Storm Over Saturn (16 page)

Hunter took two giant steps forward. Just as in the other places he'd been, he didn't bother to identify himself. He simply asked the question: "Do you know a man called the Mad Russian?"

The bearded man thought a moment, then let out another "Ahhhhh… yes! Such a valuable person. A true spirit in this world."

Hunter felt a glimmer of hope.

"Is he here?" Annie asked him. "Have you seen him lately?"

But then the tiny man shook his head and said, "No… in fact, I have never really set eyes on him."

Hunter was immediately bummed out again.

"Do you know where he is?" he asked the guru. "Is he on this… world?" Hunter hesitated using that term. But the little guy got his meaning.

He shook his head again, his beard rolling from side to side.

"From what I know, he is not," he said, in a high-pitched, singsong voice. "And has not been for many, many years. To tell you the truth, there are days, dark days, I agree, when I'm not even sure he exists. Is he a real person or not? How do we really know? Perhaps, as many have claimed, he is just an idea, something your hands cannot grasp, but only that your mind can hold on to."

"But I'm
sure
he exists," Hunter insisted, pulling out his yellow ticket and holding it up so the guru could see the faded photo on the back. "I know people who know him."

The little guy just smiled. "Then I can only tell you that your search does not end here. In fact, I think, it is just beginning."

The congregation all began nodding and bowing, as if the swami had just laid out one of the secrets of the universe for them. The little guy waved his hand, and the congregation dispersed, wandering in twos and threes back outside.

Annie slid down off the pillows. For once she was not smiling. She took Hunter's hands and squeezed them gently.

"I'm sorry, man," she said. "I thought if anyone would know, it would be this guy."

They turned to leave, when suddenly they heard the little man call them back. He indicated Hunter should climb the pillows, which the pilot did, but with awkwardness and great difficulty. Finally reaching the top, the guru motioned him closer. Hunter went right down to ear level. The guru started whispering to him, his voice suddenly much lower than before, his spiritual demeanor gone.

"Try the second next moon over," he told Hunter directly, sounding more like a wise guy bartender than a swami. "My boys have told me the Russian used to hang out there a lot."

Hunter was mystified. "Why didn't you tell me that before?"

The guy just shrugged, reached behind him, and came out with a huge cigar. He lit it and spat a few loose fibers of tobacco from his lips.

"I didn't want to bring it up in front of my fans," he said with a wink. "Can't ruin a sweet thing like this, you know?"

Hunter nodded in agreement, even though he wasn't sure what the guru was talking about.

"OK, then," he said. "Second moon over from here. Thanks."

"One more thing," the little guy said, grabbing him by the sleeve. "You ain't the first mook who's been asking for him lately."

Hunter was very surprised by this. "Really? Who else?"

The little guy blew a few smoke rings, then flicked his ashes all over his silk pillows. "I don't know exactly," he said. "A couple of real freaks…"

"You mean, like the long hair kids down at the concert?" Hunter asked.

"No," the little guru replied. "I mean real freaks. Tough guys. In funny uniforms. Scary dudes, in a way. I didn't tell them what I told you, though. I didn't tell them nothin' because I didn't like the way they looked. And they were a little lacking in the respect department…"

He blew a few more smoke rings and flicked his ashes again.

"What do you want to find the Russian for, anyway?" he asked Hunter directly.

Hunter thought a moment, then started crawling down the hill of pillows.

"I'm here to make him an offer," he said over his shoulder. "One he can't refuse."

Hunter and Annie returned to the concert site via a ride on the back of a truck leaving the ashram.

Night was beginning to fall. Music was still being played. The crowd was more mellow now, after all the excitement earlier in the day. Play time was over though. Hunter thought it best to get back to New York City and figure out his next move from there. He wanted to start the flight before the daylight was completely gone.

Luckily, the field was clear enough for him to get the Jenny off the ground. Rushing down the improvised airstrip, he pushed the old biplane into the air and quickly gained altitude. He swung back toward the concert site to give Annie one last look at the happening below. She was disappointed that they were leaving, disappointed that she had not helped him find the Mad Russian. Even bummed out though, she looked pretty.

Hunter flew low over the crowd one more time, intent on making a long, slow turn back east, toward NYC. But then suddenly, something inside him started buzzing. His whole body began vibrating. What was this? Similar to his built-in radar, this sensation came to him when he knew something was wrong. But what could it be? The airplane was flying fine. Annie was strapped in and OK.

Was it something below?

He banked around again, flying even lower over the crowd. The people below reacted with cheers, but Hunter's highly advanced vision spotted two unusual characters in the crowd. And these two were just about the only ones not looking up at the airplane. Instead, they were roughly pushing their way through the knot of concertgoers.

The pair were wearing strange outfits, but not in the same style as most of the kids below. These were uniforms. Black, with red trim.

Solar Guards
...

Hunter freaked out. He landed back in the field as quickly as he could, scattering some concertgoers and mystifying Annie.

These two must have been the pair the swami had told him about, he thought. Jumping from the cockpit, he ran back down to the concert area as fast as he could. Annie was behind, yelling at him to slow up, but he couldn't. He arrived on the edge of the crowd and scanned it in the growing dusk, looking for the two Solar Guards.

But there were tens of thousands of people in the natural bowl; from ground level it would be impossible to pick out just two. He jumped up onto the stage, now vacant, and studied the crowd intensely. But again, sheer numbers and the growing darkness worked against him.

The two Solar Guards had disappeared.

With their plans changed, they slept under the plane's wing that night, wrapped together in a borrowed blanket, holding each other tight.

Hunter was surprised that he was actually tired; for some reason he didn't think he would get tired here, in this crazy fantasyland. But after studying the strange night sky for a few minutes, and thinking about the ramifications of spotting the two Solar Guards earlier, he drifted off into a deep slumber. He awoke only once during the night, this to find that Annie had taken off all her clothes and was now pressed against him as tightly as she'd been back in Adventure Land.

Hunter smiled for what seemed to be the first time in eons, then went back to sleep.

When they awoke in the morning, they were surrounded by hundreds of sleeping kids who had also taken advantage of the landing field as a good place to spend the night. Hunter hated to do it, but he woke most of them by starting the very noisy engine on the Jenny. They all politely moved out of his way as he and a very sleepy Annie took off again.

He flew low and slow, scanning the road full of departing concertgoers in hope of spotting the two Solar Guards again. But it was no use. There were just too many people down there. Plus, he couldn't imagine the pair of SG thugs wanting to mix with the young flower children—or they with them.

After a while Hunter just gave up and climbed in altitude. He finally turned east and lay on the throttle. That the Solar Guards were also looking for the Mad Russian was a very disturbing development. It could only mean that they knew the ancient Communist was the only person left in the Galaxy who could actually foil their plans of manipulating the Big Generator.

This only increased the pressure Hunter was already carrying. There was no alternative: he had to find the Mad Russian before they did.

They returned to the airfield on the edge of New York City.

Annie was full of questions on the ride home, yelling them back to Hunter every half minute or so. But he was reluctant to give her any answers. He certainly didn't want her mixed up in anything having to do with the Solar Guards.

She noticed the change in him, though. As soon as they landed, she told him he looked "permanently bummed." He apologized, trying to explain to her that his carefree trip here had now taken on a more sinister edge. And yes, that was enough to bum him out—permanently.

He had to find the next ticket booth and move on. He didn't want to leave Annie; he'd become very attached to her. But duty called. Where would the ticket booth be? In a city the size of this re-creation of old New York, there could be thousands of places. And his quadtrol wasn't much help.

But Hunter got an idea. He asked Annie to lead him to the biggest museums in the city. The search took most of the day, but they finally found a museum dedicated entirely to modern conveniences. Inside, they found a PC, one that accepted his thrice punched admission ticket. His hunch had been right. It was a ticket booth in disguise.

He typed his way past the security walls and up came the familiar questionnaire. He filled in all the fields, including the one about his hobbies. The old PC churned for what seemed like an hour before finally declaring itself ready. At last, everything was set for him to go. According to the English-language box in the comer of the screen, the next ride was called Land of the Lost.

He turned back to Annie. She was crying. Somehow she knew that none of this was real—not
really
real. And he remembered the message she'd given him at the end of the first attraction. But to take her with him now was out of the question. Even if she could go with him, it was way too dangerous.

Maybe that was the point…

So he took her in his arms, kissed her, and held her tight for a very long time.

Then, without her seeing him do so, he reached down and hit the Enter button. 

He was falling.

Tumbling…

Out of control.

Hunter tried to get his wits about him, but it was hard to do. There was darkness all around. All he could see was an inky black sky above and very dark shadows below.

He'd spent so much time inside flying machines, his body could tell just how high he was by the thinness of the air and the sensation of the air pressure around him. Both of these indicators came to one dreadful conclusion now: he was about a mile high and dropping very, very fast.

What went wrong? Had he jumped to a moon that was no longer there? Or had it moved off its orbital plane for some reason? Or had this been a trap all along?

He began falling faster.

What could he do? He was the Wingman, but he didn't have wings. Flapping his arms would be a ridiculous way to spend his last few seconds of life. But he just couldn't go limp, either.

He managed to right himself somehow, which from his point of view, was body horizontal, head down. He was wearing his flight suit again, his boots, his crash helmet. He ripped open the front of his suit, allowing the air to collect underneath. This slowed his velocity, but only by a tiny fraction. So he would impact going thirty-one feet per second per second instead of Nature's well-established thirty-two?

What good was that?

All this fussing and physics took time, and before he knew it, he could see the ground, his splat spot in sight. But then something strange happened. What was below him was not rocks or hard ground or even water. He wasn't sure what the hell it was. But in the last instant before impact, he realized maybe it was actually…
soft
.

He hit a moment later. It felt like his spine had come right up out of his skin. But at the same time he knew that if he could think at all, the fall had not killed him. Not immediately anyway.

He hit hard on something soft—hit and kept on going. Down ten feet, fifteen, twenty. Finally he stopped burrowing and shot back up, all this happening in the span of a second or two. Next thing he knew, he was in the air again, fifty feet high and tumbling once more. He came back down, hit the surface hard again, bounced a second time, then finally came down for good.

Now it felt as if his heart was coming out of his throat. How could he have survived such a fall? And what the hell did he fall into?

He lay there for a full minute, waiting for his ticker to start beating normally again. Facedown, he had the taste of old cloth in his mouth. Finally lifting his head, he realized he was lying in a pile of cloth. Hundreds of separate pieces of it. Different colors. Different textures. But all just about the same size.

It was still dark out, but he managed to grab of few of these things and hold them up to his eyes.

Socks?

He grabbed another handful. This time, big ones, small ones, white ones, black ones. But they were indeed socks. Not the artificial pliable plastic type worn by the people in the Galaxy today. Rather these were the simple cloth foot covering used way back in Hunter's previous-previous life, back in the twentieth century.

How crazy was this?

He worked his way to the top of this pile and realized that his landing had not been such a miraculous event; he hadn't landed serendipitously into the only pile of these things on this new, very strange moon.

Instead, the entire moon seemed covered with them. For as far as his eye could see, horizon to horizon, the surface was nothing but socks.

This was nuts, of course, and Hunter knew there was no way the Mad Russian would be found here. He quickly retrieved his quadtrol and asked if it could locate the next ticket booth. It quickly replied, "No." So much for the spy's navigation information. Hunter asked the quad if there were any man-made objects on this moon. The answer came back: everything here is man-made. A stupid question.

Finally he asked if there were any computers close by. The device snorted and burped for a couple moments and came back with a reply that yes, a computer was almost in sight, just about a mile away. Hunter got to his feet and tried to walk as best he could in the direction indicated by the quadtrol, but it was no dice. The mountains of socks were just too loose, too soft to support his weight. It would be impossible for him to hike on top of the piles to get where he had to go.

He would have to crawl.

This was obviously another example of the Mad Russian's sense of humor. But Hunter was not laughing at the moment. His only saving grace was his belief that all the socks around him seemed clean. As if they'd just been washed. Of course, that was part of the joke.

He asked the quadtrol what else was unusual about this crazy place, this as he was crawling along. The reply was: no two socks were the same. They were all socks, but they were all just one half of a pair. Interesting… but why?

After a while Hunter was reduced to crawling up and rolling down the mountains of socks, this as the day began, and sunlight appeared, this time out of a totally false, yellow sky. The new glow just confirmed what he already knew: that there was nothing but socks everywhere he looked on the strange little satellite. All of them missing the other mate.

It took him what seemed like hours, but he finally spotted the ticket booth. It was at the peak of an extraordinarily high mound of mismatched socks, standing next to an ancient washing machine-clothes dryer combination. His only clue as to where he was going next was a sign on the booth that read: Next Stop: World of Mirrors.

Hunter climbed up to the booth and booted up the PC. He quickly filled in all the applicable fields, then took another look around.

Thousands, millions, billions? of socks, all without mates? An ancient washer-dryer. Land of the Lost?

Even as he hit the Enter button, he had to admit, he still didn't get the joke.

An explosion…

Yellow flames. Red. Orange. Then pure, pure white.

Hunter was tumbling again, but this time across very hard ground. His head was going over his heels and was bouncing viciously off anything that got in his way.

Even worse, whenever he bounced, he seemed to stay in the air way too long—long enough to see that he was bleeding from his hands, his knees, from his head and ears. He burst through a cloud of smoke to see that he was tumbling down a hill in the middle of a massive battlefield. Churned-up sections of ground, water-filled bomb craters, and flames were everywhere.

He finally bounced one last time and landed—hard—on a battered roll of barbed wire. It was coiled like a spring, which, lucky for him, allowed him to spring right off, only to land in a pool of putrid water. Suddenly all his wounds were being stung by numerous filthy liquids. He rolled himself out of this disgusting puddle, and the next thing he knew, he was tumbling down another hill, colliding with many other things, all of them big and sharp. More barbed wire, depleted shell casings, discarded military equipment. Bodies…

He came to a stop again, finally, at the bottom of this hill. Only then could he see the top of the slope where he'd started his great fall. An aircraft of some kind was up there, burning furiously. He'd been in a crash; a bad one, but he'd somehow survived.

"I guess that was one aircraft I
couldn't
fly," he muttered painfully.

Startled though he was, he tried to make some sense of his surroundings. For as far as he could see, there was nothing but devastation. Horizon to horizon, the smell, the taste, the feel of death and war. Hunter was familiar with these things.
Too
familiar. But never had he seen anything like this.

He took all this in over just a few heartbeats before a huge explosion went off not fifty feet away from him. He put his face in the mud just in time to allow a small storm of shrapnel to go over his head. No sooner had his eardrums popped when another blast went off, this one to his left. Then another, just north of him. And another, right in front of him.

What the fuck kind of ride is this?

He was breathing in the mud now, and thankful for it. The ground was moving like he was floating on water. He reached up and felt his left ear. Blood was pouring out of it.

This was not good.

He managed to roll over on his back. Eyes looking straight up, he could see a formation of huge airplanes passing overhead. Strings of bombs were falling from their bellies. Quick but fuzzy calculations told him the bombs had already passed over him. They fell a half mile away, but he could still feel the ground rumble as each one hit. He was sure another wave was coming over, though. He could already hear the airplanes, and their bombs whistling through the air, heading right for him.

Damn…

He began crawling up the hill, thinking this was the most likely path to safety. But he was surprised to see four men carrying a stretcher coming down the hill toward him. At the same moment, the air was suddenly filled with small arms fire. Bullets zinging back and forth, sizzling as they went by. Then mortar shells began landing all around him. Then artillery shells.

Then the aerial bombs hit.

The ground shook with such ferocity, Hunter swore he could feel his bones breaking simply from the concussion of the bombs hitting so close by. They went on exploding for sixty long seconds, some not one hundred feet away. Somehow they all hit around him, missing him completely. But he couldn't imagine anyone within a quarter mile being able to survive.

Yet when he looked up, he was astonished to see the four men with the stretcher jump up from the smoke and continue racing down the hill toward him, undaunted. Gunfire began again. The stretcher bearers ducked and zigged and zagged their way through the blizzard of lead apparently intent on retrieving Hunter from his very precarious position. And somehow they made it. That's when he saw the large red crosses on their armbands. They were medics. And at that moment, he was damn glad to see them.

They jumped into the crater next to him and without a word began tending his injuries. A bandage was quickly applied to his ear. Two more were applied to his leg wounds.

One of the medics shoved a pill into his mouth; another unloaded a gigantic load of something from a giant syringe into his arm. A second later, Hunter felt his body begin to rise off the bloody, muddy ground.

Morphine
...

There was nothing else like it.

Everything got different after that. No more pain. No more worries. No more war, battlefield, muck, or yuck. They put him on the stretcher and began lugging him up the hill. The bullets were still flying all over the place, but they sounded like notes on a violin as they went zinging by him now. The four stretcher bearers, tripping and scrambling in their ascent, were showing uncommon bravery in the face of near-certain death.

Somehow they reached the top of the hill and managed to dive for the relative cover of a trench beyond. Hunter's stretcher fell to the mud of the ditch, the four medics fell on top of him, protecting him from the artillery bursts that came in just seconds later. It went on like this for at least five minutes, but even more so now, the explosions sounded like the kettle drums in an orchestra to Hunter, thanks again to sister morphine.

Finally the symphony of fire and steel played itself out, and it became eerily quiet. The medics lifted themselves off Hunter's battered body and tended to his wounds again. His bandages put back in place, they picked up the stretcher and began hoofing it down the trench.

Ten minutes later, they reached a dugout, basically a man-made cave cored out of the mud and rock on one side of the trench. Within was a makeshift field hospital. The medics put Hunter's stretcher down just outside the door.

"You will make it," one of the medics told him. "They will care for you here."

That's when Hunter focused his eyes again. He saw the four medics looking down at him, grim smiles all around. Their uniforms were so dirty he thought they were gray, but now he realized they were actually blue.

Then he noticed something else. Each man had a silver badge over his left breast pocket. Hunter did a double take. The badge was a twisted cross, a vaguely familiar symbol.

A swastika?

He cleared his mind of the painkiller just long enough to make sure he was actually seeing this. But it was true. Their badges were swastikas. And even though his memory was clouded over by his 5,000-year time transportation and all of the interdimensional travel he'd been taking since, this memory stuck with him like super glue from his former, former life.

High as a kite or not, swastikas meant only one thing to him: these soldiers were Nazis.

Again, ever since Hunter had started on this long journey of his, he'd been able to remember bits and pieces of his long-ago past, back in the twentieth century. He knew he was a fighter pilot, that he loved a woman named Dominique. That back then, he'd been called the Wingman. That he was a patriot. That he loved his country. That he had fought for it many times.

But very unpleasant memories had made the jump with him, too. Fragments of the enemies he'd fought, people who'd spewed hate and disorder. People who'd killed close friends of his and who'd tried to take over the beloved land of his birth, the United States of America.

Of all these enemies, and there were many, he might have despised the Nazis the most. Their brand of hatred for people of other races was despicable. Their belief that they were somehow better and therefore entitled was just plain wacky. They were
so
bad, the Russians even hated them, possibly more than Americans. But the Nazis were also very, very dangerous, and back then, Hunter had vowed to stamp out every last one of them. And, he believed, he'd come close to achieving that goal.

But now, they were here in this dizzylando, this very weird place. The question was, why?

He lay on the stretcher for about ten minutes. In that time, he came to realize his wounds were actually superficial and in no way serious. He was still very, very high, though, and even when he saw another wave of huge bombers go overhead, and saw them drop their bombs, and heard those bombs falling, and felt the ground shake when they hit, it didn't faze him. Just another selection from the symphony.