William Rabkin - The Call of the Mild

“And then ET get sued out of existence,” Gus said.

“Not if we unmask Mathis as the killer first,” Shawn said. “He’ll run, we won’t be able to catch him, and the exercise is ruined.”

“Along with our agency,” Gus said. “I have a better idea. We figure out which way to go, and we use the day’s hike to confirm that Mathis is our killer. Then, once we’ve got incontrovertible proof, we use the beacon.”

“You sure about this?” Shawn asked, studying Gus’ face for any sign of panic, despair, or hallucination.

“I’m really fine,” Gus said. “I guess being out in the wilderness is like going to the dentist. The anticipation is much worse than the reality.”

“Funny, I’ve always found that having people jam razor-sharp pokers into my gums a lot worse than thinking about it,” Shawn said. “But if you’re really okay with this, then I guess it’s time to start moving.”

Gus slipped his arms through the straps of his backpack and shrugged it tight against his shoulderblades. Once he’d fastened the chest and waist straps, the pack balanced so well it seemed weightless, and when he stood up, it felt like it was being lifted by a skyhook. “Let’s go.”

They walked over to the clutch of lawyers bickering across the clearing.

“Why can’t you understand this?” Mathis was saying, beads of sweat dripping down from his artificially tan hairline. “The only thing to our east is the desert. If we go down that way, we’re going to die in the wilderness.”

“If we don’t stop before we hit Nevada,” Savage said, not bothering to hide the contempt in his voice. “We’re hiking down the mountain, and when we reach our destination, Rushton will be waiting for us. He knows we’re not skilled mountaineers, so he’s going to want us to take the safest and easiest path down. If you look, you’ll see that’s the eastern route.”

Gus looked in the direction Savage was pointing. There was a faint trail that threaded its way through a lunar landscape of enormous boulders before disappearing into a pine forest a long way below. In other words, it looked exactly like the paths leading off in every other direction from the summit.

“What makes you think the eastern route is the easiest?” Gwendolyn demanded. “If you have the map, you have a moral obligation to share that information with us.”

“And then you’ll have a moral obligation to share that information with Rushton,” Balowsky said. “You’re not fooling anyone.”

Jade looked like she was about to burst into tears. Gus wondered if they would have a green tint, too. “Guys, we need to make a decision,” she whined. “We should just strike out. If there was a wrong way, Rushton would have told us. So let’s go west. Or north. No, let’s split the difference and go northwest.”

“It’s a simple fact of natural law,” Savage said, ignoring Jade as if she were a bright green mosquito. “The eastern side of this mountain gets far less rain than the western side. Less rain means less runoff, which means less erosion, which means an easier hike down.”

“Hike down to nowhere,” Mathis said. “When we were flying up here, I saw buildings on the southern approach. That must have been the park entrance, and that’s going to be where we can expect to find other people.”

“And you know this because you’re such an expert on California, Mr. Detroit?” Gwendolyn said. “You do a lot of mountaineering in Motown?”

“I’ve got eyes and a strong desire to survive,” Mathis said. “And unlike some of the people here, I’d rather be alive than see someone else die.”

“Guys,” Jade said again. “We don’t have that many hours before it gets dark. We’ve got to start moving.”

Again, her voice seemed to have the same effect on the others as a mosquito’s whine. Shawn stepped up to the pack. “Do any of you have any balloons?” he said. “Because as long as you’re putting out all this hot air we could use it to float down the mountain.”

Even with that friendly opening, the assembled lawyers did not seem pleased to have Shawn join them.

“You’re the psychic,” Gwendolyn said. “Why don’t you just beam us off the mountain.”

“You know, that’s a common misconception about my powers,” Shawn said. “Believe it or not, I can’t actually teleport anyone.”

“That’s the one thing I would believe about you,” Balowsky said. “Oh, and that even in this vast, trackless wilderness you’re a waste of space that should be used for something more beneficial to society. Like another rock.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot,” Shawn said. “If I could only be useful. Like the person who’s got the map.”

“We don’t know who that is,” Gwendolyn snapped. “If we did, we could be halfway down the mountain by now.”

“And you’d be two-thirds of the way down, running to tell Rushton before anyone else could,” Savage said.

“Let’s not bicker,” Shawn said. “Or maybe I should say let’s not bicker anymore.”

“We are having a serious intellectual argument about the proper route to take,” Balowsky said. “We are adressing the issues one at a time, searching for answers to the problems they present, and coming up with a solution. We do not bicker.”

“He’s right,” Gus said, stepping up next to Shawn. “Once you charge more than two hundreds bucks an hour, it’s not bickering anymore. It’s deliberation.”

“Two-hundred-dollar deliberation is fine if you’re suing over who is responsible for a traffic accident,” Shawn said. “But when it comes to climbing down a mountain, I prefer a two-dollar map. And one of us has it.”

“What good does that do us?” Gwendolyn said. “Whoever has the map can’t reveal that fact. And as long as that person can’t prove he or she is arguing from real knowledge and not from some half-assed Boy Scout training, there’s no reason to value anyone’s word over anyone else’s.”

“Rushton said it was so you’d learn to trust each other,” Shawn said. “But I’ve known you all for less than a day and I know that’s never going to happen. So he must have had something else in mind. Maybe we should reexamine exactly what he said.”

“I believe his actual words were to the effect that if the map bearer revealed the map to the rest of us, we’d all be fired,” Gus said.

“Yes,” Shawn said. “If the map bearer reveals that he or she has the map, that’s it. But he didn’t say that anything bad would happen if someone else revealed who had the map.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” Mathis said. “Tear through each other’s packs?”

Gus slapped his forehead. “If only we had a psychic here who could tell us who was carrying the map.”

“Why, that would be a fine thing,” Shawn said. “But where would we look for such a psychic?”

“We wouldn’t have to,” Gus said, “if Mr. Rushton hired a psychic detective and sent him along on this trip.”

“Wait a minute,” Shawn said. “Didn’t he do something just like that? If only we could remember who that psychic was, maybe he could help us out.”

“Maybe he could help us by shutting up and letting us determine the right trail,” Savage said. “Which happens to be the eastern one.”

Before the arguments could start again, Shawn pressed his fingertips to his temple and squeezed his eyes shut. “I need you all to blank your minds,” he said. “Don’t think of anything. Let the vibrations flow.”

“There’s something flowing, all right, and it isn’t vibrations,” Balowsky said. “And my brain is never blank.”

Shawn squinted one eye open and took a quick glance at Balowsky. Took a quick glance and saw. Saw the way his hands trembled slightly and sweat beaded the palms. Saw the pallor in his cheeks. Saw the tiniest difference in the size of his pupils.