Bob and the Oxygen Wars

by Connector Waves Forest

The SubGenius boasts about Time Control always sound like a bunch of tall tales, until you get a first-hand taste of the High Volt Age.

One of “Bob’s” Friends from the Future just clued me in, partway at least, and my scrambled synapses still haven’t settled. How do I apply some of these crazy new ideas in time to help prevent or at least personally survive you-know-what?

Sometimes it seems like your luck has to balance out somehow, where you have to undergo a total bummer to set you up for something great you’d never have run into otherwise.

I was hoping this would be one of those times. A blown head gasket on an empty desert highway should be worth some sort of break to even things out, preferably before the sun melted me into the asphalt.

But so far all I was getting was a new and deeper appreciation of the word barren. Even the occasional scragglebush looked like it really resented being here, and wasn’t about to put any more than the bare minimum of survival effort into it.

So much for shortcuts. I’d been walking for three hours and had seen only one car. The expressions glimpsed on the flyby were of dull surprise that anyone would even try to hitch a ride in this time and place-a feeling I could appreciate.

It was getting rather obvious that years of city life had left me in Pitiful shape. Only a few hours out in a hot but otherwise ordinary American desert and I was nearly wiped out already.

This was no longer just a matter of missing a long-shot job interview that might have helped me postpone lifting anything heavier than a paintbrush a little while longer. It was starting to look like all my stubborn resistance to changing times had caught up with me. When their basic survival necessities get threatened, most folks’ interest in “art” evaporates quicker than piss on a desert bush, which got the unpleasant surprise of discovering that it could get even more resentful than it already was.

Shortly after that so did I. My crude pack of stuff salvaged from the car got its fill of bouncing and bellyaching, split open and scattered feeble expressions of American “culture” across the gravel. How appropriate. The phrase “World Without Slack” kept taking on new and more exasperating significance.

While I was crouching there, telling various inanimate objects how stupid they were and patching the pack by tying my shirt around it, all my arm and neck hairs suddenly stood up.

I turned around, and there was the smoothest-looking sports car I’ve ever seen, standing with the passenger door open. Instant floods of relief struggled with major danger signals for control of my legs. There was no way I could have missed seeing that car miles ahead of its arrival. I’d been looking back a lot oftener than any logical expectations could justify. And even with all the smog that’s crept into the desert basins, visibility was still at least twenty miles, on a road going straight over the horizon.

The desperate craving for shade won out. Dehydration makes me capable of superhuman rationalizations. The car was actually the same shimmery color as the road, and might have been mistaken for part of the constant mirage. The motor was too quiet to be heard over the mild desert wind-which, rather than cooling me off, tended to produce a slight blowtorch effect.

And anyway, how could something so beautiful be dangerous? Its curve was completely different yet thoroughly appropriate. The interior was a deep moss green, and a cool ocean breeze seemed to be flowing from inside it. This car was definitely not made in Detroit.

As I stepped up to the open door I could see that the kid at the wheel looked harmless enough-scrawny, and unarmed unless his swimming trunks had a secret compartment, or the car itself was one big weapon. I collapsed into the strange green upholstery and pulled the door shut. The sound reminded me slightly of a submarine hatch closing.

“Thanks,” I rasped. “That was getting embarrassing.”

The kid just smiled and floored it. We went from zero to about one-ten in seven seconds, with no gear changes that I could detect. The bucket seat yielded in all the right places, but I immediately discovered there were no seat belts. And all I could figure was that he must have some really ultimate soundproofing, because I could hardly hear any engine noise. There was just sort of a deep muffled pounding whoosh, like a distant waterfall.

“What kind of car is this?”

“You sound awful. Here, soak those vocal cords before you break something. Unless you’re trying for a New Sound, maybe.”

I seized the water jug, closed my eyes and swallowed until I had to stop for air. Then I sat there gasping and trying to identify some of the extra stuff in the car’s instrument cluster. What little I thought I could recognize made no sense at all, so I looked at the driver instead.

He didn’t seem to make sense either. For one thing, he was soaked, not from sweat but as if he’d just been swimming five minutes ago. He looked quite cool and comfortable, and smelled like seawater-of which the nearest had to be a couple hundred miles away.

Also, he didn’t entirely look like a kid, up close. The face was maybe nineteen, but the eyes seemed much too confident and experienced. Though he looked thin, the muscle definition was unusually sharp. And his hands and feet looked like they’d seen at least thirty years of heavy work, and were up for plenty more whenever.

I acted mildly unastounded by our speed and silence and took another shot at conversation. “You’re probably wondering how I came to be stuck out here.”

“Not really.”

Normally I’d expect to be annoyed at such indifference to human suffering, especially mine, but he was so matter-of-fact about it.

He added, “One dead car, three hours cold, and one overheated hitchhiker two hours’ walk past it. Nothing else around for miles. Fairly short list of possible explanations, eh?”

In these irritating times that sort of statement might be considered as a mild put-down, especially from a strange and evidently well-financed teenager. But here it came across perfectly straightforward. I credited my extra tolerance to the relief of getting out from under the sun, and to the water’s invigorating aftertaste.

“What’s in this stuff?”

“A few trace minerals, some North Pole magnetism and extra oxygen.”

My stomach started feeling rather odd. “How do you get magnetism into water?”

“Put the north face of a large, flat magnet against it for a while. Makes it more able to hold things in solution. Don’t use the south face unless the water’s for plants.”

“Uh, just how much stuff is in solution here?”

“Very little. It’s mostly to help it dissolve and carry out unnecessary stuff from whoever’s drinking it.”

I had to admit that sounded like a good idea. Depending of course on who was defining “unnecessary,” and for what.

He took a giant swallow off the jug so I let it slide, then remembered something else. “How could you tell my car was three hours cold?” “Infrared. Comes in handy when you drive at night a lot.”

I was trying hard not to goggle at the instrument panel, but it was rather spooky. There were pressure and temperature gauges: internal, external and somewhere else. There were high-voltage dials, gas-mixture indicators, gauges for magnetic and gravitational field intensities, a ship’s floating compass, little radar and sonar screens, dials I couldn’t identify at all, and some sort of range finder.

But there was no fuel gauge anywhere. Also, the speedometer had no numbers on it, just colors, and the needle was shockingly low on the dial. Unless it read backwards, it was meant to be able to register speeds many times higher than what we were doing. If that wasn’t weird enough, there was an altimeter, next to a depth gauge.

Looking at all this stuff, I didn’t know whether to laugh or try to escape. A lot of it appeared to have been salvaged from other vehicles. Most of the controls were touch-sensitive patches behind the same clear shield that covered all the gauges. What should have been a gearshift obviously wasn’t, since he hadn’t touched it yet. There were extra knobs branching off it, and what looked like backhoe levers beside it. There were also several small video screens, all empty.

Seen against all this, the faded “Bob” sticker on the glove compartment was rather reassuring. I’d met lots of SubGeniusesi and while most were pretty peculiar, none seemed to be actually dangerous to me so far.

Just over the windscreen was a full-length detailed chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, with tiny indicator lights along the whole thing, including an extra upper section I’d never seen. Strangest of all, sprouting from among the gauges were nine different clock faces with little dagger-shaped joysticks poking out of them.

My stomach suddenly felt very peculiar, and I involuntarily shook like a wet dog for an instant, then let out a tremendous belch. Just as suddenly I felt all right, better than I had all day.

“What the heck was that?”

“You just clobbered the anaerobic germs in your stomach, and also boosted your oxygen saturation a bit.”

“Huh?”

“You have a severe oxygen deficiency, like most people in this time period. Due to pollution and deforestation, right now your atmospheric oxygen levels are at an all-time low, so the oxygen pressure in your blood is insufficient to guard you against oxygen-hating microbes. You become slightly stagnant, and serve as a growth medium for anaerobic parasites. But all pathogens are inherently much weaker than your own cells, which are a lot more highly evolved than viruses, bacteria, fungus and such. So you can always get rid of them by just raising your internal oxygen concentration above what they can stand.”

I was still working on the first part. “I’ve heard of all kinds of nutrient deficiencies, but oxygen?”

“Your body’s supposed to be at least eighty percent water, which is eight-ninths oxygen.”

“Wait a minute, water is two hydrogens for each oxygen, right?” I was not exactly a chemistry whiz.

“Yeah, but the oxygen atom is sixteen times bigger, remember?” I hadn’t. “You’re supposed to be composed of over two-thirds oxygen, twice as much as everything else in you combined. The bigger a proportion of something in a formula, the more margin there is in the high to low range of how much you can put in and still make that formula work. That also applies to the formula for an organism.

“So you can see how a person could exist anywhere along a wide range of oxygen saturation that can support his cells, though the lower levels are not much fun. But people can still function, more or less, even at oxygen percentages so low that anaerobic microbes can inhabit them quite comfortably.”

“Well, how can you tell if your oxygen level is high enough?”

“If you get sick, it isn’t.”

“But everyone gets sick sometimes.”

“Everyone you know about. You’re all oxygen-starved, that’s all.”

I considered this while watching the desert race by. I was strangely reluctant to ask how we managed to hurdle over this beat-up old highway without feeling any real bumps or vibrations. Instead I asked, “Well, doesn’t the encyclopedia still say oxygen makes up twenty-one percent of our atmosphere?”

“Have you measured it yourself lately? They haven’t. They just keep printing the same figures from earlier editions.”

“So what level is it at?”

“Depends where you measure it. In a healthy rain forest it can still get up over twenty percent. But most large cities have very few trees and lots of carbon monoxide, which, being electrically unstable, gobbles up free oxygen like crazy, to become carbon dioxide, which is more stable. In those cities it gets down to twelve percent or less at times. In Eastern Europe, with the whole Westem world’s pollution blowing at them, even wooded areas can drop below fifteen percent. Entire forests are dying there. For humans, suffocation occurs at around seven percent.”

“You mean the cities are already more than halfway to suffocating?” “Right. What do you think causes early heart attacks, crib deaths and crashed immune systems? Very little of that happening in mountain villages. A mammal’s immune system uses lots of single-atom oxygen in knocking oft germs, and carries it around in H2O 2. That’s because singlet oxygen itself is so reactive it only stays loose for maybe a millionth of a second before oxidizing the nearest appropriate molecule. You should be internally producing and using several quarts of H2O 2 every day, but you can’t if there’s not enough oxygen available from your air.”

A little of this was coming back now. “H2O 2? You mean hydrogen peroxide?”

“Yeah, oxygen water. The tiny amount in what you drank oxidized the pathogens in your stomach.”

“That stuff they sell in brown bottles?” Yucko.

“No, the pure food-grade kind, thirty-five percent, which can hurt you if you don’t dilute it enough. Lots of health-food stores carry it now. -The drugstore variety has chemical stabilizers in it. Okay to put a little on a wound, but not much else.”

“Stabilizers?”

“Supposedly to keep the oxygen from escaping, but it’s really more stable than they let on. Mainly it’s so no one will use enough of it all at once to get rid of a major disease that should’ve netted some hospital at least twenty grand.”

“What? Which diseases can you get rid of with it?”

“All of them. But oxygen water is too simple and cheap to draw any commercial interest. Unpatentable.”

“What do you mean, all of them?”

“Like I said, all disease organisms prefer much lower oxygen saturations than what your cells function best at. Their primitive, fragile membranes break down at concentrations a healthy human cell merely finds invigorating. You need it constantly; oxygen’s the only thing you can die in minutes without. Get enough and it protects you from disease.”

“What about cancer?”

“Especially cancer. It’s anaerobic; high oxygen levels kill it pretty fast. Otto Warburg won a Nobel Prize back in the 1930s for pointing that out, but your medical establishment has ignored the principle since then. Too unprofitable. Cancer cells get energy from glucose by fermentation instead of by oxidizing it like normal cells. This wastes so much energy that the healthy cells can’t get enough to function and the cancer squeezes them out, unless you intervene by raising the oxygen level one way or another.”

I thought of a couple of friends who should be hearing this. My growing exhilaration wasn’t just from watching the now-painless desert zooming past. “Why isn’t this all written up somewhere?”

“It is, it’s just unpublicized. Hundreds of physicians have independently reported curing all kinds of supposedly incurable diseases by raising the patient’s oxygen saturation, whether with intravenous H2O 2 , ozone blood infusions, taheebo or hyperbaric oxygen tanks, all of which simply raise the level of H2O 2 in the blood. But the way of modern science is to disregard any facts that don’t fit the accepted lucrative theory. And disease is a multibillion-dollar industry, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“For someone so young, you are well informed but awfully cynical.”

He chuckled lightly. “Just how old do you think I am?”

I was spared the embarrassment of guessing completely wrong by a small interruption. A kamikaze jackrabbit apparently decided we were its ticket out of this desert and maybe out of rabbithood, and scooted right in front of us. The kid’s hand twisted part of the steering wheel like a motorcycle throttle, and the whole car smoothly lifted a couple of feet then dropped back to the road. I turned and glimpsed a surprisingly complicated expression on the receding rabbit.

“Would you mind telling me where this car was made?”

“Detroit, mostly.”

“Uh, Detroit in Michigan?”

“Where else?”

I really wasn’t holding up my end of the discussion very well. But I was still determined to at least be too cool to ask why he was dripping wet in an air-conditioned car ninety miles from any water.

That was another thing I realized just then: The air conditioning was supreme. Instead of the usual dry, synthetic-tasting car air, this air was cool, moist, and invigorating, like the air near a waterfall. The roasted landscape whizzing by, and the relentless sun beating down all around, might as well have been on a movie screen for all the elect they had on us.

I tried a different approach. “Is your air conditioner a custom job as well?”

“Actually it’s fairly standard at this car’s point of origin. Nice, eh? The extra moisture, oxygen and negative ions make it pretty close to the optimum breathing mix for humans.”

I spotted the inside air-mix gauge. “Thirty percent oxygen? Isn’t that supposed to be twenty-one?”

“Just because it was twenty-one when the encyclopedias first came out doesn’t mean that’s optimum. Desertification of Earth has been going on a long time, though the current rate is unprecedented. Remember hearing about those scientists who measured the air mix in bubbles trapped in fossilized amber? It tested out around this high. Those samples were trapped about the time the mammals took over. Not much tree-cutting or gas-burning going on back then, and the plant-animal ratio was ideal. Under those conditions eventually humans appeared, designed to operate at that oxygen percentage.”

“So it’s dropped by a third since then?”

“It’s had lots of help. Currently the manufacture and operation of your machinery consumes eighteen times the oxygen you use up through breathing. That’s the equivalent of another ninety billion people standing around sharing your air, all so someone can keep selling oil and cars and such. Talk about wasteful, it works out that driving twenty thousand miles uses up as much oxygen as breathing for two years.”

“Folks do have a right to travel, though.”

“Absolutely, but there are much cleaner, cheaper and safer methods, ready and waiting, still as effective as back when they were invented and neglected. Same with oxygen as a healing principle. It’s an ancient concept, appearing in various forms throughout history, but you all need it now more than ever. It stands to reason that if your body contains over three times the percentage of oxygen that’s in the air, it has to work a lot harder at concentrating whatever it extracts through breathing when the atmospheric oxygen level drops. So supplementing it with oxywater or other high-oxygen substances becomes the most logical short-term solution.”

“How about long-term?”

“Re-establish a healthy global oxygen production-consumption balance, if you’re up to the task. It can be done, though the situation may need to get even worse before enough folks get their priorities straight. Like a lot of things, oxygen is taken for panted, but since it is so reactive, I+ee oxygen has to constantly be replenished or it all gets bound up in other compounds. Keep trashing your forests and your oceans’ phytoplankton, and you’ll all be gasping long before X-Day.” “Oh yeah, when’s that again?”

“Soon enough that you’d better get cracking. It’ll be hard enough as it is, trying to mobilize a bunch of oxygen-starved Normals, and the longer you wait the more sick and tired and useless they”‘ become.” I had a sudden flash. “Is this why people were supposedly stronger and lived longer in early Biblical times?”

“Precisely. Though by then there was already some atmospheric damage from earlier civilizations.”

“What, like Atlantis?”

“Among others. Many civilizations go through a brief deforestation and fossil-fuel-burning stage, but this one has been artificially retarded and kept there for over a century.”

“By whom?”

“When you find the answer to that question, you will then know what to do about it.”

“Some reason you can’t just tell me?”

“At this point you’d never believe it, and that would interfere with your grasping certain other necessary facts first.”

I made a disrespectful noise. “You sound just like my old college professor, Mr. McSploont.”

“How clever of him. What’d he teach?”

“Disregard for college professors, mostly. I expect he eventually melted down in the white heat of his own brilliance.”

He smiled a knowing smile that wasn’t smug or imitating, but rather a bit frightening, hinting at vast hard-won experience.

“So besides being physically less healthy overall, noticed anything else wrong with city folks?” he asked quietly.

“You name it, they’ve screwed it up. Basically most of them just act unbelievably lame, and tolerate the most absurd stuff you can imagine. There’s some exceptions, but I mean, like, have you switched on a TV set lately?”

He casually touched part of the spectrum chart overhead. One screen lit up with a retina-wrenching ten-second montage of about ninety different TV channels, then he switched it off. “Yup, pretty pitiful.”

I was staring at the blank screen. “Uh, well, yeah, there you are.”

“So what do you reckon makes them act like that?”

“Beats me.” It was reassuring to refer to “them” as if I had rarely lived in a city. “It’s like they’re all brain-damaged. Which is a real drag, considering that’s where all the governments are located . . . hey, wait a minute.”

He grinned. “Exactly. What happens to a brain that gets oxygen-starved?” Mine seemed to be slipping gears a bit. “It goes to that big scrap bucket in the sky, eventually. But continuous gradual oxygen starvation, over a period of years…” I had to admit this could explain an awful lot of modern human behavior. “Earlier you implied all this was somehow deliberate. Does someone actually want people brain-damaged and stupid?”

“Did you attend a public school? Do you follow the so-called news? Have you browsed through a pharmacy recently?”

“Well, okay, but aren’t most of the guys behind all that living right there in the cities too?”

“The most powerful ones all have their own remote strongholds, and can afford to have many others fronting for them. A good rule of thumb is, if someone’s in the news, that person’s not actually running things. And hired help are seldom in on the big picture, or the purpose of their assigned tasks.”

We reached the crest of a long, low rise and started down the other side. There was a slight bend ahead, with another road feeding in from the south, all of which seemed a lot more interesting than it really was, due to following so many miles of straightness. At the very edge of visibility it looked like there was a little town. It struck me that I had one hell of a lot of unasked questions still, and for all I knew this could be his destination coming up.

I took a wild guess. “Since you’re not a big fan of air pollution, I assume this car is electrical, somehow.”

“You could say that. It has more than one system, but the motor we’re using at the moment is a variation on the Noble Gas Plasma Engine invented by Joseph Papp in the early seventies. Of course, since it’s cheap and fuelless it was never allowed to be commercially developed.” “Of course. How does it manage to be fuelless with gas plasma?”

“Noble gases. They’re inert; with their outer electron shells already full, they’ve got no incentive to hook up with other atoms. So they aren’t being burned or broken down, just induced to expand repeatedly. Put a certain Inix of noble gases in a sealed cylinder with a piston, spark it and pulse a magnetic field around it, and the gases repel each other quite fiercely for an instant, then collapse back to their previous state, to be sparked again. The energy delivered by the piston’s displacement greatly exceeds that required to spark the gases, providing a net excess from a self-powering system.”

“Are you saying this thing is a perpetual Inotion machine?”

“We’re living on the surface of a great big perpetual motion machine and composed of godzillions of little tiny ones, so shouldn’t they be able to exist on our scale as well?”

“Well, those things’ll all wind down eventually, right?”

“They’ll run long enough for whatever you plan on doing with them. Anyhow, this design is somewhat less than perpetual; every hundred thousand miles or so the gases lose their elasticity and need to be replaced.”

“Sounds pretty tough.”

“Sure beats making your whole lower atmosphere taste like a monoxide suicide’s garage.”

“Couldn’t we retrofit existing car engines to run off this?”

“Simpler to start from scratch, but maybe. Seal off the valves, throw away the carburetor, fuel lines, exhaust manifold and so forth, evacuate the cylinders and let in the inert gas mix. It’d become two-stroke, since there’s nothing for it to suck in or exhaust.”

“So this gas is some combination of helium, neon, argon, krypton and xenon?” I was amazed I could still remember their names. “I suppose the exact mixture is privileged information.”

“Technically, but it’s locatable. The inventor’s still alive, last we heard, but understandably rather frustrated. It’s always disillusioning to work out a practical solution for. some major problem, only to find out there’s someone profiting hugely by keeping the problem just the way it is.”

For some reason I didn’t resist this notion as much as I usually would, even though it implied my having to eventually help do something about it. But at the moment what I really wanted was details. “Where could I find diagrams and such? I’m no engineer but I know a couple. While we’re at it, how’s that gearless transmission work? And what was that hopping trick? I’m assuming you’d like others to pick up on these inventions.”

“Naturally. The drive gear consists of long cones pointing in opposite directions, with a heavy triangular belt that slides along them, giving a smoothly variable ratio between their cross sections. Again, it’s not a new idea, but it had anti-commercial potential, being much too efficient and durable, so no way was any major automaker going to retool for that.”

“I’d think the first to do it would make a fortune. Who wouldn’t want one?”

“You’re kidding, right? At first, sure they would, but then that’d be the end of selling replacement transmissions, and cost billions in lost engine sales and repairs, From the greatly reduced wear. Plus billions more in lowered gasoline consumption, due to improved efficiency. As for the rest of it, remind me to give you a few patent numbers and such before you get off.”

It occurred to me that during all this I still hadn’t asked how far he was going. Wherever it was, we’d be arriving a lot sooner than expected.

There was a billboard, of all things, about four miles ahead of us. Mr. Science touched something under one of the video screens and it gave us a zoom picture of the road ahead. He reached up and pushed a spot just below the visible-light band on the spectrum chart, and a little car-shaped pink spot with a bright center appeared on the screen at the bottom of the billboard.

“Nice of ’em to build that feller some shade. Though I doubt he’s been there long.”

“Well, don’t you think you should slow down a bit?”

He shook his head. “My, aren’t you well-conditioned. Don’t sweat it; this car’s not under any local jurisdictions.”

While I considered my response, trying to choose between sounding real law-abiding and getting some clarification, we zipped past the billboard. He touched a spot on the radio portion of the spectrum, just as a very dusty police car lurched out after us in a cloud of gravel.

“Got a live one, Charlie,” buzzed a small speaker in the dash. “No plates, too fast to get the make. At least one-twenty.”

“Want me to come on out?” A fainter voice, younger.

“May need you for a roadblock, so stand by. Let’s see if this new engine is as good as Clyde says.”

We were already nearly a mile past him but now we could hear a faint siren, slowly getting louder. We slowed down slightly, a move which sort of seemed at cross-purposes with rocketing past a sheriff in the first place. My ever-unpredictable benefactor hit a button under the speaker and said, “Are you attempting to get my attention, officer?”

There was a brief spluttering noise, then a few clenched words. “Smart boy, huh? Pull your fancy self over, before I get irritated.”

“That shouldn’t be necessary. I can easily answer your questions in this manner, without being late for my destination.”

“You think this is open for discussion? Identify yourself.”

“Changesmith. Or CS, whichever. Who’s this?”

“Officer Harry Scrotum. You have about five seconds to pull off of my highway.”

“I see,” said CS sympathetically. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“Are you nuts? Reckless endangerment, doing twice the limit, unauthorized use of police bands, no plates; hell, I expect your fine’ll buy us a whole new station. You’re even hauling drugs for all I know.”

CS smiled questioningly at me and I shook my head. “Nope,” he said. “And no one uses them where I’m from.”

“Drugs?”

“License plates.”

There was a strained silence. He evidently was not up for pursuing the implications of that. We were now less than a quarter-mile ahead of the sheriff’s car, which was still creeping closer, apparently at its top speed.

Changesmith added helpfully, “If our velocity is causing concern, be reassured that this vehicle is crash-proof and does not threaten the safety of local traffic, should there happen to be any.”

There was a heavy sigh. “Charlie, get that block up, now. Don’t use any working vehicles; drag over some dunkers from Philo’s lot.

“And as for you, snakebrain, consider yourself warned. This is your last chance to pull over in one piece.”

“Sorry to disturb your programming, but it’s a mistake to assume that everything that moves through your area is subject to your rules and limitations.”

“That’s it, pal, your death wish is granted.”

A sudden shimmy from the left hind wheel was followed by the faint sound of two gunshots. Changesmith touched a panel on the dash and a small sign lit up that said GUNJAMUER, then he accelerated us a bit. The shimmy grew more pronounced, then there was a loud clank and it stopped entirely.

No flat tire, and no more gunfire that I could hear. I looked back to see a pistol being violently shaken out the cop’s window, accompanied by some general-purpose curses coming over the speaker.

CS said, “Sorry, but we couldn’t chance a ricochet hitting someone in your town up ahead,” and switched off the speaker.

“What’d you do?” I asked.

“Ever hear of a subject. known as sonochemistry? Production of chemical changes with sound waves? This is related; we’re broadcasting a simulation of the wave pattem that occurs when water blocks the oxidizing spaces in gunpowder. Since matter is junior to energy, many effects can be induced on the physical level simply by emitting the kinds of vibrations which accompany and direct them.”

“Now that I like. How wide an area is affected?”

“The range varies with the power and circuit design. At the moment, no one can shoot anybody within about twelve miles of us.”

“Well, all right! Does it interfere at all with organic oxidation?”

“Good question, but no; cellular processes are all much less explosive. Different frequencies altogether.”

“Couldn’t someone just mass-produce these things, hide them all over the world, and stop wars and murders once and for all?”

“With enough time and materials, yes. Appealing idea, isn’t it? Like taking matches away from children.”

I thought about it. “On the other hand, I suppose the more extreme gun lovers would all come after you with crossbows, until it sunk in that now they’d be protected as well. You’d have to be pretty discreet.”

He zoomed the picture on the screen a bit more, and the rusty town became quite visible, complete with roadblock. The crew that was pushing it together seemed to be engaged in a lively argument with some old desert rat over one of the cars they’d included.

CS chuckled and switched the speaker back on. “How’s your engine holding up?”

“Oh, so you’re back, eh? I see we can add Giving False Names to the list of charges.”

“Not at all. That is indeed my usual designation.”

“You mean you don’t even have a license, on top of everything else?”

Apparently neither of them considered it tasteful to mention the brief shooting incident. “Did you punch it in under Change or Smith?”

The speaker was silent for a moment, then Harry came on again, his voice containing a curious blend of triumph, respect, bravado and near-panic. “Let me guess. That thing you’re driving is some sort of a stolen Pentagon experiment, right?”

“If so it’d be the most intelligent expenditure they ever made. But no, it was assembled entirely by unarmed forces.”

“Well, either way, it might interest you to know that this here computer advises capturing and/or killing you with extremely hasty prejudice, in the urgent interests of national security.”

“How thoughtful of it. You’d be awfully disappointed to leam exactly whose interests are now considered to be a matter of national security.”

“Do I sound like the kind of character who goes around second-guessing the government? Look, it doesn’t matter to me if you crash and burn at the roadblock, or among the boulders and ravines around the town, in case you were figuring on leaving the road. But since we’ll miss out on your nice big fine, tell me something first: I know I saw the second shot hit your tire, so what’s the deal? Tire armor or something?”

“Actually, why aren’t we leaving the road?” I asked softly. “Is that trick only good for little hops?”

“He’d have to try and follow us, and I don’t want to be responsible for him racking up his car and possibly himself.” He added in a louder voice, “The tire’s full of a type of semisolid high-pressure sorbothane foam, which hardens to a tough elastic crust on contact with air. Anything causing a puncture gets forced out through the surface by the internal pressure and centrifugal force, then the opening seals itself. Makes a flat tire impossible.” He sounded awfully calm, for someone who was closing in at high speed on a barrier of old cars, and wanted by federal agents besides.

There was another brief silence. The screen was reducing its zoom as we neared the town, holding the image at a constant size. It showed the roadblock crew and a few dozen spectators scrambling back from the impending impact zone, everyone but the old-timer who appeared to be trying to start one of the cars.

Harry spoke up again. “If that’s true, how come I never heard of that stuff before?”

“Ask the chief executives of your tire companies. It’s in their files.”

Right when I was sure this couldn’t get any more complicated, another small speaker spoke up, with a completely different voice. “CS, there’s some action about sixty leagues north of you.”

“How bad?”

“Just heating up, max it but stay low.”

“No kidding.”

“And watch for monitors.”

“Whose?”

“Anyone’s.”

“Okay, Xandy.”

By now I was just about ready for what happened next. He pulled back hard on the wheel and the steering column stretched toward him. The road, roadblock, desert and town suddenly dropped away under us and shrank with its collective jaw hanging open. I looked down and back at all the little upturned astounded faces and laughed like an idiot, despite the fact that my gonads were trying to crawl behind each other.

The engine’s faint whooshing sound didn’t get much louder, but now it had a kind of underwater ringing quality.

“Real professional,” remarked the speaker. “Maybe you could hold a seminar on how to keep a low profile, when you get back.”

“Oh, hush. They’ll probably be too embarrassed to even report it.”

“You think anyone can run a check on your name without triggering a follow-up inquiry as to why?”

“Fret not; he can’t tell them anything they don’t already know, and by the time they respond we’ll be extremely elsewhere.”

As we tilted north and leveled out at less than a thousand feet, I wondered why I wasn’t more disturbed at being, for all practical purposes, kidnapped by a UFO. Getting nowhere with that, I started wondering why I wasn’t being flattened into the seat by our steep ascent, unable to turn my head like this without extreme and possibly terminal discomfort. Some sort of high-tech shenanigans were keeping my weight from being affected by these abrupt speed and direction changes. “So, you can even get away with breaking the laws of inertia?”

“Not exactly, but there are conditions under which they don’t apply.

Those equations only described mechanical interactions at the low electrical intensities familiar at that time. At high enough voltages a local electrogravitational field can override the surrounding gravity well, and suspend inertia within the field.”

I recalled my arm-hair reaction when the car first got near me. “How high a voltage?”

“Millions, but the current is so low it’s practically a static charge. You also need to know what frequency to pulsate it, among other things.”

The speaker switched itself on again, a different voice with more background hiss. “Try and stick to the information already available there and then.”

CS ignored my startled look. “All this can easily be dug up through the scientific underground here. Like, the Biefield-Brown effect is already sixty years old, and it’s been written up all over the place.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” I said, in a tone intended to encourage generosity with details.

He looked straight into my right eye. “Do you ever seek out information through any sources which are not approved and controlled by some tentacle of the Conspiracy?”

I squirmed a little. “Probably not. It’s all just so . . . available.”

“So even though you know they’re a pack of liars, you still get all your news from their broadcasts and publications?”

“All right, so where do I find out who’s got the real scoop?”

“Depends on what you want to know and if you really want to know it. But one way is, the most honest sources seldom seem to have much money, or charge much for their reports. Nor do they tend to get much coverage in any media owned by anyone with economic interests that could be harmed by such information getting out.”

“Could you please just tell me how we manage to fly with no wings, propellers or jets?”

“Have you ever noticed what happens when you hang a charged condenser on a thread or a balance beam?”

“Can’t say as I have. You mean a capacitor, right? An insulator between two conductive surfaces for storing charge?”

“Same difference. It can be any shape as long as its poles are at opposite ends, and it holds a substantial charge. Try it and you’ll see it try to move in the direction of its positive pole. Hang it on a scale with the positive pole up and it’ll get lighter. Shape the charged surfaces properly, put a huge positive charge on the leading edge, pulsed at a high enough frequency, and you can make that sucker fly.”

“Let me get this straight. Right now the hull of this thing is carrying umpteen million volts, and we are sitting inside of a humongous capacitor? Why aren’t we electrocuted, or did I just miss it in all the excitement?”

“The frequency’s toe high to bother our cells, and we’re insulated from it anyhow. See, the condenser is the linking device between electricity and gravity, like the coil is between electricity and magnetism.

“We’re riding on a temporary artificial gravity hump, sliding down it continuously like a surfboard on a wave, and carrying it along with us. In different terms, we’re putting electrical stress on the local fabric of space, which tries to correct or balance it out by drawing us forward into the slight relative vacuum we’re creating in the space-juice ahead of us. This here’s the simplest version of the most widely used transportation method in this arm of the galaxy.”

“Watch it,” from the speaker again.

“What is this?” I yelped. “You got someone monitoring us?”

“Yeah, we always leave the line open. If anything happens they can learn a lot from the final transmission.”

“WHAT??”

“Oh, relax, would you? Here, put some of this on your arms and legs, while you’re sitting there gawking.” He offered me a clear plastic squeeze bottle of what looked like water.

“What is it?” I had a lot to gawk at, with the desert tearing by right under us. This guy was crossing jet speeds with hang-glider altitudes, and it tended to keep the adrenaline pumping quite briskly. “And what’s the anything that might happen?”

“A lot less than you were subject to back where I found you, so settle down and enjoy the heightened sensory input. This is three percent oxywater; you can absorb it through your skin.” He splashed some on his chest and rubbed it in, then handed me the bottle.

“What will it do?”

“Weren’t you listening earlier? Try it and see.”

I smeared a bit on my arm and it felt just like water, so I went ahead and did both my arms, my legs and my chest. It was actually rather soothing somehow.

While I was rubbing it in I suddenly remembered why we were up here. “What’d that mean earlier, some action up north?”

“We have to go put out a forest fire.”

Now I was really amazed. “When did the forest service get this sort of funding?”

“Dream on. This is an independent action; all the regular firefighters are already tied up at other zones closer to populated areas.”

That much I could believe; I’d recently heard the fire season was in full swing out here. I started to hand back the bottle.

“Put a little on your neck and behind your ears; it’II get into your cranial blood more quickly.”

I did so and smelled something rather pungent, then realized it was my own arm. I smelled the bottle and it was completely odorless, so I put my forearm up to my nose and sniffed, and it smelled like a locker room with smoke damage. “What gives?”

“H 2O 2 enhances membrane transport, among other things. Your pores just expelled most of their accumulated toxins to the surface of your skin. They were there in you all along, but now you can smell them. The oxygen goes in and the garbage comes out. Here, use this.” He pulled a wet towel out from under his seat and gave it to me.

Parts of my skin were starting to itch slightly, so I vigorously rubbed everything off with the towel, while noticing that I felt more alert and clearheaded than a minute ago. It was-subtle and totally undruglike, as if it were a notch closer to the way I was actually supposed to feel normally.

“Does that improve things?” he asked.

“Yes, actually, though I can’t explain just how.” I figured I’d better try to get a clearer picture of my exact situation here, without seeming too obvious. “So now I’m germ-free, simple as that?”

“Hardly. You are absolutely riddled with anaerobic opportunists. But they’ve gotten the message, the party’s over.”

Apparently even fewer things were under my control than I thought. “Are they likely to be upset?”

“You better believe it. And their death struggles can be most uncomfortable to be around. You just don’t back down once the battle’s joined, that’s all.”

“I suppose it’s too late to re-establish a truce?”

He looked at me and was no longer smiling. “It’s way past too late. Any truce with them is on their terms, and they know a lot more about you than you do about them. For them you are a walking food supply, among other things, but you have no idea what they really represent.”

My spine literally tingled at that, but I said, “How can you attribute intelligent behavior to a bunch of bacteria and viruses?”

“Individually they aren’t very bright, but neither are your cells. When vast numbers of them get together, that’s another story. You’ve heard of colonial organisms like beehives and army ants?”

“But germs are so tiny.”

“Lots of your cells aren’t much bigger. But enough microorganisms all working together can collectively act as a much larger intelligent life-form, such as you presumably exemplify.”

“Look, those disease microbes aren’t even physically connected.”

“Neither are army ants, but they still manage to stomp the daylights out of anything that gets in their way. Since they’re genetically identical, their DNA coils all oscillate at exactly the same set of frequencies; being on the same wavelength gives them telepathic linkage.”

“Well, maybe, but ants at least have some sort of rudimentary brains to be telepathic with; germs do not.”

“Your individual cells have no brains as such, and they sure wouldn’t last long on their own, but when enough of them team up, they’re a critter to be reckoned with.”

I started getting a weird flashback from something I occasionally experienced during my mushroom days. It involved becoming somehow slightly aware on the cellular level, and it contained a sense of high drama that always made me feel vaguely guilty. Here were all these fearless hordes of cells, putting everything they had into keeping this body going, working nonstop, every moment of their brief lives, all so I could … do what? I was never able to think of an activity I could engage in that would be truly worthy of all that selfless cellular effort, so I sheepishly buried the vision under more normal memories.

Now it was back, and I remembered something else about it, some additional vague presence I had never felt like examining closely, and always forgot about as quickly as possible. There was something else in there that wasn’t part of me or my cells. It felt cold, silent, disinterested, and very, very old. Now for the first time I actually tried to wrap my wits around it, and I got the distinct impression it was not pleased with me.

But there was nothing in the way of a personality to relate to. It felt like a minor part of something much bigger, patiently engaged in some vast operation that spanned millions of years. Most disturbing of all was the definite feeling that this huge project was nearing completion. “Did you find your answer?” Changesmith’s quiet voice brought the “real world” back to center stage, while the microdrama faded. The landscape streaming past was a lot more jagged now, and had picked up a few Joshua trees.

“Answer?”

“Earlier you asked, in effect, who is really behind the Conspiracy. The question to consider is: Who ultimately benefits the most from the overall effects of the things the Conspiracy does, or forces others to do?” “That’s what’s always been so maddening. I just can’t figure someone being both brilliant enough to pull off all these amazing scams, and stupid enough not to be able to foresee the disastrous consequences. It makes no sense that they’d try so hard to gain control of the whole planet, just to destroy it in the process. Especially if, as you say, they know about and choose to suppress alternative technologies that could head off eco-disasters altogether.”

“What does that leave?”

I looked at the increasingly rocky scenery and thought about it. My sense of urgency was heightened considerably by the way CS seemed to just barely avoid the taller granite formations rushing past us.

“I guess whoever they are, either they’re as suicidally psychotic as they are diabolically clever, or they’ve arranged someplace else to go after they’ve trashed the Earth.” I let out a deep sigh. “Or they aren’t even human at all and they have some totally different set of priorities.”

He smiled grimly. “Or some combination of all three. So, since we’re assuming the Conspiracy is smart enough to be actually accomplishing its goals, and since the overall effect of all the Conspiracy’s actions is to eventually ruin this planet’s oxygen cover and render it uninhabitable for humans and other higher life-forms, apparently that must be one of their actual goals. Who might possibly desire such a thing?”

“Lower life-forms, right?” Something in me felt it might be true, and something else was fiercely denying it. “Are you saying that all the activities of modern civilization are ultimately aimed at serving the interests of a bunch of germs? The heads of the Conspiracy are actually microbes? Who’s going to believe that?”

“All the most successful conspiracies have been so outlandish they were impossible for anyone to believe, until it was too late. And nor none of our truly civilized activities serve them, only our ecology-wrecking ones. The germs may be merely a physical extension of something bigger and uglier that exists mostly on a different plane, feeding on death-energy- And humans themselves are actually making most of the decisions, but they are unaware of the neurological influences of the anaerobic entities hiding among their cells.”

“A gang of viruses has stolen our brains? Give me a break.”

“That’s what all this is for. Actually, there is ample precedent for a lower life-form temporarily seizing control of a higher one’s nervous system for its own purposes.”

“Can you give me a for instance?”

“Certainly. Viruses routinely take over their target cells’ manufacturing processes, to create more viruses. On a slightly larger scale, the ant brainworm needs to complete its life cycle in a sheep’s gut, which is hardly an ant’s favorite hangout. Nonetheless, when the time comes, the worm induces its host to climb up to the tip of a blade of grass and wait to be grazed. Then there’s the parasitic bee worm that eventually persuades its bee to go drown itself, just so the worm can reproduce in the water.”

“Gack. Okay, but what about bigger creatures?”

“Well, the problem is, if an animal’s actions are not in fact serving its own needs but those of some parasite, how does it tell the difference until after it’s too late, if even then?”

“Good Lord.” I had several really sickening thoughts, each worse than the one before it, so I mentioned one to sort of hold off any others. “Do all those beached whales somehow tie in with this?”

“Interesting possibility. You mean like something uses whales to get up on land with a giant food supply? That’d be a tough one to verify.”

“Why’s that?”

“If someone hung around a decaying whale long enough to detect any monster parasites slithering away from it, would you let him stand close enough to tell you about it?”

“Heh, not without a strong crossbreeze.”

“Anyhow, who knows, with whales? Some of the beachings could be their equivalent of those monks who set themselves on fire in protest.”

“Of what?”

“I’m sure you can think of a few things people are doing that the whales might not be particularly enjoying.”

“Wouldn’t they get their point across quicker by sinking a few factory ships?”

“Perhaps that would compromise their sense of ethics. Likewise, the monks could go around blowing up this and that, but choose to make a more lasting impression.”

There was another disturbing notion demanding closer examination. “What really gets to me is the idea that a bunch of germs could be influencing us all to use ineffective methods of dealing with them. What if the entire modern medical industry was really designed to prolong and spread disease rather than conquer it?”

“You would probably see a proliferation of treatments intended to mask the symptoms of disease, while the basic causes continued unchecked. Like turning your car radio up so you don’t have to hear your ailing engine’s warning noises. Increasing numbers of people would keep on getting sicker, from an ever-growing list of diseases, as more and more money gets poured into drugs, surgery and other accepted medical practices.”

“Basically just like it is now. What a mess.”

“It’s not as if all the doctors have sold out the human race or anything. They’re under the same subtle microbial influences as everyone else, plus their very unsubtle medical indoctrinations under others similarly afflicted. And a lot of what they’ve managed to develop within the limitations of their accepted theories is quite clever. Especially for patching up accident victims; some of those procedures are absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately, that doesn’t quite make up for the technological stupidities that cause the accidents which make such repairs necessary in the first place.”

“Oh yeah, what were you saying about this thing being crash-proof?” This was not just idle curiosity; we were into the foothills now, wiggling along canyons at the same fiendish speed that had felt excessive even over an open desert.

“When it’s switched on, the cushion field that wraps around this craft repels any solid objects away from it, like the repulsion between two identical magnetic poles but much stronger. The force increases with the object’s proximity and speed of approach. Ground vehicles with such fields were tested in Detroit back in the 1950s, then buried so as to postpone having to cope with all the inevitable industrial upheavals. But it’s utterly foolish to build high-speed vehicles without designing in some such feature to protect the occupants and whatever might get in their way, except where the chance of getting creamed is truly meant to be part of their game.”

I could only take his word for it, but we seemed to be cutting awfully close to the digger pines now whizzing by under us. As we slipped over a ridgeback and dropped into the next canyon, I recognized a few Coulter pines with their giant cones.

“Pretty, aren’t they?” CS pointed out two eagles, off to our left and downslope, leaving the area with dignity but wasting no time at it. Then they vanished behind us as we climbed again, up and over into the next valley, continuing our convoluted northern course.

“I have to admit my appreciation of the scenery is tainted somewhat with the constant feeling we are about to become part of it. I assume all this ground-hugging is to keep us from showing up on somebody’s radar.”

“That and for better appreciation of the land’s organic detail.” He lit up one screen with a transparent-looking relief map, oriented with our flight path. A tiny blue dot was creeping along one of the crinkly furrows, and I realized the map must be showing the whole southern range we were entering, a thousand square miles at least.

He reached up and poked the upper infrared part of the spectrum, and a small red patch appeared at the top of the map. “There it is.”

“How will you put it out?”

“You’ll see. It’II be quite picturesque.” He was fiddling with parts of the radio-TV-radar section of the chart and frowning slightly at some of the indicator lights.

He tapped the mike under the smaller speaker. “Hey, is Arg back yet?”

“A few minutes ago,” said a high-pitched voice. “He could use some rest, though.”

“Sorry, he’II have to rest on the run. Better send him on through; it’s the price of being the best. This should be a perfect chance to apply the Third Unclenched Fist.”

“All right, but don’t wear the little guy out. He needs his edge.”

“He’ll be fine.” Then he added semi-apologetically, apparently to me, “Elapsed time is practically the same at both ends.”

“You must have me confused with someone who knows what you’re talking about.”

He blinked at me and said, “Oh yeah, reference list,” then reached over and twisted the knob on the glove compartment. It opened stiffly, to the sound of gaskets separating, and he pawed through a heap of computer printouts floating around in there. He squinted at one, then handed it to me, shaking his head. “I think that’s the right one for this branch,” he muttered.

The print was very small. I stared at it and got as far as “Unauthorized Information Sources Available as of Late 1980s (Dobbs-Approved)” before my eyes glazed over, so I folded it up and put it somewhere for later.

We were now hurtling over mountainsides covered with orange-barked ponderosa pines, including some really big ones, with a few Jeffrey pines along the crests. An ominous smoky haze was now visible far ahead, whenever we topped a ridge-which wasn’t often; he was keeping us down in the valleys and lower passes as much as possible. I was finally starting to get used to it, but my fingers must have left permanent dents in his weird upholstery.

“What is this stuff, anyway? It feels just like moss.”

“That’s because it is, mostly. Not all products of gene-splicing are dangerous, thank goodness.”

“Uh, which ones are, in case I run into any?”

“The vast majority are still pretty nasty. Virtually all present funding of genetic engineering research is tied to biological-warfare projects. Again, the people involved think they’re carrying out their own strategies, but in fact they are providing their parasitic masters with customized new vehicles, so they can more efficiently infect and take over large populations. Surely you’ve heard the rumors about AIDS being cooked up at Fort Detrick, Maryland?”

“Who hasn’t? But why would they turn something like that loose on their own people?”

“Their own people do not include blacks, Latinos or Native Americans, the ones with the highest infection and mortality rates. Deliberate population reduction didn’t stop when the Nazis fled Germany; it went international and got very covert. Here, check this out.”

He activated the screen with the miniature computer keypad under it, and entered some brief request. It lit up with a map of Africa, which had a lot of small gray patches here and there. “Those are the zones where high numbers of AIDS infections have been reported.”

He punched in something else, and a series of brown patches appeared, overlapping the gray ones almost exactly. “Those areas are where the World Health Organization conducted its massive smallpox vaccination program in the mid-1970s.”

“They did that deliberately?”

“Not the individuals delivering the vaccinations; how could they know exactly what they’d been given to inject? But somewhere along the line, someone apparently contaminated the whole batch. It certainly wasn’t the first time health personnel got duped into poisoning the people they were trying to help. Anyway, that’s the bad news.”

I stared at the screen, shaking my head. “What’s the good news?”

He switched it off “Mainly that nobody really has to die from it, if someone gets the word to them soon enough about oxygen therapies. Ozone blood infusions, and/or slow intravenous H2O 2 at 0.035 percent, two hundred fifty cc’s at a time, seem to work the most swiftly.

“But as far as beneficial applications of gene-splicing, Dr. Ananda Chakrabarty’s work is one early example. He came up with modified bacteria that can break down dioxin and 2,4-D and other deadly long-lived poisons. Unfortunately, no one so far is producing them at anywhere near the volume the bio-warfare germ labs are up to.”

Sitting and breathing heavily was about all the reply I was up for. Years of missing pieces were getting plugged in all at once, but I was undergoing extreme brain strain trying to keep up with it. At least it can’t get much more intense than this, I told myself unconvincingly.

There was a loud gurgling slooshing sound right under me, so I looked down and there was an otter between my knees. I squeezed my eyes shut, then looked again and it was still there, paused in mid-crawl from under the seat, looking up with a this-better-be-worth-it expression.

“Hi, Argle.”

The otter squinted at him, blinked at me, shook his head and sent an amazing quantity of cold water onto my legs. He slithered to the deep end of the footwell, yanked a short tube loose from under the dash and took a drink from it. Then he looked at me and shook his head again.

He was a fairly small specimen, some sort of northern river otter, and he was wearing a miniature backpack. “His name is Argle?” was the least stupid question I could come up with.

He sloshed over and surged right up into my lap, still carrying at least a gallon of ice water in his fur. As it sunk in, it struck me that this might just be the coldest water my lap had ever experienced, if you catch my drift. Then he stuck his face right up to mine, whiskers nearly poking my eye, and let out a revolting gargling belching noise.

CS cracked up. I sort of laughed, whimpered and gagged all at once; Argle seemed to be on an all-fish diet. Then I encouraged him to get off my lap, with what I hoped would be read by an otter as non-hostile body language, since I’d just had a close look at a very respectable set of fangs.

“Okay, I’m ready. Why an otter?”

“He’s a bugging expert. Doesn’t know a blessed thing about electronics but he’s an ace at planting them.”

Argle slooshed over to him, stood on the seat divider and yawned in his face. CS continued, “Ferrets are smaller, but otters are better at getting things open and finding hiding places. A bit undisciplined maybe, but slack is Slack.”

By way of agreement, Argle chittered like a deranged raccoon and leaped into the backseat, splashing against CS along the way.

“Security at even the most top-secret complexes is still basically geared to human intrusions only. Angle is so fast, compact, nonmetallic and preposterous that he can go almost anywhere undetected. That is, when he remembers to dry off first,” he added in a louder voice. A high-pitched snoring noise answered him from the backseat.

“How can he break into some high-security installation?”

“Usually he gets through the gate by running along under a car that’s coming in.”

“Isn’t that kind of risky for him?”

“You bet. It’s his career; lots of otters to avenge. And without actually hurting anyone, he can help bring an end once and for all to the murder of rivers and streams. He’s a pretty brave little bugger.” The snoring sound got louder, with a sarcastic edge to it.

CS grinned and studied the “experimental” portion of the spectrum chart for a moment, between radar and infrared. “Today he may get a chance to penetrate another central sourpuss sanctorum, and get us some feeds on just how organized or messed up their minds are, how many are having doubts about their agenda, or anything else that might help us salvage them or at least soften their impact.” He nodded at the smoke column now taking up the middle half of the view ahead. “Then this might be less necessary.”

We popped up over the final ridge between us and the fire, and raced . toward it. I barely noticed the otter standing beside me again, as I stared slack-jawed at the onrushing blaze.

I’d never seen a forest fire this close. There were trees nearly two hundred feet tall, burning from the pound clear up past their crowns. The leaping flames were reflected in a river flowing through a narrow gorge off to the east. My fingers started a new set of dents in the seat moss as I realized we still hadn’t changed course, and the blaze now filled the entire forward view.

I couldn’t quite believe he was aiming us right into the fire. He sure didn’t look suicidal, but whatever he had in mind was beyond me. At last he grabbed the mutated gearshift. I managed to keep one eye on his hands as the wildfire bore down on us. Now we’d see something. The conical hood ornament suddenly pronged forward, stretching out through a widening hole until it looked like a robot anteater snout. Then it shot out a brilliant sky-blue stream of some glowing, crackling liquid unlike anything I’d ever seen, all over the onrushing flames.

“Great Zot! What is that stuff?”

“Condensed space-juice. Supercooled fresh-squeezed electron fluid. Trees can’t bum under a high negative charge.”

There was a lot more of it firing out from under us through that nozzle than we could possibly have room for in any concealed tanks. “Where’s it all coming from?”

“We draw it in as needed, and crush-cool it on the spot. No one misses it; there’s at least ten to the ninety-fourth watt-seconds per cubic centimeter, everywhere in space, including space full of matter. The primary carrier wave of the physical universe is around sixty octaves higher than an electron’s diameter.” He switched hands, kept blasting away and pointed at a spot on the spectrum chart in the upper zone unknown to me. “The higher the frequency, the greater the energy density. Establish resonance with space-juice itself and you can obtain virtually unlimited power.”

The sizzling, metallic turquoise liquid was spreading out incredibly fast wherever it hit, engulfing the flames in big round patches. It sounded like a cross between distant artillery and huge sails flapping in a gale as it rolled out over the blaze. The stuff went from shiny to blurry, and expanded into thick mats of blue-white fog, as if to cool and soothe whatever might survive of the forest.

We tilted around the western rim of the burned area, mopping up several hot spots missed by the main volley. The pulses of juice didn’t follow exactly smooth trajectories but seemed to crackle slightly as if along lightning discharge paths.

The otter didn’t appear to be even remotely scared by all this. He just stood resting a paw against my seat, watching and making chortling noises.

I found my voice again, “Is this another one of those suppressed inventions?”

“Not exactly; this one really was a bit ahead of its time. Liquid electricity doesn’t have many useful applications until you make available a virtually unlimited electron supply. The basic idea was developed by a guy named Richard Diggs back in the late seventies, though he didn’t foresee this embodiment at the time.”

“How do you liquefy it?”

“Tell you what, since I sort of have my hands full, how about if you ask the computer instead?” He pushed something that woke up that screen again, with a blinking “info” message at the top. I stared at it for a moment and he said patiently, “Type ‘liquid electricity,’ then push Enter.”

I did so and read:

The mutual repulsion of electrons can be overcome at sufficiently high pressures and low temperatures. Pump electricity into a nonconductive, supercooled extreme high-pressure vessel, through a large sheaf of fine emitting points, and the electrons can be induced to flow together and behave as a dense fluid, as long as conditions of great pressure and cold are maintained. Naturally, the energy density of a drop of pure electron fluid far exceeds that of any previous electrical storage medium.

To snuff forest fires, put a high-frequency oscillation into the fluid electricity as it leaves the nozzle. At the proper frequency it will flow as a heat-seeking surface charge over everything that’s burning, simultaneously cooling the outside of all trees and animals, and briefly removing the electrochemical pressure and cold of the container, the liquid will flow very quickly over the entire blaze as it breaks up into free electrons, the cling to all hot spots as they drop below the flashpoint, to prevent them from reigniting while the charge disperses.

It is a surface charge only, so it shouldn’t penetrate or harm any living organisms. While we’re at it we can add the blend of vibrations that stimulate rapid cell growth, so as to accelerate the healing and regrowth of the trees and other creatures in the damaged area.

“Far out,” was about all I could say.

We slipped around and under the main northern smoke column, blowing out lingering sub-infernos and plowing through a few blind gray patches. Then we came out of one right under a Vietnam-era attack copter that was not rigged for fire fighting. CD cut the main field for a moment but didn’t change course, and we cleared it landing gear by maybe four feet.

At about thirty yards past it the field came back on and our seats came back up under us. As we kept going straight the helicopter swung around and pointed something black and ugly in our direction. A heat-seeking missile, I assume it was, suddenly came after us with what would have been an impressive smoke trail anywhere else.

Apparently, it felt we weren’t nearly as hot as the smoldering logs down off to its right, so it zoomed over there and enthusiastically reignited a section of what we’d just put out. They fired a second one immediately, which of course agreed with the first one, went straight over and made that spot even hotter.

A small screen began flashing a rotating exploded diagram of a Cobra pretty much like the one tilting after us now, but no one had asked and everyone ignored it while we cut a tight arc down and back toward the brightening flames. Holding us into the tum, CS let off a quick blue blast, snuffing the fire again with a heavy, resounding thump. He straightened out once we were heading directly away from the burned area, barely clearing the treetops, and put us into a steep climb.

I looked back and, sure enough, they were climbing higher and coming around, wobbling slightly. We continued to pull away, passing their altitude just as they fired another rocket after us. Its smoke trail bent sharply over and under like a giant white fishing rod, as it streaked down and back toward the still-warm debris from its two buddies, and poofed it into yet another hearty blaze.

“Goddamn it!” CS swung us around again, aimed the juice nozzle and fired a stream from long range. By now whatever life remained in the roots of those former trees must have felt like this was all some fiendish torture brought here just for their unrequested opportunity to work off a lot more bad karma all at once than any tree should have been able to accumulate.

At this distance the Cobra was nearly in line with the fire. Apparently its engines were hot enough to draw the attention of one strand of liquid electricity, because the stream forked and licked it briefly. Its rotors slowed as it glowed blue-white for a moment, then it dropped like a heap of scrap metal, in fact very like the one it would shortly become.

“Oops. That’s going to be expensive.”

“I thought you shalt not kill.”

“They are unhurt but no doubt very excited. At this frequency it’s only a surface charge, no matter how strong. Their ignition system, however, is history.”

He was accelerating us toward the Cobra, which started to nose downward as it fell.

“Why couldn’t you just use your gunjammer on it earlier?”

“That device is tuned to the frequency that makes gunpowder think it’s wet. A different and rather elaborate sonochemistry is required to neutralize those more sophisticated explosives and propellants.”

“Beyond even your capabilities?”

“Very funny. Beyond my finances, to be exact.”

He hit a white patch on the dash and yanked back on one of the backhoe levers. Something like a big fat artillery shell with grooved sides lurched away from under us and headed for the falling Cobra, at a rather leisurely pace, all things considered. He reached over and switched off the blinking diagram.

The shell finally reached the Cobra’s tail at maybe three hundred feet, for what point I could not see at all, then it blossomed on impact. The grooved sides split into straps that lashed around the tail frame, turning the shell inside out just as a huge green balloon burst out of it, swelling to its full size in barely over a second.

Suddenly converted to a wildly swinging pendulum under the balloon, the Cobra’s cabin plowed drunkenly sideways through treetops that had been about to impale it a second ago. The balloon snagged and the Cobra jerked to a bouncing halt maybe twenty feet above the forest floor. Little uniformed figures crawled out and clung to the landing gear; they appeared to be undamaged but extremely annoyed.

CS was examining some sort of X-ray of the Cobra through various colored filters. Argle made a rather shrill enquiring noise.

“I’m not picking up anything of a high enough rank. Better wait.” The speaker came on. “If you’re through, punch it for the next fire zone. They’re getting creamed up there.”

“I can imagine.”

We vaulted up until the whole burned area was visible, most of it now fog-shrouded, but we didn’t tum north yet. He touched something on the spectrum and another screen lit up with a ghost image of the geography in front of us. Some small yellow lights were clustered at the far corner of the fire zone, by the river. That was apparently what he was looking for, and we swooped over there.

He dropped us close to the river where we saw a thrashing clump of deer and other animals trapped between steep banks, a burning logjam, and rafts of flaming debris flowing toward them from upstream. With the same control stick but a different trigger, he fired a thin red beam from somewhere under us, into the logjam at the waterline. The jam came apart and the water rushed through it, raising more clouds of steam but opening an escape route for the animals, who surged through as it cleared.

As we whipped around and climbed toward the mountains farther north, I asked, “How could your infrared tell the mammals from the flames?”

“It didn’t; that was the emotion scanner. Fear and pain signals tend to be among the strongest in the emotion bands, especially at a scene like this. No fear emissions would’ve meant they either weren’t in danger or were already dead.”

“You can actually read different emotions with that thing?”

“Just like notes on a scale. Humans and other mammals stand out quite distinctly in any case; trees have a very different set of emotions.”

“Lucky them.”

He looked mildly amused. “Their emotions are appropriate for beings who, among other things, can’t get into trouble without someone else’s help.” Argle made a noise like a miniature walrus and hopped into the backseat again.

I watched the forest race by under us and something occurred to me. “Is that what you were looking for when you picked me up? Fear and pain?”

He snorted unsympathetically.

“All right then, just what emotion were you scanning for?”

“Sarcasm.”

“Oh, really?”

“It’s not that we particularly care to hear any of your sarcasm; we have quite enough ourselves as it is. But we do find it’s an easy indicator to use, a sign of possible intelligence, should we ever happen to be looking for any.”

Unable to think of an appropriately intelligent reply, I just sat there trying to think of any reply at all.

“Were you about to point out that sarcasm is not exactly an emotion?” he suggested. I nodded, wearing what would hopefully pass for an intelligent expression, if one allowed for all this unfamiliar information getting crammed into the close vicinity of my puzzled protoplasm.

“An important distinction. Sarcasm isn’t what you feel, just what you do, when you feel this one certain emotion that has not itself been given a name yet. That emotion always occurs coupled with a certain mental state, which involves recognizing stupidity in some situation, so it’s not like just a regular feeling. It has strong harmonics in the thought bands.”

“What, you even have thought detectors?”

“Oh, such things exist, but they’re very expensive. The frequencies involved are so fine, it requires sensors not much larger than molecules to distinguish different thoughts from each other. Might as well just use your head.”

I closed my eyes, trying to coax my brain cells to hang in there a little while longer. One of the things dispersing my attention was the vigorous splashing from the backseat, where Argle was amusing himself by hydroplaning back and forth along the soggy mutated moss.

Looking out above the shifting horizon, I realized there was still a long strip of diffused smoke far ahead. CS had the map screen going again and appeared displeased with the red patch centered on it. He quickly glanced at the spectrum, then raised our altitude and speed a bit.

I cleared my throat. “What sort of metal was that shell? It acted like it was alive.”

“Unfortunately it’s a one-shot deal. Strips of Nitinol, a type of shape-memory-effect alloy, backed with an impact-activated heat-generating compound to trigger the alternate shape. The helium was compressed nearly to liquid, in a titanium sphere with a quick-release valve.”

“I remember hearing about Nitinol, but I didn’t know it was that strong. Nickel-titanium, right? Whatever happened with that stuff?” “It never really became available to the general public in any useful quantity, once it was realized you could take advantage of naturally occurring temperature differences and build free energy motors with it.”

“Just how many kinds of free energy devices are there?”

“We’ve lost count. The fact is, all energy is free, just like the land and water once were. However, if someone’s methods of obtaining it are inefficient enough, they can justify selling it to others as if it were inherently scarce and expensive. Of course, for that to work they have to continuously ignore the vast energy underlying physical reality.”

“So your noble gas motor isn’t still providing all this power, is it?” “That one’s only for the wheels. The main power supply works something like a living organism, resonating in harmony with the oscillating space-juice, and inducing extra energy to well up within its circuits. There’s theoretically no upper limit to what can be drawn off with a properly tuned transducer.”

He switched on the FM radio band for a moment and quickly found a news station that was covering the fires. The newscaster was commenting on the unusual number of dry lightning strikes again this year.

CS turned it oft. “Awful lot of lightning to be coming out of a cloudless sky. You’d think they’d at least wonder about it.”

From this height, the trees streaking by were almost soothing, and my pulse rate had finally started slowing down a little, when CS said, “Did I mention watch out for lasers?”

“No,” I sighed, “not that I recall. Would these be coming from any particular direction?”

“From overhead.” His tone implied I should have figured this out; actually I’d been avoiding doing so. But now I happened to remember a guy I knew a few years back, who was an investigator for the fire marshal’s office.

In the summer of ’85, something had turned him really paranoid, while working on that huge bunch of forest and brush fires in California. Officially the cause of most of the fires was arson, but they never said how or by whom, as the investigation was supposedly still underway.

One evening I got him to let me buy him a few drinks, to relax him a bit since he was always so keyed up lately, and since that was his preferred relaxant. He started talking about the fires and it came out that quite a few of them seemed to have started high in the treetops, as if by an intense heat source directed from above. But there was none of the shattered look typical of lightning strikes.

I didn’t know what to make of that, and he didn’t seem inclined to speculate. Not long after that he quit the fire marshal’s office and disappeared. Now when I tried to picture him, all I could see was the way his eyes looked that night. As I recall it took me some time to persuade myself that it a’l had nothing to do with me.

The smoky haze up ahead was getting thicker and darker. I wanted to ask CS to clarify his warning, but the only possible answers I could anticipate I was very reluctant to hear right then.

CS seemed to sense another round of questions approaching. “I’m a little burnt out on all this jabbering at the moment. Why don’t you pick us out some tunes instead?” He slid open the cover on the seat divider to reveal a row of ordinary tape cassettes. “This is the best stuff from the all-time greatest musicians and anti-musicians.”

Some of the names were quite familiar: Beethoven, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Doktors for “Bob.” Others I’d never heard of. “What do the Mutated Mudpuppies sound like? Or the Presidential Polyps?”

“You have to be in the right mood. Let’s hear something more cheerful.”

Argle reached over and patted one of the tapes. “Skraa-ook Chirrup?” I pronounced carefully. “What the heck is that?”

“One of the best human-dolphin combos. Yeah, put that on.”

I opened it and popped it in the slot, while trying to make out the picture on the case. It appeared to be six dolphins and three people, playing several extremely weird instruments, and surrounded by coral reefs and curious fish. Two more dolphins were operating a presumably waterproof mixing board. Apparently I was not keeping up with the latest musical trends as well as I’d thought.

I looked up and there were now giant smoke plumes clearly visible, rising from beyond the farthest ridges. Shivering slightly, I put the case back in with the others and riffled them with my fingers. “Somehow I was expecting micro-CDS or laser cubes or something.”

“Too much hassle to make copies. Cassettes are cheap and universal.” A startling burst of percussion filled the air. Whatever I’d been expecting, this wasn’t it. Clicking, ratcheting, creaking, and tearing sounds wove in and out in fast, intricate multiple rhythms. There were only occasional pure notes and chords here and there like accents, sparingly describing a song that was somehow both thrilling and haunting. Despite the high density and underwater sound quality, it was all very crisp and undistorted.

The music contrasted sharply with the grim scene ahead. The mountains were taller here. Although our approach was from generally up-wind, we were already well into the fringes of a huge smoke blanket. The valleys we were crossing were densely forested, but the last few ridgebacks between us and the central smoke columns were boulder-strewn and nearly treeless.

CS looked rather grim himself. He appeared to be silently wrestling with some sort of difficult decision. Argle was standing between us, perfectly still for a change, watching the smoke.

We shot through the last slate-gray pass and saw miles of scorched ex-forest ahead, with a blazing edge way off to the northeast.

“Bloody hell, we’re too late. Well. . .” he glanced at the otter, who nodded briskly. “Close your eyes.”

The speaker came on: “CS!”-a different voice with lots of static. “Hey, all’s fair and this is both. Fuzzy noncombatants.”

“Fine. You get to do all the maps and paperwork for the new fork.” I grabbed the sides of the seat. “What are you about to do? And will throwing up electrocute me?”

The otter vanished into the back.

“Relax, close your eyes. You can always trust a SubGenius, right?”

He touched something out of sight behind the steering column and a loud bell sounded that was just like the one before they start up the boardwalk bumper cars. “I’m not kidding,” he added and grabbed two of the bigger clock-face joysticks.

I squeezed my eyes shut just as a searing white light hit us for a second or two, along with a weightless feeling and a sound like a giant champagne cork.

When I looked again it seemed like the windows themselves were all swiftly fading from blue-black to transparent, but it might have been my own afterimages. I realized I was looking at the same landscape as a moment ago, but it was only late morning and most of the trees were still here. Right in front of us though, on a very inaccessible-looking hillside a few miles ahead, was a fire nearly as big as the one we’d snuffed back by the river.

“There, that’s a bit more fair.” A sudden puff of smoke went up a few miles south of the main fire. “There’s a new one. They’re still firing here.”

“Who? What’s going on?”

“Grab this stick, will you? I need to get a fix on the satellite. We have to get under the next one to reflect it back up and fry the laser. Use this button here as we pass the blaze.”

“I’m not shooting anything until you tell me what we’re up against.” He turned the wheel hard over and we plunged toward the rocks. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize you wanted off here.”

“Hey!” I clutched at the stick. “All right already, you can tell me on the way.”

We leveled out and streaked toward the leaping flames. “Aim for the northeast edge first, then dump full power into the center.”

He had a screen going that was full of stars, thinning out rapidly as he touched a series of colored patches under it. Finally one remained, and he hit a button that dropped a grid and target pattern over it. “Got. it. Okay, we’re in range; cool her down.”

I aimed the hood nozzle as he’d done and touched the juice trigger. A thin stream of turquoise plasma licked out and curved away in the wind, lighting up a jumble of boulders way northeast. I hastily aimed further to the left and held the trigger all the way down, as the fire raced toward us. The stream connected and there were several deep thumps as the bright liquid blew out hot spots and dispersed into a powder-blue fog that immediately spread over the whole blaze. Just as we were about to tear right into it, we banked all the way over, hard left, and shot toward the vertical southern horizon.

As we leveled out and accelerated even faster, I looked back and couldn’t see any flames, just thick, rising white mist. “Fantastic.”

“Heads up. Snuff that little one there.”

I looked where he pointed, tried to compensate for the wind, and arced a shod stream toward the latest fire. Nailed it on the first shot, with a satisfying thump. Actually it looked like I’d overshot at first, but the tip of the blue stream bent toward the flames as the heat attracted it.

The star screen showed a small green blip rapidly closing on the targeted star. CS twisted something beside the seat and the whole center of the roof bulged downward until the top must have been perfectly flat. He touched a spot above the spectrum chart and small signs lit up with the words MIRROR ON and SHIELDFIELD REINFORCED.

As we fired through another jagged pass, the two blips joined and a big X appeared, locking them together. We angled slightly west, got perfectly level and held a constant speed. “Any time now. Probably at that next big valley ahead.” He gently took back the control stick.

I found room in my midsection for another small knot of fear; there was a little town in that valley. I could see kids playing beside an ancient red one-room schoolhouse. “So the Strategic Defense Initiative never really was for defense, I take it.”

“Afraid not. The Nazis first conceived it as an explicitly offensive weapon in the mid-forties. Look up Project Paperclip, the U.S. importation of Nazi scientists. In all fairness, though, very few of the folks working on it have any notion what their effort’s actually going into.”

“And that is?”

“Continuing destruction of Earth’s oxygen-producing surfaces, removing native animals and peoples, and driving survivors out of the mountains into the cities, where they can be more easily weakened and controlled. Eliminating the wide variety of natural, harmonious cultures that might compete with the homogenized anaerobotoids.”

There was a sudden shimmering flash around us, and the big X on the screen went out. He scanned the spectrum chart and smiled. Then he pulled us into a tight downward spiral, firing short blue bursts at the broken ring of new flames rising from the trees just below us. They were snuffed almost instantly, and he straightened us out, climbing into the western sky.

“That was it? Are there more of those?”

“A few, but not within reach at the moment.”

“Was anyone alive on board, do you think?”

“Those platforms are awfully toxic, and supposed to be unmanned. If anyone was there they’d have to have been severely modified to tolerate the radiation while they lasted.”

“So we possibly just fried some poor slave?”

He sighed. “All I can go on here is the Golden Rule, and if I’d been kidnapped, neutered, mind-controlled, and turned into someone’s expendable cyborg, I think I’d want to be freed from that nightmare existence as quickly as possible, and take a shot at something more natural. If anyone was up there and they were actually enjoying it, they have my apologies.”

He was eyeing a pink spot on the main video screen, superimposed on the wooded edge of the next pass up ahead. He checked the lights blinking in the radio-TV bands, then dropped us right toward the blip.

An unmarked helicopter bristling with cameras and listening gear peeled out from behind the treeline where the pink spot had been. It dropped away from us down the far side of the ridge, gaining speed. As we closed on it I saw a gun barrel swing out and point toward us, and I nearly beat CS to the jammer switch. The gun protruded ineffectually in our direction for a moment, was shaken violently, then pointed at us again. Finally it was withdrawn and replaced with another, which must have annoyed its owner even more than the first one, since he hurled it out the door at us.

We swiftly overtook them and climbed slightly higher. CS thumbed the ungearshift’s laser trigger. “I really don’t want to waste another rescue shell, so let’s just trim the blades a bit.”

The thin red line angled down for an instant and snicked the edge of the rotor’s whirring blur. Two dark rectangles spun off violently on parallel tracks, and the chopper immediately started losing altitude.

“Now they’ll drop at around three feet per second all the way down, even at full throttle.” As in the previous encounter, he made no attempt to talk with these guys. We soared away on roughly the same track as our approach, as if how they landed was of no concern. Along the way we happened to pass directly over the only chopper-sized clearing within their range.

Looking back we saw them pull out of a near-tumble and follow us toward it at the shallowest descent angle they could hold. We kept going, on around the valley’s next bend, until we were just out of sight of the clearing, then dropped right down between the trees. CS cut the field and we crunched into a thick carpet of pine needles.

He opened a compartment in his armrest and pulled out a small bag. “Better take some extra fangs. This one could be a long way in and a shod way out.” Argle held still while CS stuffed a handful of little hollow white cones into an elastic pouch on his pack. They looked exactly like caps for an otter’s upper canines.

“What’re those, poison or something?”

They both looked at me a moment and slowly shook their heads, wearing remarkably similar expressions. “The bugs, naturally,” said CS.

“That would’ve been my second guess. Does he bite them into a door frame or what?”

“A desk or chair leg works better, or sometimes an air vent, the underside of a briefcase or the heel of someone’s shoe. If he gets in far enough and plants enough of them, a few are bound to pick up something useful.”

“I gather he’ll be hooking a ride with whoever comes to rescue these guys. How do you know they’ll be taken straight to some inner sanctum?”

“He’ll stick with whoever’s the highest rank, and that one’ll almost certainly go in for debriefing immediately. Otters don’t have much personal use for social pecking orders, but they have no trouble spotting them in other species.”

Argle came over and patted my back with a splatting sound. His fur still held quite a bit of water, but I didn’t say anything. Then he shook his whole coat, thoroughly soaking both of us.

He stood and hitched up his pack, adjusting the quick-release clasp on the front of his harness. He leaned against CS and stretched his neck up until they were nose to nose for a moment. For a second there it was kind of touching, almost, then Argle blew his hair back with a racket like a blue jay getting stuffed into a mud hole.

“Need to get any more of that out of your system, or can we open the door now?” Argle nodded at the door and CS cracked it open. The scent of startled pine trees rushed in while the otter slithered out, managing to give CS one more heady splat across the face with his thick tail, the only place where his fur was still full of water.

We watched him flow erratically back toward the clearing where his quarry had presumably come down in one piece. He paused and shook all over for several seconds, until only a fine mist was flying off. CS pulled a couple more hand towels out of the back footwell and handed me one, and we silently dried ourselves off while we watched Argle disappear into the underbrush.

CS stared thoughtfully at one of the stabbed clocks, which I noticed had thirteen hours marked on it. Then he switched on the main field. We popped up off the ground and rose between the trees until we were barely above them. Then we slid away as if the field were rolling lightly over the treetops.

“What are his chances?” I asked.

“Pretty good, actually. He has a one-shot escape route he can activate almost instantly, as long as he jumps the moment he’s spotted.” “What if he doesn’t see them first?”

“Back home his wife’ll be having pups any day now. He knows where to go if he winds up needing another body.”

I thought about it. “That’s really something, putting his life on the line like that to help you guys.”

‘%He knows we’re all in this together. If our habitat goes down the tubes, so does his.”

Somewhere along the way the background music had faded into serene counterprogressions of bubble and bell sounds, with barely a trace of percussion left. I was still hunting for a discreet and trustworthy-sounding way of mentioning I’d noticed that along with everything else we were flying a time machine.

We rounded another bend in the valley, then accelerated and started climbing. Finally I said, “I couldn’t help noticing that this car is a time machine.”

CS grinned but made no reply. I added delicately, “Could you tell me how it works?”

“Afraid not. It hasn’t been invented yet. You can already find some good clues, though, in current popular neophysics texts, the multiple- worlds hypothesis, Professor N. A. Kozyrev’s time experimentsi and certain past-life regression techniques.”

“How long before, uh, this gets invented?”

“Only a few more years. As with most breakthroughs, necessity is the mother. If you want something bad enough you can usually make it happen. In this case, some young electronics prodigies will get together and decide a time machine would be their only chance to personally witness some of those Jimi Hendrix concerts they weren’t old enough to go to when they happened.”

“You’re not kidding, are you? Talk about devoted fans.” I thought for a moment. “So how did you come to be this thing’s owner?”

“After experiencing all that soul-washing music they couldn’t resist interfering with his assassination. One of them caught him backstage and warned him about the FBI’s Cointelpro hit list, and about Monica Danneman. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to him that a Dusseldorf banker’s daughter would not normally be a strong supporter of black antiwar activists, considering interest payments on war debts are the biggest source of income for the major bank owners.”

“But he really did die. VThoa, is that what you meant by a new fork?”

“Exactly. They chose, quite naturally, to remain in the branch where Hendrix was allowed to mature and continue his astonishing career. He got together with Miles Davis as originally planned, and they changed history in precisely the way that those who ordered his removal had feared.

“Quite apart from the surge in musical breakthroughs, and completing Jimi’s graduation from Conspiracy-created drugs, the collaboration drew Miles into an active role in the antiwar movement in the early seventies. Dozens of jazz artists followed his lead, as they had in music, and that entire somewhat hipper subgroup of the establishment that appreciates jazz followed after them. They injected new energy and major funding into the peace movement, and made it impossible for the warmongers to maintain the fiction that only Commies and hippie radicals wanted to end the wars.

“The program of eliminating politically active musicians and minority leaders ground to a halt, hate music and other false rock never really took hold like it has here and the Age of Slack arrived there earlier.”

The tape had ended and we were high enough now to make out a spectacular multilayered cloud bank off to the west. We weren’t really climbing so much as allowing the mountains to drop away under us, but it gave us a higher altitude than any so far.

“Weren’t you tempted to join them?”

“Sure, and I may splice into their stream again later, but meanwhile someone has to tend the home branch. Anyhow, great danger can still make for some of the most thrilling challenges. Which brings us back around to your reason for being here. You’re looking for work, right?” “Sort of. However, my choice of positions tends to be influenced by the probabilities of getting killed on the job.”

“Fair enough. I imagine you’d also prefer something that calls for a minimum of heavy perspiration.”

“Now that you mention it, that could be a factor. What sort of work are you offering?” Until I learned otherwise, I was going to keep acting as if I was up here entirely by my own free choice.

“There are five billion humans down there, who in most cases through no fault of their own are locked into some suicidally shortsighted technologies. Many are already well aware that they need to clean up their methods, but they need a lot of help getting informed about the more harmonious alternatives, and the economic transitions required.”

“I do appreciate the urgency, but what exactly can I do about all this?”

“By now you should have a fairly clear picture of the fundamental struggle over Earth’s future, and basically who’s fighting who over what.”

“Actually, I still have only the vaguest sense of what these oxygen wars are all about. And if I tried to explain it to someone else, they’d probably have me put away.”

“Okay. There are basically two kinds of life here, the kind that thrives at high oxygen levels, which are the vast majority, and the little ugly slimy things that would prefer an atmosphere with a lot less oxygen and a lot more methane, ammonia and that sort of stuff. They had their mn of the place way back when, but until humans came along the expansion of forests and all the accompanying high-oxygen-based creatures was continuously pushing the other kind into smaller and less significant roles in the ecology.

“Now humans are more capable than any other life here of things like expanding forested areas and pushing back deserts. But if they had any wasp of the existing natural order of things, very few of them acted like it. They threw in with the anti-oxygen gang, against their own entire kind of life-forms, unaware in most cases of the long-term effects of the things they were trained to do. As humans became more heavily affected by parasites, they acted more and more like parasites themselves.

“The possibility that some sort of organized nonphysical predators are using the upstart micro-lowlifes for reasons of their own, and’ or the other way around, have not been ruled out.

“Earth’s time track has some enormous forks coming up. Who goes which way is up to everyone involved. On one of the least enjoyable branches the entire planet’s water-oxygen cycles all collapse and an Age of Decay really sets in.”

“You went there and saw it?”

“Only the most miserable of higher life-forms bother with the place. The point is, here and now, the future is still entirely up to those who are going to experience it. The first thing they need fixed up is their health; can’t do much else while they’re getting sick all over the place.” “Isn’t there a lot more to it than just getting them to raise their oxygen levels?”

“There are other factors, of course. Attitude, behavior, whether their blood is clean or loaded down with useless extra matter, whether they have enough trace minerals or are trying to live off just a few elements, all that sort of thing. But oxygen is the key.

“Your personal fluidity varies with your oxygen-hydrogen ratio. Oxygen loosens your cells, speeds up your internal flows, atomic turnover and energy level. Oxygen is biomolecular Slack. Hydrogen sticks things together and slows the flows, ideally just enough to hold your form solid, but too much makes you sort of gluey, not as fluid or adaptable.

“Oxygen is the physical counterpart of prana, vital-energy. All your metabolic functions require it, and run better as you increase it. Also, it’s no accident that humans can potentially run at higher oxygen percentages than any other land creatures, though few manage it or even try in these sluggish times. Thus, the vast majority never discover the additional marvelous capabilities designed into their bodies, which very rarely switch on at the usual low energy levels.

“At any rate, your job would be to first inform yourself more completely as to the details on all this, then help get the word out and tum the tide. Anyone with a little imagination and sense of humor should be able to take all this information and make a decent living and a lot of good karma out of it.”

“It certainly would be different. What sort of pay is involved?”

“Up to you, since you’d be your own boss. The benefits include avoiding what’ll happen if you don’t do it.” He noticed my expression and grinned, then added, “That’s general prophecy, not personal threat.”

“I knew that. Does the deal include time travel?”

“In a way. You can help the future to hurry up and get here.”

“Say, couldn’t you take me ahead a few years to just after this was built, then tell me how it works?”

“Nice try. You’ll have your hands full with what you’ve already got, and the rest’ll be along before you know it. Meanwhile, it’ll help if you bear in mind that the sensation of time itself is generated by certain constant universal rhythms, at nearly unmeasurable frequencies, high enough to continuously grab the part of your attention that makes memory recordings.”

“That’s supposed to help?”

“It might, later on.”

I wondered how much of this I’d even be able to remember later on. My attention couldn’t help dividing itself between the words and the stirring scenery flowing by, at a lot less threatening proximity than earlier. Not far ahead the dark green forest faded into brown and yellow foothills, then nearly white desert at the horizon.

“I have this tendency to hesitate on tough decisions,” I said carefully. “With this one it’s not so much a matter of whether, but how. And there are some things I’m still not sure about. Like, what if it turns out that this great master-germ takeover theory is wrong after all?”

“It wouldn’t change any of the rest of it, apart from giving the humans a lot less of an excuse for their behavior. No matter who’s really behind the constant all-out assault against higher life-forms, the basic means of reversing it are the same. Shift over to fuelless energy sources, massive reforestation, and oxygen therapy, and don’t wait for official permission.

“That applies to any of this information, by the way, from gravity control to the multi-worlds hypothesis. You don’t have to swallow all of it, to use the pads you like.”

“Imagine my relief.” There was something else I just had to ask. “So, does the Church of the SubGenius really wind up being the number-one religion worldwide?”

“Work out the numbers and see what you come up with. Since any new member’s first duty is to splinter off and form a new denomination, how long can it take before the sheer number of SubGenius splinter groups exceeds all other denominations combined? Since they borrow the least foolish points from all the other religions and mock the rest, how can they help but attract away the brightest followers of those plundered faiths? As the Conspiracy’s actions become more and more obvious, who can resist the only church that even acknowledges the Conspiracy exists? And what other church provides such laughter? For its own members, I mean.”

“Sounds like everything tums out all right, then.”

“Don’t take anything for granted. The Antislack Masters still think they can win.”

The speaker came on with a burst of static. “CS, can you hear me?”

“Why, has it started already?”

“Yeah, it’s getting pretty intense here. Can you spare yourself?”

“Of course. Want the car?”

“No. It has no dependable dream body, and you’II be needing yours, at full power.”

“Good, I should leave it for Argle anyhow.” He stretched for a moment, then put his hand behind the steering column. A small sign lit up with the words IDIOT MODE.

He started climbing out of his seat into the back. “Take the wheel.” “Wait! How do I, uh? . . . ” .

“Look, it’s very simple. Turn the wheel right or left, pull it up and down to rise and descend. The accelerator and brake pedal work pretty much like you’d expect. The car won’t let you crash it.”

“But what if it, uh? . . . “

“Hey, either you achieve a state of hole-in-oneness or you don’t.”

I got into the driver’s seat and gripped the wheel, feeling a strangely enjoyable mixture of power and incompetence.

“There you go. You are now headed toward your original destination. Hold at this altitude almost to the coast, then turn south and descend. I suggest you park somewhere discreet, outside city limits, and walk from there. I’ll find it later with the beacon.”

I glanced back and got a bit panicky; he was strapping on a small pack. “What the hell? Are you bailing out here or something?” I didn’t remember seeing any back doors.

He pointed over my shoulder at the map screen. It still showed no new red lights. “There are no more fires from here to the coast,” he said, as if that made everything okay.

“But what are you doing?”

“I have to go take care of something that’ll get a lot more complicated if I put it off.”

I made various ineffective protesting noises, then glimpsed something truly awesome out the right window. A huge bright silver disk was pacing us, far off to the northwest.

I looked at CS and his eyes were gleaming like a child’s, so I figured this wasn’t an enemy craft. He put a hand on the wheel for a moment and rocked us slightly from side to side. The silver disk made a similar small rolling motion, then shot straight up at an impossible speed and vanished in about three seconds.

I gave him a stunned look and he said happily, “Some modes of transport are a lot more advanced than others.”

I stared again at the outrageous dashboard and my eye fell on the “Bob” sticker, so I asked, “Have you ever actually met “Bob” personally?”

“Has anyone ever truly met “Bob”? Even “Bob” himself?”

With that he slipped. further into the back seat and added, “Check your map. You’ll reach the coast in a few minutes.”

I looked at the map with a fizzing sensation in my ears. Then I heard a roaring, whooshing sound behind me and spun around. CS was crouched on the seat with his back to me. He had a strip of blue-white fabric stretched between his hands, and it appeared to be trying to get away. He hooked an elbow into it and spread it sideways, as the roaring grew louder and my ears popped. The fabric was writhing and whipping around and its actual pattern seemed to be spinning. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from it.

He wedged his other elbow and a foot into this escaped hallucination and stretched it like a sheet of rubber, and the roar grew deafening. I got a blast of ocean mist in the face, and suddenly I was looking into the thundering tube of a fifteen-foot wave, with sunlight gleaming through and a flash of blue sky beyond the churning mist at the far end. For an instant there was this flapping window right through the throat of a great tumbling tunnel of water, then he leaped into the pounding chaos and it snapped shut behind him.

I sat turned around like that, staring at the empty backseat long after the last tiny blue spot had faded away and the foam had all soaked into the moss. Then I recalled I was at the wheel of a car going several times faster than I’d ever driven, and up in the air besides, so facing forward might be a good idea.

I did that and my adrenal glands really outdid themselves. There was nothing but ocean far below. My head thumped as if my brain intensely desired to be somewhere else, then I realized the coast was behind me and sheepishly turned the wheel in a slow curve to the south.

About the only coherent thought I remember from the remainder of the flight was how much I needed to take a leak. The car covered the remaining miles to the mountains above L.A. a lot faster than I asked it to. It also didn’t seem to care if I steered it or not, since it always corrected gently back to the same heading afterwards, resetting the wheel’s relative orientation each time. It ignored the altitude control, brake and accelerator altogether. I felt around behind the steering column but didn’t find any hidden switches, and the IDIOT MODE light stayed on.

Without any help from me the car zeroed in on a small canyon facing the coast and hurtled toward it at a truly sphincter-testing velocity. I was standing on the brake with both feet when finally we slowed to a crawl all at once. Now even the steering wheel ignored me as we floated down and landed among boulders and sagebrush. We were in a state park, judging from the maze of trails that had flashed by.

I started breathing semi-normally and blinked quite a few times. My eyes seemed rather dry, probably from bulging so much. As my hand went for the door handle, I noticed the INFO light blinking on that screen above the keypad, and hesitated. There was an appropriate bush only about thirty feet away, but I had to try something first.

I typed “time travel” and pushed Enter. A short menu of subtopics appeared: General Theory, Useful Discrepancies, Circuit Diagrams, Backup Systems, Special Features, Fork-Mapping Suggestions, Unmapped Warpjumping Cautions, and Now That You’re Stranded. Unfortunately, nearly all the choices were followed by the words “Unavailable in This Mode and/or Time Period,” flashing at the same dull rate as the IDIOT MODE light.

The only option that wasn’t marked unavailable was number nine, Brief Demonstration. Curiosity continued to override bladder pressure. I pushed 9, and read: -Select date and location.

This couldn’t be for real.

I grabbed one of the joysticks and twisted it around. It offered more resistance than I expected, but it also could be rotated on its axis, and pulled in and out several inches. Apparently it let you control four directions with one hand, and it really was almost like reaming a clock with a big knife, but nothing seemed to be happening. Some of the clocks had thin flat rings around them, calibrated with numbers and other less familiar symbols. I started to rotate one of them, then noticed some more words had appeared on the screen: -Preset destinations available only. List? (Y/N). I punched Y, ignoring my hydraulic discomfort. -Dating system? 1) Euro-American 2) Chinese 3) Mayan 4) Other. I pushed number 1.

A chillingly plausible string of dates and places appeared, with an inquiry as to whether I was interested in seeing more. (Y/N). I pushed Y. Would this tum out to be some sort of intelligence test, or a practical joke? But I’d already seen some of what this machine could do.

The selections formed odd clusters. Most of the first screenful was 1969 and 1970. These guys had some peculiar criteria for choosing important moments. I recognized things like November 22, 1963, but only a few of what would usually be thought of as key historical events were included. Hardly any wars were represented, though there was a cluster right around the “end” of World War II. Except for a few in 1899 at Colorado Springs, the dates grew farther apart as they got into earlier centuries. They’d skipped the Middle Ages entirely.

There were a few selections around A-D. 33 in the Middle East, and several more around the mid-fifth century B.C. in India and China. Then the Nile Delta at 1500 and 3100 B.C., something in Northern Europe at around 11,000 B.C., a string of five- and six-digit dates and places that meant nothing to me, and then Greenland at 5,000,000 B.C.

There was another big gap, and the next choice was 63,000,000 B.C., Cliffside, Lizard Vista, North Pre-America.

I read no further. Dinosaurs! This couldn’t wait. With trembling fingers I tapped in “179,” the number for that selection, and then pressed Enter.

The screen said: -What, you want to go there? (Y/N). I pushed the Y. -Are you sure? (Y/N). I pressed Y again.

A long list of instructions and cautions appeared, that sort argot on my nerves: -Ensure eyes are closed before engaging temporal displacement, but not before reading remaining instructions. Do not attempt to open door after displacement, or while it is occurring, Do not attempt to move vehicle from preset destination during or after displacement. Duration of excursion is subject to conditions at selected viewpoint. Rebound may occur with little advance notice, depending on conditions, etc. Very few controls will respond until vehicle withdraws to origin point, so quit screwing around and enjoy the show, This vehicle is not to be considered specifically liable for anything whatsoever.

-Do you still wish to move to viewpoint 179? (Y/N). I hit the Y. -You’re quite sure about this? (Y/N). I hit the Y again, with unnecessary force. -Close your eyes and press any key. I pushed the exclamation point, but hesitated on closing my eyes; I had to see if the time daggers moved around by themselves. Instead the screen said: -Are your eyes closed? (Y/N). There was a five- second pause, then the waming bell sounded and I covered my whole face with my arms.

The white flash and deep thump seemed no more intense than when we made the several-hour hop. But When I opened my eyes I instantly wished I’d held off on this little jaunt until alter soaking some unsuspecting bush.

I was looking straight down into a river canyon from the side of a cliff, maybe two hundred feet up, from a shallow cave barely larger than the car. The cliff sloped sharply back away from under us, and the opposite cliff was also heavily undercut, making the canyon much wider at the bottom than up here. But this was just a small side canyon feeding into an enormous river valley off to our left, where the view opened out.

At the far end of the valley, the biggest waterfall I’d ever seen was thundering in over a much taller cliff, from what looked like an inland sea on the horizon. Its mist filled the entire valley. The sky overhead was the deepest and most intense blue I’d ever seen outside of dreams. Through the mist I could make out these strange enormous shapes lying around down there on the rocks and mud, like gigantic seals. presumably these were the dinosaurs, but they weren’t actually doing anything.

The visual scale kept trying to shift around on me. I finally realized it was because all those trees along the river were giant-size versions of plants I was used to seeing only a few feet tall, if ever, so it threw everything else’s apparent size off. The cliff across from me was only about fifty feet away, and it had several cave openings. A small, scaly face with big eyes suddenly appeared in the one just opposite, peeking over some rocks on the ledge. It made a chittering noise a lot like Argle and disappeared back into the cave.

I heard a chorus of honking and bleating sounds, and three of the cave openings filled with long-legged monkey-sized lizards. They all had light-brown scales and, as it turned out, opposable thumbs, which they put to immediate use by hurling rocks in my direction. I ducked instinctively, then realized the cushion field was still on; the rocks were all bouncing off like they’d hit a wall of springs.

There was something wrong with this picture. These ape-lizards were all bouncing around throwing rocks and dodging each others’ ricochets, screeching and cackling as if this were some sort of a game. Their voices had that shrill, annoying quality that seagulls have, probably from trying to be heard over the constant noise of pounding water.

I watched some of the bigger ones in the left-hand cave until it was quite clear they were trying to bank their rocks off the car’s springy field and hit their friends in the adjacent caves. Most appeared to have done this before. Several were already bleeding from direct hits but they all seemed to be enjoying it immensely.

Just as I figured it out, they all stopped and stared at something on my side of the gorge, off to the left. I looked and saw two iguanodons, I think they’re called, approaching the top of the cliff from above.

Each was carrying a very angry pterodactyl folded up under its arm, and holing the long beak shut with the other hand. Both were rather scratched up and missing a few scales, but they seemed in good spirits, honking boisterously at each other as they walked right up to the edge of the cliff.

It was hard to imagine the iguanodons thought their rate of descent would be slowed much by the pterodactyls, which they must have out-weighed by ten to one, but they seemed pretty confident. With no particular ceremony they stopped at the very edger grabbed their pterodactyls’ hind feet and jumped off.

The winged lizards went into screaming overdrive, flapping frantically all the way. Everyone watched as they fluttered erratically down and splashed heavily into the swamp. I guess I’d just witnessed the invention of hang gliding, or something.

That done, rock throwing resumed immediately.

A lot of the rocks weren’t bouncing all the way back to the opposite cliff. Far below I noticed a mass of ferns disappear into one end of a big long mud bank, and began doubting it was a mud bank. It confirmed this suspicion by raising that end and looking around to see what had just bonked it on the head.

I forgot about the rocks as the head continued to rise. This thing was even bigger than that supersaurus or whatever it was they wrote up awhile back, or ahead, depending. As I watched it lift its neck higher and higher, it occurred to me I hadn’t noticed any instructions for activating the departure mechanism.

A deeper and more authoritative honking across the way made me look back up at the caves. A larger and less fun-loving version of the rock-throwing reptiles had appeared in the opening and was shooing everyone back inside. The other cave entrances emptied almost as quickly. I looked down and now the humongosaurus was definitely looking at me, and the head was still rising.

I rapidly typed, “How do we get out of here?” and pushed Enter. -What, you want to go already? (Y/N). Y. -Didn’t we just get here? (Y/N). Y.

-So what seems to be the trouble? Not having prepared for an essay question, I typed, “A very large dinosaur is about to try and swallow us or maybe hatch us,” Enter. -Now let’s go over that again: You say you saw some sort of monster? (Y/N). No wonder most of the paint was worn off the Y. I tapped it again, trying not to punch it right through the keypad. The neck was nearly vertical, and that little head was looking a lot bigger. -And so you want to leave now, just like that? (Y/N). Y. -Were you expecting maybe cows and bunny rabbits? (Y/N). Tricky; N. ” -Well, what, do you need to take a leak or something? (Y/N). Y!

The stupendosaurus ran out of neck about thirty feet below us, then rocked back onto its hind legs and tail, raising its shoulders and front legs until its lumpy face was less than ten feet away. Now the creature looked like a mountain of mud with a giant tentacle on top, with eyes and a big mouth instead of suckers.

The screen wasn’t through with me yet: -But are you sure you want to leave right this minute? (Y/N). I got some sweat on the Y this time. -Are you positive? The view is quite spectacular from here. (Y/N). I was close to losing it. I pushed the Y some more, with considerable restraint, considering. The giant head was tilting to one side in a way that might have struck me as sort of grotesquely cute, if I’d been feeling more detached about things. It wasn’t easy to be terrified by something with a big heap of swamp mud dribbling down its face, but I was managing.

A tongue bigger than a surfboard flopped out and slurped toward us, compressing the field to less than three feet from the windshield, and rocking us back slightly. The head reared back a couple of yards and seemed to ponder the cushion field’s electric taste, then it let out a noise like a giant rusty hinge, amazingly similar to the sound in the old Godzilla movies.

Still we sat there in our hole in the cliff. I wondered just what it took for this machine to register something as dangerous. -Sure you don’t want to take a few pictures before we go? The lighting is perfect right now. (Y/N). What was this, hitchhiker torture time? I hit the Y and most of the keys next to it, hoping I’d read the question correctly.

The giant mouth was swaying toward us again, and opening wide. The teeth all appeared to be plant-grinding molars, with big chunks of fern gumbo wedged into all the crevices, but somehow I was not reassured. -All right then, you’re absolutely certain? (Y/N). I typed, “CAN WE PLEASE GO NOW!” and hit Enter, just as the whole mouth started rocking us. -Oh, relax. Close your eyes and press any key. Certain pads of my endocrine system were sure getting a workout today. I pressed about ten keys at once, and this time, instead of the bell, the thump and blast of light were preceded by something like a flashbulb going off that made me blink just in time.

I thought I saw, fading from the screen: But I was in too much of a hurry to pay attention. Now I truly was in dire need of a leak. For all I knew, the way this vehicle could move around, its moss seats might very well be designed to safely absorb large amounts of urine spontaneously released by startled passengers. But I didn’t want to test that possibility right now; I’d managed to hang on this long.

I nearly lost it, struggling with the door handle; it turned out I needed to twist and pull at the same time to unseal it, then the pressure difference popped it open. Apart from the smell of sage, I noticed a slightly unpleasant scenti then realized it was just typical L.A. County air. I slid out and staggered to the nearest bush, and the next few moments were the least stressful I’d had all day.

As the pressure started to ease, my mind was filling with possibilities. All I needed was to scrounge up a movie camera somewhere, and the film world would soon be in an uproar. Incredibly realistic historical epics for just the cost of the celluloid. Dinosaur scenes that’d make Ray Harryhausen himself wonder how they were done. The ultimate in quality bootleg concert videos. And imagine what a determined investigative reporter could accomplish with a camera, a tape recorder and a time machine.

While I was at it I was sorely tempted to go buzz downtown L.A. in this thing, just for old times’ sake.

There was a half-familiar gurgling whooshing sound behind me. I turned and saw Argle climbing out from under the passenger seat. As I walked toward the car he got into the driver’s seat, shoved my pack out onto the ground and put his paw behind the steering column. The door closed itself and the IDIOT MODE light turned off.

Great, I thought to myself; even an otter from the future is smarter than me from now. I walked up and tapped on the glass. He made a shooing motion with one paw and placed the other paw meaningfully on the main field switch. I backed away hastily; he had a black singed-looking streak across the top of his head and a no-nonsense expression. I watched helplessly as he yanked down on one of the time daggers with both paws. There was a sound like a giant champagne cork played backwards and the weeds and bushes all jerked toward the place where the car suddenly wasn’t. Then the birds and insects all started up again and the world sort of went normal on me.

There was no physical trace of anything I’d just experienced, except for my dead car somewhere back in the desert. Apparently I was up a wild story without any proof.

Then I remembered the reference list and started going through my pockets.

As a child, at the end of a dream I would often try to grab something in the dream and take it back with me to the waking world. But whether I grabbed sticks, dirt, rocks, toys, money or whatever, it always turned out what I was clutching was part of the sheet, or my own arm or hair. Though even now I still felt it should somehow be possible, I’d never managed to drag any physical souvenirs awake with me from dream-time.

So it was with a once-familiar sinking feeling that I came up empty in every pocket. Then I pulled open my pack and there it was, a bit crumpled but quite readable: a long list of what appear to be legitimate publications, book titles, patents and contacts. These are some of the main ones. What do you make of this?

The following list is from the mid to late 90s and many of the mailing addresses are no longer valid. Try Google… they can run, but they cannot hide!

Rex Research, P.O. Box 1258, Berkeley, California 94701. Some 250 different photocopied folios of the original reference material on various ignored, suppressed or otherwise little used but highly promising breakthroughs in energy, transportation, healing, agriculture, unconventional water sources, gravity and weather control, and other areas. Catalog $2.00.
Now What, P.O. Box 768, Monterey, Califomia 93940. Unauthorized information: oxygen therapy, free energy and other exotic sciences, clean resources, transition logistics. $15.00/four issues, $4.00 each.
More Info on Oxygen Therapy

ECHO, a newsletter on oxygen therapy, is available from Walter Grotz, P.O. Box 126, Delano, Minnesota 55328. 8 pages, $2.00. Extensive references and case histories of successful treatments.
The Peroxide Story: Update on Oxidative Treatments and Remedies by George L. Borell, P.O. Box 487, Stanton, Califomia 90680. 83 pages, $7.00.
The International Bio-Oxidative Medicine Foundation (IBOM) Newsletter contains technical updates for physicians offering H2 O 2 therapies. P,O, Box 61767, Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas 75261, 817-48l-9772, Physician referrals $10.00.
The International Ozone Association, 83 Oakwood Ave., Norwalk, Connecticut 06850 (203-847-8169) has available Medical Applications of Ozone, the largest single volume on the subject. $50.00. (Ozone in water or blood forms H2O 2.)
The Use of Ozone in Medicine: A Practical Handbook by Drs. Siegfried Rilling and Renate Viebahn, Karl Haug Publishers, Heidelberg, 200 pages. English version: Medicina Biologica, 4830 N.E. 32nd Ave., Portland, Oregon 97211. $29.00. (Two of the physicians reporting complete cures of AIDS patients.)
See also the “Medica Media” subcatalog from Rex Research.

Free Energy

“Noble Gas Plasma Engine,” Joseph Papp, U.S. Patent #3,670,494.
“Permanent Magnet Motor,” H R Johnson, U.S. Patent #4,151,431 (one of many).
Suppressed and Incredible Inventions, by Al Fry, 9237 Craver, Morongo Valley, California 92256. $9.00.
The Manual of Free Energy Devices and Systems, Electrodyne Corporation, P.O. Box 11422, Clearwater, Florida 33516. $10.00.
Living Water: Viktor Schauberger and the Secrets of Natural Energy by Olof Alexandersson, Turnstone Press Ltd, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England.
The Sea of Energy by John E. Moray, Cosray Research Institute, 2505 South 4th East, Salt Lake City, Utah 84115. $22.50 (cloth), $9.35 (paper).
The Energy Machine of Joseph Newman: An Invention Whose Time Has Come by Joseph W. Newman, Route 1, P.O. Box 52, Lucedale, Mississippi 39452, 601-947-7147. $39.00.
The Principles of Ultra-Relativity by Professor Shinichi Seike, Gravity Research Lab, P.O. Box 33, Uwajima City, Ehime (798), Japan. $40.00.
Tesla Said and The Nikola Tesla Patent Wrappers, edited by John T. Ratzlaff, Tesla Book Company, P.O. Box 1649, Greenville, Texas 75401, 214-454-6819.
Rex Research has approximately twenty different folios on fuelless power sources.

Gravity Control

“Electrokinetic Apparatus,” Townsend Brown, U.S. Patents #2,949,550, 3,018,394.
“Secondary Gravitational Field Generator,” H.W. Wallace, U.S. Patents #3,626,605.
Ether-Technology: A Rational Approach to Gravity Control by Rho Sigma, Tarnhelm Press, Lakemont, Georgia 30552. $7.00.
The Gravitics Situation (Gravity Rand Report), Rex Research. $5.00.
Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program by William L. Brian II, Future Science Research Publishing Company, P.O. Box 06392, Portland, Oregon 97206. $14.95.
UFO’s and the Complete Evidence from Space: The Truth about Venus, Mars, and the Moon by Daniel Ross, Pintado Publishing, P.O. Box 3033, Walnut Creek, California 94598. $9.95.
“The Hans Nieper Gravity Papers,” Keith Brewer Library, Richland, Wisconsin 53581.
The Secrets of Flying Saucer Propulsion by Noel Huntly, Prescience Publications, 1330 1/2 Sutherland Street, Los Angeles, California 90026. $9.00.
The Cosmic Pulse of Life by Trevor James Constable, Merlin Press, P.O. Box 12159, Santa Ana, California 92712. $6.95.
Clear Intent: The Government Cover-up of the UFO Experience by Lawrence Fawcett and Barry J. Greenwood, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 07632. $8.95. (out of print).
Genesis by W.A. Harbinson, Dell. $4.50. (Fiction, but lists useful sources).
Liquid Electricity

Richard Diggs, Custom Invention Agency, P.O. Box 11, Carthage, Missouri 64836; patent process on hold, though he has over two hundred others.
The Conspiracy

Mae Brussell Research Center, P.O. Box 8431, Santa Cruz, California 95061.
Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World by Jonathan Kwitny, Penguin, New York. $8.95.
Out of Control by Leslie Cockburn, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1987. $18.95.
Inside the League: The True Story of How Nazis, the Unification Church, South American Death Squads, and the American New Right Have Joined Forces to Fight Communism by Scott and John Lee Anderson, Dodd, Mead, 1986. $19.95.
Blowback: America’s Systematic Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy by Christopher Simpson, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, New York, 1987. $19.95.
The Creation of World Poverty: An Alternative View to the Brandt Report by Teresa Hayter, Pluto mess, 1981, published by Longwood Publishing Group, 27 South Main Street, Wolfeboro, New Hampshire 03894-2069, 603-569-4576. $5.50.
In Banks We Trust by Penny Lernoux, Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1984.
Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom by Nelson Blackstock et al., Anchor Foundation, Inc./Pathfinder Press, New York; Vintage, New York.
Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA by Ralph McGehee, Sheridan Square Publications, P-O- Box 677, New York, New York 10013, 212-254-1061. $7.95.
The Warmongers and The Paper Aristocracy by Howard S. Katz, Books in Focus.
The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies by L. Fletcher Prouty, Ballantine, New York; Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffis, New Jersey (out of print). (CIA “controls” world.)
Spooks: The Haunting of America-The Private Use of Secret Agents (Wm. Morrow & Co., New York) and Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (Random House, New York; Ballantine, New York) by Jim Hougan (out of print).
A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Gas and Germ Warfare by Jeremy Paxman and. Robert Harris, Hill and Wang, New York. $7.95. (Is AIDS a weapon?)
Nomenclature ofan Assassination Cabal by William Torbitt (removal of JFK).
The Taking of America, 1, 2, 3 by Richard E. Sprague.
The Nazis Go Underground by Curt Riess, Doubleday Doran, 1943.
Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War by Clarence G. Lasby, Atheneum, New York (out of print). (Imported Nazis.)
The Great Conspiracy (Little, Brown, Boston) and Sabotage! The Secret War against America by Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn, Harper and Row, New York (out of print).
International Terrorism and the CIA by V. Syrokomsky, Prowess Publishers, U.S.S.R./Imported Publications, Chicago (out of print).
The Real Terror Network by Edward S. Herman, South End Press, Boston. $9.00.
The Great Heroin Coup by Henrik Kruger, South End Press, Boston. $8.00. (CIA and narcotics.)
The Crime and Punishment of l.G. Farben by Joseph Borkin, Pocket Books, $2.75.
The Glass House Tapes by the Citizens Research and Investigation Committee and Louis Tackwood, Avon Books, $1.75. (L.A.P.D, and Cointelpro.)
Many titles no longer available from publishers can obtained from Tom Davis Books, P.O. Box 1107, Aptos, California 95001.

Covert Action Information Bulletin, P.O. Box 50272, Washington, D.C. 20004, 202-737-5317. $20.00/four issues.
Citizen Alert, P.O. Box 51332, Pacific Grove, California 93950; $10.00 info package documents the “October Surprise,” the 1680 Bush-Reagan deal with Iran to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election.
Reality Engineering

Everything by Carlos Castaneda. Widely available. (Start with Tales of Power or The Power of Silence, unless you expect to have lots of time. And PLEASE note that Castaneda is considered by many recently to be kind of quackish and made it all up)
General Interest

Three-Testicled Tales of “Bob” by Rev. Yvonne Stang, Simon, Schuster & Shonuff.