Lawrence Watt-Evans: Out of This World

The other slaves simply watched with amused interest; they made no effort to help him, but didn’t hinder him, either. Nobody called for the guards. They all just watched as he chinned himself on the sill, threw up first one arm and then the other, his feet waving wildly all the time.

He hung there for a moment, looking out through the window at gray asphalt roofing and, some distance away, the tumbled gray stone of a mountainside. There were no obvious hazards or obstacles.

Encouraged, he struggled to inch upward, to swing one leg up.

It was harder than it had looked in all those old movies, all those times Indiana Jones had hung from a cliff by his fingers or whatever, but eventually he got himself out the window onto the roof.

He got cautiously to his feet and looked around.

He stood on a long, narrow rectangle of slate-gray roofing, extending the full length of the dormitory and lavatory, but only about six feet wide. The “chimney” he had located by its shadow was close by, and he now discovered it to be a vent-pipe from the lavatory’s plumbing.

Behind him, the windows were set in a sheer wall extending much higher than he had expected-it had to be at least twenty feet high, and was topped with an overhang. The edge of the overhang was wrapped in dull grey metal that glinted oddly in the orange sunlight. It looked very sharp.

The height of the wall seemed to imply that there was another story to the building, but there were no more windows above the set he had climbed through, nothing above them but blank concrete. It might simply be intended as an obstacle.

That wall was too high and bare for him to climb. He turned to look at the other sides. Before him was the edge of the roof; he crouched down and peered over.

The wall dropped sheer for a ridiculous distance, given that he was only one story up-at least thirty or forty feet, it looked like.

And about thirty feet away another wall rose, a wall that appeared to be hewn out of the mountainside itself, the space between the walls forming a sort of dry moat.

He worked his way around all three sides, and the moat went all the way around. Nowhere was it narrow enough to make an attempt to jump it reasonable; nowhere was it shallow enough to make a leap down into it reasonable; nowhere did it look possible to climb back out if he once did get in.

Frustrated, he climbed back down into the dormitory-and found four guards waiting for him.

They beat him soundly and removed his bedding, to prevent any attempts at making climbing gear from the fabric.

* * * *

Major Johnston swore quietly under his breath, wishing he could think of some new obscenity. The old ones had all lost their flavor by this time.

“All of them,” he said. “ All of them.”

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant stood beside the desk, trying to look suitably unhappy and hide the relief he felt that this wasn’t his problem.

Johnston tapped his pen on the desktop and stared up at the lieutenant. He knew the man was glad to not have the responsibility on this one, and he didn’t blame him. Johnston wished he didn’t have the responsibility, either.

And to think he had asked for it, and had been pleased when the FBI decided to leave it all to the military.

“The cars are really theirs? The vehicle numbers match, not just the plates?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And that damned phony spaceship hasn’t moved? Nobody’s been inside?”

“No, sir.”

The Major stopped tapping, and for a moment he sat silently. Then, abruptly, he hurled the pen across the room and roared, “ Where the hell did they go? ”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“You talked to the neighbors?”

“Someone did, sir, not me, personally.”

“And searched the house?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Legally?”

“Yes, sir; we got a warrant.”

“Nobody saw anything?”

“No, sir.”

“And there wasn’t anything to say where they’d gone? Notes? Maybe something on a computer disk? Anything ?”

“Nothing, sir. Some empty pizza boxes, a very hungry cat-nothing else out of the ordinary.”

Johnston growled. “This is ridiculous. The spaceship appears out of nowhere, but does that disappear? No, it just sits there, and instead this… this marketing consultant bails the crew out of jail, and invites the Jewell woman and her lawyer over, and they all vanish. All the cars still there. Like the goddamn Marie Celeste . Lieutenant, does any of this make sense?”

“No, sir.”

“Damn right it doesn’t. Almost makes me believe in the fucking Bermuda Triangle and Charles Fort and all that crap.” He slumped back in his chair.

For a moment he sat silently, and the lieutenant stood, equally silent, and waited.

“The cat,” Johnston said at last. “What happened to the cat?”

The lieutenant cleared his throat. “Well, sir,” he said, “I’ve got the cat at home. He’s a cute little fellow.”

Johnston chewed on his lip for a moment, then snarled, “Good. Keep it. And I want that place bugged. Both places. And watched. If anyone goes in or out of Jewell’s house, or Brown’s, I want to not just know it happened, I want to know who it was and every goddamn word they said. Bug that ship, too. Bug the lawyers’ homes and offices. Everything .”

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant started to turn away, but the major’s voice stopped him.

“Lieutenant. Do it legally. Get court orders.

“Yes, sir.”

“Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You think we’ll ever find them?”

The lieutenant considered that carefully, then shrugged.

“No, sir,” he said, “I don’t think we will.”

By the end of the first month after the capture of Emerald Princess Amy had given up any hope of rescue. She had also given up resisting Walter’s advances. She still neglected the housework as much as she dared, but when she received a direct order she obeyed it without argument.

She had also made the rather startling discovery that Beth was a slave, like herself, rather than Walter’s wife. Walter had never bothered trying to deal with free women; he had bought Beth about twenty years ago, when they were both young, and had kept her.

This revelation left Amy feeling betrayed-right from the first, and at every point since, Beth had consistently sided with Walter against her. Bad enough that Beth had sided with a man against one of her fellow women, that she had helped Walter to rape and starve and torment Amy-but when she was herself a slave, and at least theoretically in the same situation that Amy was?

When she learned the truth Amy refused to speak to Beth for a day and a half.

She had just decided that this was a mistake, that she was only making everybody’s life more difficult and making Beth less likely than ever to sympathize with her, when the whine of an aircar made her look up from the sink.

Walter hadn’t said anything about expecting company. He and Beth were out in the fields somewhere.

Then another whine sounded, and another. Amy put the dishrag aside and reached for a towel to dry her hands.

Voices were calling back and forth out there; Amy tossed the towel on the counter and crossed to the window. She hesitated, then lifted the curtain and peered out.

There were a dozen men in purple uniforms out there, and three matching purple-and-gold aircars-or vehicles, anyway; they didn’t look much like ordinary aircars. One of the vehicles had landed beside Walter’s aircar, half on the gravel and half on the grass; the other two had set down on the corn, flattening it. The men had blasters drawn.