Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

In front of them sat the four maglevs. They didn’t look like much; nice, padded seats behind rather standard-looking handlebars with grip controls, and a readout panel with touchscreen centered between them. There were clips for packs to be attached, but Jerry wanted them to get the feel of the things first without complications.

“The trick is balance,” he told them. “The units will power up if you press these two control symbols at the same time,” he went on, pointing to the touchscreen. “As you can see, you can’t really push the two accidentally; you have to contort a little to do it, which is the idea. Power down the same way. The power cells inside are good for several years at standard gravity and shouldn’t be a problem, and they can be recharged with a power source, so you’re not likely to run out of juice.”

The body of the scooter was, under the saddle, basically a long and smooth rectangular block with no particular features; stirrups came down from under the saddle to provide foot and leg support. There were no wheels or runners, and the four units sat there quite simply resting balanced on their flat undersides.

The four of them had all chosen light face masks to filter out the dust and ash that blew around, but otherwise each was very individually dressed. Jerry was wearing an off-white pullover robe tied with a belt at the waist, with a hood hanging back off the neck, and a pair of calf-length boots. He was also wearing not much else, judging from what was revealed when he got on the scooter nearest him, although that didn’t bother any of them. They’d all been together too long to be titillated by the sight of anybody’s skin.

Sark wore a light khaki-colored tunic and shorts, also bound with a belt at the waist, a broad-brimmed hat tied under the chin with a strap, and ship’s utility boots, which were light and comfortable but might not be as insulating as Jerry’s.

An Li wore basically bikini style briefs and a halter, revealing a better figure than she usually showed, but also a more problematic one on a heavier gravity world. She did, however, wear a head scarf, mostly to control her hair, and high leather boots that might or might not be good for a hike but would certainly do if she could master the scooter. Randi kept her ship’s uniform, basically a light pullover shirt, jeans, and ship’s boots, and a baseball cap.

Jerry sat on the saddle, turned on the power, and then gripped the handlebars as the scooter rose about fifteen centimeters above the rocky ground and hovered there. If it made a sound, it was masked by the sound of the wind and far-off volcanic noises.

“The right control is your accelerator,” he told them. “Go easy on it, build to speed and then hold it comfortably. You can lock it in if you need to scratch or reach for something, but it’s not a good idea to use that much. The left is your levitator. Pull the two calipers together and you’ll rise from the default fifteen centimeters up to about five meters. Leave it in default for now; five meters is pretty high up to fall off a moving scooter onto hard rocks. You can switch them in function by simply flipping this lever on each to give the hands a rest or to reach for something with the right while still going. Pulling the levitator all the way in will cause it to lock and leave the scooter in a stationary position at whatever height you happen to be at; just remember that it’ll also override your accelerator. Whatever height you set, the scooter’s sensors will keep you at that height relative to the ground until told to do otherwise. You steer with your body. It’ll go where you lean or want it to go. Turning radius isn’t all that great, so practice a little with that. That said, a little steer goes a long way.”

“How come no safety harness?” An Li asked him.

“If you lose control, you’ll find that, on these, you’re better off jumping off, even at five meters and thirty kilometers an hour, than sticking with one. Remember that. Now, I’m going to take this one for a little demo around the area here. Watch me and see what I do. Then we’ll have each of you try it in turn, with me monitoring nearby, and then it’s everybody for themselves. Deal?”

He rose about five meters into the air and started forward. The fact was, it looked easy and fun, and by that point they were all grimy, dripping with sweat, and feeling all their muscles ache. Any way to let a machine do the heavy stuff was all right with them.

An Li volunteered to be next. She found the saddle hot against her choice of mostly bare skin, but she said she’d get used to it. Smaller than the others, she needed Jerry to adjust the handlebars and the stirrups, and now he showed them, with An Li aboard hers, the other functions of the panel—intercom, various sensors, things that were useful but not essential to the basic task.

An Li proved something of a natural once she got going, although she did have some problems adjusting to the speed control, and she almost fell off when she reached for her canteen with her right hand, thereby releasing the calipers and bringing her to a more abrupt stop two meters up than she expected.

Sark’s big body had some trouble with the subtleties of steering, and it took him a good half hour or more to get even the basics to where Jerry felt confident Sark wasn’t going to kill himself or, more importantly, them.

Randi Queson was somewhere in between, riding comfortably and well from the start but occasionally forgetting to do something critical and causing potentially dangerous problems. Still, Jerry was satisfied she could keep up if she didn’t do anything fancy.

Now it was time to attach the packs and instrumentation, practice going a little with those unbalanced loads, practice a little more going together at a consistent speed and altitude, and then decide they could do it.

Randi found that the worst problem was judging distances at any kind of speed at all. The light was just so strange and soft that it was disorienting.

The last thing to do before heading out was to hand out the guns. These were settable energy pistols for the two women, and precision needling guns, riflelike devices with long ranges held by holders on the saddles themselves, for the men. Neither needed a lot of skill; if you could see what you wanted to shoot, the logic in the guns would pick it up and you would hit it.

Salvagers with guns and maglev scooters, Randi Queson thought to herself with discomfort and amazement. My god! Where have we taken ourselves? She felt uncomfortable with the pistol in its holster on her belt, but she also couldn’t help but think that she’d have given her right arm for one of these back on the worm’s world.

Jerry put them in a kind of diamond formation, with himself bringing up the rear. “This way I can see all three of you and know if there’s any trouble,” he explained. “And you three can keep eyes on each other. Just remember that if you hear a beep from the pad then turn around, because it’s me that’s in trouble!”

Eyegor did not prove to have a lot of speed in this environment. Even though the scooters went at a maximum speed of under forty kilometers per hour, it seemed much faster when you were on one, and it also was considerably faster than the tiny levitator in the robot was designed to do, no matter how close in principle was the design of Eyegor’s propulsion unit and the maglevs. Jerry did find that if the thing was partly fastened to the saddlebags, it didn’t add much if any weight, and so he put it on An Li’s scooter to her right. If anybody could keep the little sniveler of a robot in its place, she could.

Jerry put Queson in the lead. He was more than confident that not only was she the smartest one in the group but also that she had real guts. That stuff with the worm and the absorbed colony had proven that. He punched the intercom. “Where to, Doc? You’re the lead.”