained. "At home, in the car, on trips. Nobody else can ever use the bathroom if he doesn't want them to. If he's not the center of attention, he's gotta go. He does it to escape spankings. He does it to get me in trouble. And he did it at Barringer Meteor Crater—you heard about that?—because somewhere he's figured out that announcing that you have to go to the bathroom is the reset button for reality. You notice, he hasn't said a word for the past two minutes? If something interesting is happening, he forgets he has to go."

Right on schedule, Stinky piped up. "I wanna go on the roller coaster!"

Mickey turned back to Douglas. "What do you want to do?"

"Chigger is right. Let's keep going."

"We haven't heard from Alexei—" Mickey fiddled with his phone. "Alexei—? Can you hear me. Respond please?" To me, he said, "It's a long way down. If he went slow—"

"He could still answer, couldn't he?" I bounced up and flipped my wheel over the cord, clicking my grabber onto the other handle with an ease that surprised me. I was getting used to this stuff.

Before I could kick free, Mickey blocked me. "Charles, wait—"

"Why? If something happened to him, we're on our own. Waiting up here is only going to use up oxygen. You have to stay with Douglas and Stinky. I can do this—"

"Mickey, he's right. Let him go. We have to get down from here."

Mickey sighed and stepped out of the way. I don't think he liked any of us right at that moment.

I didn't care. I kicked free.

GETTING DOWN

I sailed off the rocks and out into open space—above the crater wall, above the rubble-strewn slope, above the gaping chasms, toward the distant gray Lunar plain. Parts of it were so dark the shadows were tangible.

There wasn't as much sense of motion as I expected—and there wasn't as much falling feeling either. Even so, my heart lurched in my chest. Here I was again, hanging in open space—

I tried looking up. That didn't help. The cord was zipping by too fast. I looked down. That was even worse. I could see how fast the ground was coming up. The line was too steep. I twisted the handles as hard as I could.

The wheel slowed, the vibration in my hands and arms changed. But it didn't feel slow enough. "Oh, chyorr!" I should have started sooner.

"Charles—?"

"I'm trying to slow down." The ground was coming up awfully fast. And I was feeling reallystupid. I twisted the handles harder—but they were already at their limit; they clicked into a locked position. The wheel was stopped—but I was still going! The wheel skidded and bounced along the cord. Was this what happened to Alexei? Betrayed by the Lunar laws of physics? There wasn't enough weight on the wheel, there wasn't enough friction between the wheel and the line, they were both too polished– and the line was too damn steep! I was just going to keep sliding all the way down—until I slammed into a big unfriendly boulder.

It was a long way down. More than a klick, maybe two. How fast would I be going when I hit bottom? Fast enough to hurt? Fast enough to puncture the bubble suit? Twenty kph? Thirty? More? If only I had a couple of Palmer tubes—

That gave me an idea. I took my hands out of the connecting gloves and hurriedly connected the emergency rebreather tube to the valve of the bubble suit. It snapped immediately into place. This was going to be tricky. I pointed the valve and opened it in a series of short bursts.

I couldn't hear the outrush of air, but I could feel it. I came skidding to a stop on the line. My downward rush was halted. The line wasn't as steep here, the brakes held. I took my finger off the valve. I couldn't believe it—it worked! I'd traded a few minutes of air—maybe more—for a safe landing. A fair trade. I shoved my hands back into the gloves and looked down. I was hanging thirty meters above a yawning abyss. It was too dark to see how deep the bottom was.

"Chigger?" That was Douglas. "What was that screaming about?"

"What screaming?"

"You were screaming."

"No, I wasn't—was I really?"

"Yes, you were. What happened?"

"I was going too fast. The brakes didn't work. Well, they worked, but they didn't. Alexei screwed up, I think. Even if the wheel doesn't turn, you'll still go skidding down the line. But it's okay. I stopped myself. I used some of the air from my rebreather."

"How much?" That was Mickey.

"Not too much. Just a few squirts."

"Charles, I don't want to alarm you. But it's hard to tell how big a squirt is in vacuum. Don't panic. We've all got spare bottles. We're not going to run out of air. But that's not a real good idea."

"It was the only one I had, Mickey. Anyway, you and Douglas are going to have to do the same thing."

"No, we're not. I'm going to figure something else out. Where are you now?"

"Hanging maybe a hundred klicks over nothing in particular."

"How much farther do you have to go?"

I peered ahead. "The ground levels out soon. So does the line. It looks like maybe two or three hundred meters. It's hard to tell."

"You'll have to go very slow."

"I know that!"

"All right. Just keep talking."

My arms were starting to get tired. I reached up, grabbed the handles firmly, took a breath, and carefully began untwisting—not very much, just enough to unlock the brake and let the wheel start rolling. Only a little bit. I began moving forward. Very slowly. So far so good.

The thought occurred to me that I might have reacted out of panic. The line had a lot of sag in it. Of course the highest part would be the steepest. Lower down, the line would level off enough that the brakes would be more effective.

The more I thought about it, something felt wrong about this. Al-exei had planned everything else so carefully; why did he screw this up? Lunar explorers used all kinds of tricks for getting up and down steep slopes. This couldn't have been the first time he'd done this. So why didn't he know better? Had he been careless? Or stupid? Or what?

The ground came gliding up to meet me. Everything was back to slow motion. It was like one of those flying dreams where you drift along like a cloud. I tightened my grip and came to a halt, suspended only a couple of meters above the Lunar dust. The line went on farther, but the ground dropped away again. Maybe this would be a good place to get off … ?

Two meters. I did the math in my head. One-sixth of two meters. It would be like jumping off a chair. I could do that. "All right," I said. "I've found a stopping place. It's not too far to the ground. I'm going to drop down here. Wait a minute." I looked up at the wheel and the handles and visualized what would happen when I released my grip. The wheel would pop off the line, dropping me down. I just had to be ready. "Here goes—"

My hand came free and I fell. The bubble bounced down onto the ground. I didn't fall over.

"I'm down."

"Good job, Chigger. All right, now move out from under the line. You don't want to get accidentally bumped. We're coming down now. Mickey and I are coming down together."

"Huh?"

"You'll see. Just keep out of the way."

I stared up the line and waited. Several very long moments later, three luminous bubbles appeared very high up. One very large one, and two smaller ones with silver figures inside. They were moving very slow—painfully slow.

"I can see you," I reported.

"We can see you too," Mickey called back. "We'll be down in a bit."

It took longer than a bit, but I could see them clearly, so I wasn't worried. When they finally did arrive, they hung lower on the line than I had. In fact, they were holding their knees up so they wouldn't scrape the ground. They brought themselves to a stop, hanging all together like the last three grapes on the stem. Douglas lowered his long gangly legs to the ground and unclipped himself and Mickey.

He showed me how they'd used some of the leash to the inflatable to tie their two wheels (together to make a kind of pulley rig. With both wheels locked, the cord had to twist around first one wheel, then the other. It couldn't skid—at least not very well.

"We should have thought of this before," said Douglas. "All three of us could have come down at the same time. With your wheel rigged in, we would have had even better control. We did skid a bit at first, but not as hard as you did."

We were on a low hill. Mickey was already settling the inflatable on the level crest of it, opening up the first zipper of the entrance tube so Douglas could go in and take care of Stinky. As soon as Douglas was on his way in, Mickey came over to me and checked my air bottles.

"How bad?" I asked.

"Not as bad as it could have been. You used up half an hour of breathing. Maybe more. You'll just have to swap in one of your O-bottles earlier, that's all. Later on, we might have to equalize your air supply with mine or Douglas's. What you did was very smart, Chigger—and also very stupid. I hope you realize that. We don't have air to waste. Alexei didn't leave us much margin."

"I didn't have time to think, Mickey."

"I know you didn't. And I'm not bawling you out. We've just got to be more careful from here on. Okay?"

"More careful than what?" I asked.

Mickey looked exasperated. "I mean, we're going to have to think harder. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"Do you understand what I'msaying? Is there anything I could have done different?"

He got it. Or maybe he didn't. "All right. Fine. Let's just drop it."

He turned back to the inflatable. "Doug, do you need my help?"

Douglas was already inside. There was a smaller silver beetle next to him—Stinky. I couldn't see what he was doing, but from his posture, it looked as if he was squatting over a toilet bag. "No, I think we've got everything under control."

Mickey turned to me. "Chigger, you stay here. I'm going to follow the line down to its end and look for Alexei."

"I'll go with," I said.

"I'd rather you didn't. It might not be very pretty—"

"I've seen dead bodies before," I lied. Well, in the movies anyway. "Besides, you might need help bringing back the extra oxygen bottles and all the other stuff that Alexei was carrying."

"All right," said Mickey. "But if you throw up inside your bubble, you'll have to live with it."

"I'll be fine," I said. I hoped I was right. I followed him, hop-skipping over the hill.

END OF THE LINE

We followed the cord for several hundred meters. The ground was uneven, and generally sloping downward, though here and there it rolled upward too. There were boulders everywhere, of all sizes—some as big as cars or houses, others even bigger; so we couldn't really see too far in any direction. But we weren't worried about losing our way. Not as long as we kept the line in sight. Mostly it was ten or twenty meters over our heads.

Mickey turned his transmitter all the way up and called for Alexei to respond, please.We waited and waited, but there was no answer.

Several times we paused to circle around some of the bigger boulders, just in case Alexei had come down behind one of them, or even on top of one. But if he had, we didn't see him. Mickey kept checking his homing device, but Alexei's beacon didn't register. Maybe he was out of range. That was possible. Or maybe it was no longer transmitting. That was possible too.

Then we came to a place that was very slow going. The boulders were too big and uneven and we had to watch our bounces carefully. When we got past that, we took a short rest, each of us taking a small drink of water. Mickey looked over at me. "Y'know—Chigger, you're a pretty good kid."

I didn't know how to respond to that, so I just grunted something that might have been thanks.

"At first, I thought you were a whiny pain in the ass—but you can take care of yourself. Better than I expected. I respect you for that."

And then he added, "I hope that maybe you're starting to respect me too."

"Yeah, I guess so," I said.

"Charles, you resent me. I see it on your face every time you look at Douglas and me together. And I don't blame you. Douglas and Bobby are all you've got left, and I must seem like an intruder to you."

I didn't know what to say to that either. After a bit, I mumbled half an agreement. "Well, yeah."

"So, let's agree to work together anyway, okay? Because we both care about Douglas. And Bobby."

"Urn. Okay."

We slapped gloves, kind of like a handshake, only clumsy, and then we checked in with Douglas. He told us to be glad that odors cannot travel through the vacuum of space.

We pushed on.

After another fifteen minutes of bouncing and skipping through house-sized boulders, we came around a tall rocky prominence and stopped. We had finally reached the end of the line. Literally. The place where the grapple-dart had anchored itself.

Mickey bounced up to the top of a boulder, then bounced over to the next. He tilted himself forward to inspect the dart. "It looks fine," he said. "I'm going to see if I can loosen it and bring it with us. We might need it again."

"But Alexei had the pistol."

"Well, we'll just have to find him."

I was already circling the outcrop, looking for Alexei's body. I wanted to find it—and I didn't. I was morbidly curious—and I was terrified. If Alexei was dead, then where were we … ?

"All right, I've got the grapple-dart," said Mickey. "I'm coming back down." Two quick bounces and he was beside me again. Above us the line was falling slack. "Did you see anything?"Meaning, did you find Alexei?

"Uh-uh. It's like he popped off the line and flew away into space."

"Knowing Alexei, I could almost believe that." Mickey bounced up and grabbed the sagging cord above us. He pulled the free end over the rocks and began winding it up. "Even without the pistol, this might be useful. Waste not, want not, remember?" He handed me the line to hold, then circled the promontory, looking for anything I might have missed. He spiraled outward among the boulders, then came back to me. "Nope. He must have jumped off earlier. We could search for days and never find him." After a moment, he added, "And we don't have enough air for that."

We started back toward Douglas and Mickey resumed winding the cord. "You know," he started, thinking aloud. "There was a lot of horizontal slack at this end of the line. He might have had time to slow down, even stop." And then he added, pointedly,"You might have too."

"Yeah, but I didn't know that."

"No, you didn't."

We picked our way back slowly. We took turns gathering up the cord and winding it in loose coils. It looked unnaturally thin to me—but everything on Luna seemed spindly. If they made it only one-half as strong as it would need to be on Earth, it would still be three times stronger than necessary for Luna.

We spread out and searched from side to side, looking for any sign of Alexei. Even a track on the ground would have been welcome. We searched as carefully as we could—but we were in shadow, there were a lot of boulders, and it would have been easy to miss him in the dark.

Mickey stopped to study his PITA. He whispered something to it, studied the display. "All right," he said, with terrifying finality. "I'm going to call it. You know what that means?"

"You think he's dead."

"It means we can't waste any more oxygen looking for him. If he's dead, we can't help him. And if he's alive, we still can't help him—" He stopped and faced me. "Do you know the first law of Luna?"

"Uh—no," I admitted.

"It's very cold, it's very selfish. Take care of your own well-being first. Otherwise, you have nothing for anyone else."

"That doesn't sound selfish to me. It sounds like good advice."

"It is. But a lot of dirtsiders don't like it. The equations are too cold for them. You know what that means?"

"Everybody does. Not enough air."

"That's right." He took a breath. "All right. Let's go back and talk to Douglas. It's time to make a decision."

Douglas and Bobby were sitting together inside the inflatable. Bobby was munching an MRE and sipping at a canteen. I checked the time. We'd have to take another bathroom break in an hour. If we waited until he went now, we might manage two hours, two and a half. Maybe.

Mickey and I stopped outside the inflatable. We checked each other's air supply. We were both fine. Mickey told Douglas what we had found—and what we hadn't found. He traced lines in the thin dust. "Here's where we started. Here's where we are now. Here's the closest two train lines. We could have gone to this one, to the east. It's only half the distance, in fact it's still closer, but there are some steep crater walls in the way. And we'd be in sunlight a lot of the time, dodging from shadow to shadow. Experienced Loonies wouldn't have had a problem with it, but it's too risky for beginners. So Alexei had us going the long way, but safer—heading for this other line here. This way, we stay mostly in shadow, and the biggest problem is that one little crater rim—yeah, thatwas a littleone—and a little bit of sunlight, and making sure that we have enough air. He thought we could do it. So did I. I still do."

I couldn't tell what Douglas was thinking. Behind the blurry wall of the inflatable, he was an unreadable silver ghost.

"If we call for help," said Mickey, "we'll probably end up in the custody of bounty marshals. Alexei was my only real connection on Luna. I might be able to make some phone calls, but I can't think of anyone who'd get involved for us. For you. Unless—"

"Unless what?"

"Unless you know who paid your dad to carry the monkey. They'd certainly have an interest in reclaiming their property."

"No, they won't," said Douglas. "It's a decoy. Having us caught by bounty marshals serves them perfectly. It's a public distraction."

For an instant, the monkey tightened its grip on my head, reminding me it was there. For an instant, I wondered again if it was really a decoy. But something told me I didn't want to voice that thought aloud. "So what's our alternative?" I asked. "Without Alexei, can we still get to the train?"

"I think so. My maps are good. Not as good as Alexei's, but he showed me the way, and I think I can get us to Prospector's Station."

"And then what?"

"Then we keep going. We take cargo trains. We zigzag. We avoid interception points. We get to the catapult somehow. Or we sit here and call for help. But we have to decide in the next few minutes, because if we don't start moving soon, the window closes. We won't have enough air."

"How much air?"

"My guess is six hours if we're active, eight if we're resting. We can call for help anytime, Douglas. But if we're going to move, we have to move now."

"What about the closer train?"

Mickey pointed east—toward the harsh glare of the rising sun.

Douglas turned and looked. He didn't like what he saw. I could see that much in his posture. "And the farther one?"

Mickey pointed south, toward the darkness.

Douglas stared into the gloom. "You really think we can do it?"

"Alexei thought so. And he knew the risks better than any of us."

"All right," Douglas said. "Let's do it."

"You want me to take Bobby?"

"No, I promised him he'd stay with me. Let me get packed—"

A HUNCH

We didn't talk about Alexei. Not too much. There wasn't much that either Douglas or I could say—and whatever Mickey was feeling about his friend, he wasn't saying anything to either of us. I got the feeling he was as much angry at Alexei as he was grieving.

After a little bit of discussion, we decided to go for thirty minutes at a time between rest breaks. It was mostly downhill, and we were getting our Luna legs now, and Mickey was worried about my air. He didn't say so, but he checked my readouts a lot. He wanted to get us to Prospector's Station quickly.

For a while, we were moving through boulders, and then just rocks, and finally, we were back on hard rock and thin dust again. That was easiest. We were heading toward a landmark that Alexei and Mickey had identified as our halfway point.

About fifty years ago, in the first days of serious Lunar exploration, the Colonization Authority put down thousands of surveying beacons all over the Lunar surface. These were nothing more than self-embedding spikes with reflectors on top. The reflectors were dimpled with hundreds of little right-angle corners so that any beam hitting them would be reflected straight back to its source.

The length of time it took for a beam to return told you how far away you were. By triangulating on several reflectors, you could calculate your position almost to the centimeter. The reflectors also made it possible to make highly accurate surveillance maps of the Lunar surface. The geography of Luna was actually better known than that of Earth—because two-third's of Earth's geography was underwater.

We were heading for one of those reflectors now. There was nothing else there, just the reflector. But three generations of Lunar explorers used the reflectors as opportunities to recalibrate their PITAs.

The reflectors were also good for data storage, sort of. Anyone could point a beam at a reflector from just about anywhere, as long as they had line of sight.

Suppose you're on Earth and you aim a beam at a Lunar reflector. Luna is 3.84E5 kilometers from Earth. The beam travels 384,000 kilometers one way, or 768,000 kilometers round-trip. That's 768,000,000 meters, 768,000,000,000 millimeters, 768,000,000,000,000 micrometers. 768,000,000,000,000,000 nanometers. Or … 7,680,000,000,000,000,000 angstroms. There are 10 angstroms in a nanometer.

A blue laser, emitting at 4700 angstroms produces one wavelength every 470 nanometers. One wavelength every .47 micrometers. One wavelength every .00047 millimeters. One wavelength every .00000047 meters. 4.7E-7 meters.

So if we divide 7,680 trillion angstroms by 4700, we get 1.634 trillion wavelengths between Earth and Luna. Round-trip. If I'd figured this right, if you used one wavelength per bit, you could put nearly 1.634 terabits on a round-trip beam. Or 204.25 gigabytes every three seconds. Not too bad. About 100 hours of music, recorded in hi-resolution mode.

That sounded a little low to me. But I was figuring it in my head, and it was possible I'd screwed up the numbers. And I was using a blue laser because that was the only angstrom number I could remember. If you used an X-ray laser, you could multiply that by 10,000, and that would be 2,042 terabytes every three seconds. Which represents a much bigger music collection—about a million hours in hi-res. More if you played all the repeats.

If you used 8 beams, each one a different wavelength, all synced together, you would send 8 times 2,042 terabytes—16½ petabytes round-tripping between Earth and Luna. Was that enough to hold the sum total of human knowledge? No, probably not. I'd heard somewhere that the human race had so many recording machines functioning, we were generating a couple thousand terabytes of information per day.So maybe the Lunar circuit was only big enough to hold a week's worth of global data. But if you threw out all the crap that wouldn't matter a week from now, 16½ petabyes was certainly enough storage to hold the most importantinformation the human race needed.

But the moon is only visible a few hours per day. So your connection only works as long as the moon is in the sky. On the other hand, if you're broadcasting from L4 or L5, you've got a permanent line-of-sight connection with Luna—and the farther away from Luna you get, the more data you can have in transit. As fast as it returns, you retransmit it. Round and round it goes and no piece of data is ever more than a few seconds away.

There was a time—before I was born—when some folks thought that Lunar reflectors could be used to store the entire world's knowledge in a network of laser beams zipping around the solar system. But by the time the reflectors were in place, the cost of optical data cards was already in free fall, and it was obvious that using the reflectors for data storage was another one of those good ideas that was obsolete by the time the technology was ready. You could put 500 gigabytes in a credit card. You could put 500 terabytes in half a pack of playing cards. You could put it in your pocket. Or inside your robot monkey …

Oh, hell. Memory wasn't about size anymore, it was about density. You could even put a few petabytes into a monkey if you packed them tight enough. Maybe even an exabyte or two. That should be enough to hold the sum total of human knowledge. Of course, thosewould be expensive. Petabyte bars were worth thousands. Exabytes were worth millions …

Hm.

But if you only wanted to smuggle 2,042 terabytes of information from the Earth to the moon, you didn't need to hire a courier and a bunch of decoys. You could go out in the backyard, lash your xaser to your telescope, point your telescope at the target, feed a signal into the beam, and fire away for a few seconds. Cheap, easy, impossible to intercept.

Dad had bought two cards of used memory for the monkey—which would have seemed weird at the time, except Weird and I had been distracted by Stinky's near-headlong tumble into Barringer crater. Why would we need so much memory for a toy anyway? And what was in that memory? I hadn't had a chance to look at the cards closely, and I wasn't going to do it with anyone else around.

What was it that had to be transported that couldn't be transmitted? Money? Codes? Information? No. All that could be phoned in. So it had to be something that couldn't or wouldn't travel by beam.

There was only one thing I could think of … and it almost made sense. Maybe.

Quantum computing couldn't be beamed. I didn't understand all the details of quantum computing, but it used optical processing. The internal lasers of the processing unit were split into multiple beams and parallel processed. Interference invalidated the process. You couldn't measure the beams, you couldn't look to see where they were—the minute you did that, you changed the data.

You could beam the results of a quantum process, but if you transmitted the process itself, you created interference and invalidated the result. So all quantum computing was specifically linked to its hardware. You couldn't even guarantee that one quantum processor would exactly duplicate the results of another quantum processor. That had to do with chaos theory and fuzzy logic and the fact that quantum processors are affected by the time and place they're operating in. So quantum processors are best suited for weighted synaptic processing– lethetic intelligence engines.

A trained intelligence engine was worth at least a quarter trillion dollars. Maybe more. Depending on the training. And you couldn't just pipe the training from one engine into the next, because quantum doesn't pipe. Each engine had to be specifically trained.

According to Douglas, who was reporting what he read in Scientific American,they had finally gotten to the point where the intelligence engines could be trusted to train each other. I didn't understand the details. When Douglas started talking about forced coherency, congruent processing, and the fissioning of holographic personalities, my eyes glazed over. I finally had to tell him that if he was going to stay on our planet, he had to speak our language. What he did manage to get through to me was that there was a way of making two quantum processors marry each other so that their processing was temporarily synchronized—which meant that computers were finally moving from simulatedsentience (which is what the monkey was) to actualsentience in a chip. Not that the average person would notice. Simulated sentience was good enough to fool most folks.

It didn't make sense that we might be carrying an actual IE unit in the monkey, those things were guarded like plutonium. Despite the fact that IE chips were always the McGuffin in every movie about high-tech robberies, it was impossible to steal one—because they guarded themselves. Anything interfering with their beams invalidated their processing—and every alarm in Saskatchewan would go off simultaneously.

No, it was my hunch that we might be carrying one of the quantum synchronizers—some kind of industrial smuggling or something. We didn't have to understand what it was. All we had to do was deliver it.

Only thing is—now that we had thoroughly screwed up Dad's travel plans … we had no idea where we were going or who we were supposed to deliver this thing to. Maybe the marshals trying to intercept us were working on behalf of the rightful owners. And maybe not. How would we know?