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head and held it in my arms.
"Hello again, darling," I said, after kissing her flushed cheek. Her eyes were
open but unfocused. I looked into them, and they looked through me. Except for
the briefest instant.
Her lips moved almost imperceptibly. She moaned softly.
I looked at her for a while, then kissed her again. I rested her head on the
desktop, trying to fashion her body into the position I had found her in, but
her body seemed to have gone slack, and she wouldn't stay up. I checked my
watch. I was running late, so I stretched her out on the floor in front of the
desk, face down, head resting on her right arm.
"We'll meet again, darling," I said.
I left. Sam was waiting for me.
"C'mon! H. G. Wells I ain't!"
We ran out into the lot. And there, standing almost where we'd landed, were
two strange beings whom I knew to be members of a race called the Ryxx. It's a
sort of combination whistle, chirp, and click.
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"Greetings, Roadbrothers," one of them squawked through his translator box.
Sam tweeted a greeting, then said to me: "I guess Arthur's gadget doesn't work
on nonhumans."
The other was holding a strange-looking weapon on us.
The first looked up at the sky, its two round sad eyes searching. Finally its
eyes fixed on something the ship, pre-
sumably. I looked up and saw a shimmering in the air, nothing more.
"Superior technology," the first one said. Its fat ostrichlike body seemed to
heave a sigh. "Very, very superior. We are puzzled and vexed."
"It's pretty hard to explain," Sam said. He whistled some-
thing.
The second birdlike creature said, "I am of her nest, al-
though I am not an issue of her egg."
"Well, please convey my warmest compliments to (chirp-
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whistle-click) for me. Tell her that the straw of my nest is always fresh for
her visit, and that I hope the issue of her egg will be many and prosperous.
That comes from Sam
McGraw."
This seemed to impress the hell out of them.
"So, it is true," the first one said. "The many strange tales told of you and
your egg. Is it true that you have the Road-
map?"
I said, "It is true. But hear me. You will never get it. No one will. / will
never give it up, not to anyone in the universe.
It is mine, and I will keep it."
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"Hello?" came Arthur's voice from the communicator, which I held in my hand.
"Hell-o-o?"
"Yeah, Arthur?"
"Um... want me to make fried chicken out of them?"
I glared at the two ungainly bird creatures. Their faces were impassive behind
transparent atmospheric-assist masks.
The one holding the weapon lowered his winglike arm.
"No," I said.
"Upsy daisy."
We rose into the air. On the way up, Sam said, "I've always wanted to start a
religion, and God forgive me, if this keeps up, I just might."
We tacked against the wind of time once more. The dis-
placement was about eight months this time. We directed Ar-
thur to a farm planet on the outskirts of Terran Maze. People I
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Arthur landed on a deserted road, and I backed the rig out of the ship.
'Time to say good-bye," Arthur said. "It's been interest-
ing, to say the least."
"Yeah," I said. "Thanks for everything. Art, old boy."
"Boy? You know I'm sexless. They say I'm missing a lot, but what the hell.
Anyway..." He put his absurdly small hand on my shoulder. "Listen, I'm sorry
you lost so much. There wasn't much I could do about it...." He seemed to
drift off into thought.
"Here," I said, handing him the communicator.
"Uh, no. No. You go ahead and keep it. The ship has
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John DeChancie
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plenty. Keep it as a souvenir. Besides, you might want to call me someday."
I shrugged and put it in my pocket.
We watched the ship rise and become an olive drab dot in the sky. Then it was
gone.
Sam slapped me on the shoulder. "Let's go see if Gil To-
masso is home. I hope his heart is strong."
Gil's heart was plenty strong, but he fainted when he saw
Sam.
Our next few months weren't very busy. It was just a mat-
ter of laying low and waiting for the paradoxical crease in our universe to
work itself out. Right now my double was on our farm back on Vishnu. On or
about the fourth day of April, he would pick up a small shipment of
astronomical equipment from an importer on Bamard's III and set off on a trip
to deliver his cargo to Chandrasekhar Deep Space Observatory on a planet
called Uraniborg. He would never deliver that equipment.
Actually, that was wrong. We would deliver it for him, more or less on
schedule, and we would do that when my double disappeared through a potluck
portal on Seven Suns
Interchange.
I had a duty to perform as soon as possible, though. I had to get rid of the
cube. I still had it. (Was there a single person who coveted it now? Depends
on what now means.)
Daria said that I had given the cube to a member of the
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Colonial Assembly by the name of Marcia Miller. She said I
had simply walked into her office and plopped the cube down on the
assemblywoman's desk.
I disguised myself, borrowed Gil's four-roller, got on the
Skyway and drove to Einstein, the capital planet.
The Assembly Office Building was big and neoclassical and cost too much money,
just like every other governmental barn in the cosmos. I strode down a
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