Infante nudged his Magnum's front axle against the big tree with that little extra whump that said, "grandstander." Old Tom Kelley and I knew that, but Howard Scortia was duly impressed. The lumberman had come to see a hundred and fifty feet of Oregon fir harvested in sixty seconds and Kelley knew, between Infante and me, who was more fun to watch.
"Clear?" George Infante's voice rang from his polycarbonate bubble amplified and more resonant than his usual soft delivery.
"Clear," I sang back, louder than necessary for Infante, whose audio pickups could strain a voice out of the screech of machinery. I was grandstanding a little, too, for Kelley's sake.
Everyone jumped when Infante triggered the spike driver. Ten thousand pounds of air pressure will slap your ears when it's shooting a ribbed spike ten inches into a living fir trunk.
All I did was position a quartz fiber strap around the tree just above the paint mark; but it was a crucial operation if the hinge was to sit tight. I dodged out between the tree and one of the eight-foot Magnum tires. Then I ran.
When I replied to Infante's "Clear?" again, I was still sprinting. I knew he wouldn't wait for me to get entirely clear before querying, and he knew I wouldn't make him wait. Machismo, maybe; stupidity for sure. Though Infante had been with us only six months, since November '85, he and I could judge each other pretty well.
Infante's reflexes were honed like microscalpels, or else he started the stripping a nanosec before I cleared him. I scuffed forest humus on Mr. Scortia's boots as I slowed to a stop. He didn't notice; with everybody else, he was watching those gangsaws strip the fir.
Imagine a gang of curve-bar chainsaws arranged in a circle, mounted pincer-fashion on an extendable beam. They're staggered so they won't chew each other up as they pivot toward the center, and God help what's in the center. The saws are run by airmotors, making whoopee noises but with low fire danger.
Infante's eye was good. Correction: it was perfect. He ran his gang of banshees whooping up that fir trunk like a squirrel up a sapling, and branches rained all over the Magnum Seven. Infante had his steel cage flipped over the bubble and stared straight up through the falling junk, hands in his console waldoes, judging how close to strip the larger limbs.
Then he pulled what heavy equipment operators call a Mr. Fumducker, a piece of mechanically amplified horseplay that looks cute if it works, and kills somebody if it doesn't work. He topped the tree.
The Magnum could bring the tree down top and all, gentle as praying. But George Infante, without a line or any other control, topped her so fast she didn't know which way to falland that's what makes it horseplay. With six saws chewing at once, any one may bite through first and it's possible the thing will flip. Or it could drop vertically, a great fletched pile-driver on the operator below. And that would ruin Mr. George Infante's whole day, cage or no cage. For an instant, Kelley lost his smile. He muttered, "Barmy little bastard," not loud, but not joking.
Infante hauled the beam back so fast the pneumatics barked, made an elbow of the beam, and sideswiped the top as it fell. My eyes are good, too; I knew Infante could hear admiring feedback from Mr. Scortia's men because he was grinning. I liked the Magnum system; it did a heavy dude's job with precision. Infantewell, I think Infante liked what he could do with it. The distinction didn't seem large until you had to repair an overtaxed Magnum.
Mr. Scortia rumbled, "Thirty seconds," and I saw him holding a big antique timepiece; railroadman's watch, if I was any judge. I craved it instantly. He stood watching the gangsaws, now stilled, form a ring near the fresh stump a hundred feet up the fir.
But Infante could do that without looking; he was that good. Meanwhile he had his other waldo working the big left front extensor with its single huge chainsaw. Infante flicked the extensor back toward him, the saw snarling as it engaged. He was cutting the tree in one long swipe like a man sawing his own leg off from in front.
He stopped the cut at precisely the right instant. Mr. Scortia obviously expected the tree, all fifty tons of it, to come thundering down on poor little hapless George Infante. Kelley and I knew that poor little hapless George was nearly home free.
As Infante lowered the tree, our simple brawny hinge kept it from kicking off its stump. The entire trunk came down lamb-quiet and Infante placed its upper end in a yoke amid the rearmost of the Magnum's three axles. Time: fifty-seven seconds. I knew we had sold our first Magnum.
I also knew Infante had goddamn-near dented his. In haste to make a record stripping he had left a stub branch long enough that, as he lowered the tree, the stub slammed his cage with shivering impact. Well, I thought: if I can't teach you caution, maybe that will. I'd hate to see you graunched.
If Kelley noticed he wasn't letting on. Infante magicked the hingepin out with his little extensor. With feet and his other hand, he maneuvered the Magnum several ways at once.
The Magnum's third axle is remoted by a telescoping spiral stainless tube. The idea is to provide mass, leverage, and steerability with the remoting axle and yoke. When Infante had the remote axle tucked closer, he quickly swung the Magnum's legs down. Then, carrying a hundred thousand pounds of cellulose on the hoof, Infante's Magnum stood up and walked the hell out of there. No cheering this time; just unhinged jaws.
The ambulatory feature of the Magnum is mechanically simple, with pneumatics. But feedback circuitry is fiendishly tricky, and nobody made it really work until Kelley learned to calibrate it for a given operator. It's a mite humbling the first time you see it work on heavy equipment. Infante didn't need to walk her out, but a demo is a demo; with one eye on his rear video, he chuffed over a rise and out of sight.
Kelley listened to the turbine doppler down in the distance. "Instant toothpick," he said, chuckling. "Oh: Keith?"
I glanced around. "Sir?"
"Run down with the Six and help George pull a postops check"he eyed me significantly"and then grab a beer at the shack."
I grinned to myself at the word. Howard Scortia's geodesic dome was hardly a shack: more a statement of life-style according to the Prophet Fuller. If Mr. Scortia liked making statements of that sort, he was probably an ideal customer for Kelley. With ecology an enshrined word, the big lumber interests were helpless when government annexed "their" private rights to forest, range and watershed. The Department of the Interior might single out a lone prime tree for harvest, and threaten your license if you clipped a twig from the tree next to it. The hallowed jargon was shifting. It was harvesting, not loggingand very selectively. Snaking was only for pulp cellulose, since it damaged prime logs to drag them with a chain. You didn't snake, you toted. And the Kelley Magnum was just the rig to do it all.
I headed for my rig, the Magnum Six, which I herded around when I could get her to walk straight. The Seven had more flexible programs and better stability in walk mode. The Six had developed an intermittent malfmalfunctionwe couldn't fathom. Kelley wanted it checked out before the Six put a foot wrong and leaned on somebody a little. Eight tons of alloy with the blind staggers isn't much of a selling point. I started the turbine, which was down near the pressure pumps. It was the pumps that did everything; tried-and-true airmotors powered the wheels, gangsaws, and most other subsystems. Like Lear and Curran, Kelley knew when to bluesky and when to opt for standard hardware. That's why he had a working Magnum while AMF was still doping out system interfaces.
I found Infante playing with the damned tree as he tried to balance it upright at the loading ramp. Given time, I think he could've made the big fir stand alone. For a few minutes, anywayor until somebody nudged it.
He saw me smile and interpreted it correctly: funny, but only as an idea. Impassive, he rolled back and let the huge log fall. Its butt kicked up nearly against the Seven. I silently cursed Infante for gashing the prime wood he had harvested, and risking his vehicle. But his pneumatics coughed, the nearside legs literally bouncing him safely away. That little lunatic could move.
"Kelley sending in the second team?" Infante's deceptively mild voice came through my com set.
"Wants us to check out the Six andI'll tell you while we do it," I said. Ordinarily Infante was happy to drive while I inspected mechanical bits; George at his console, all's right with the world.
But now Infante flatly refused to handle the Six further. "If you ask me, that thing belongs in a straitjacket," he snarled. "You drive; I'll check the leg rams for binding."
As we went through the checkout, I wondered if it were only my imagination that made the Six seem more tractable for me than for Infante. Or maybe his low boiling point interfered with his fine touch. But even granting some difference, the Six had problems. Why did the bloody thing stagger? The malf was systemic, I decided: not traceable to any one leg. I hardly blamed Infante.
If Infante was an operator at heart, I was basically a troubleshooter. I'd had most of a five-year B.E. in systems engineering before I learned, during summer work, to make fast money highballing an earthmover. Dumb stunt, but I dropped out and chased the bucks. I wanted to design and build and race against the best Formula cars, and I didwith just enough success to keep me broke and hoping. I was exactly right for Kelley's operation after I sold the race car: just enough experience in vehicle systems, and just sick enough of myself to want somebody to believe in.
It was easy to believe in Tom Kelley. He did his own things, but they were useful things like the Magnums. Having helped him through some bitchin' chassis development problems, I had more time in our two prototypes than Kelley did himself. He was lean and mean for a sixty-year-old, but had the sense to trust younger synapses. They weren't helping me find the malf in the system, though.
Finally I gave up on the checkout and signaled my frustration to Infante. "I could use a ride in something that works," I added, nodding toward the Seven. "Let's see if Scortia really has that beer."
Infante scrambled down from his handholds on the Six. "But why doesn't my Seven act up the same way? They both have the same parts."
"Mechanicals, yes," I hedged. "The differences are mainly in that solid-state stuff Kelley dreamed up."
Pausing before swinging into the Seven's bubble, Infante gave me a wink full of fatherly wisdom. "That's where your malf is," he husked.
I gave a damifino shrug and followed. Those wise nonverbals seemed funny on Infante, but I didn't laugh. When he suspected you were laughing at him, George Infante was not likable. I preferred him likable. He wasn't quite my bulk, two years my senior, with big brooding eyes bordered by the longest lashes I have seen on a man. Women didn't seem to mind his macho ways. I liked him too, when he wasn't overcompensating for looking like a small latin angel.
We rolled back to the Scortia dome and Infante put the Seven into a run as we neared the place. Kelley and I had discussed the theoretical top speeds of the Magnum in walk and wheel modes, and it was Kelley's dictum that we would not try to find out until he'd sold a few. Infante must've been secretly practicing high-speed runs, though: we were not merely trotting, we were running hard and crabwise as we neared the dome. Infante tooted, in case anyone failed to see us approach. The toot was redundant. Kelley and Mr. Scortia stood in the doorway, Kelley's face a study in feigned satisfaction. Infante went in for his beer. I sat in his harness a few moments, figuring how he had obtained that angled gait. Infante was given to unpredictable moods and furies, an abrasive man for teamwork. But as a solo operator he was brilliant.
As I entered the dome, Mr. Scortia handed me a beer, holding it like a fragile toy in his great paw. "I hear good things about your ways with machines," he said.
Infante started to respond, realized the lumberman was addressing me, and quickly turned away. I said, "It may be a case of their having a way with me, Mr. Scortia."
I perched on a stool near Kelley, who mused, "Keith and my machines are easy to figure: they think alike."
Scortia chuckled from somewhere deep in the earth. "That's why I need him, Tom." I glanced up; so did Infante. Kelley missed neither look. There was a moment's utter silence.
"As I said, Howard, it's really up to Keith," Kelley said. He looked alternately at me and Infante. "Howard Scortia wants to chop costs by having his operator trainees learn here on the job. And only from our best man. That's you, Georgeor you, Keith. As an operatorand I'm being up front, with you bothGeorge, you're so good it scares me." I caught the gut-level truth of that, though Kelley's glance at me was bland. "Another month in a Magnum and you could enter the effin' thing in the Winter Olympics!"
We all laughed to relieve tension. Scortia lifted his beer in silent toast to Infante, who seemed less edgy now. The big man put in, "But I asked who trained you, George. And who's the best on-site consultant for maintenance gangs." He turned to me. "And Tom says they're both Keith Ames."
Kelley said wryly, "Keith, I explained we need you on assembly interfaces at Ashland and he could forget about borrowing you. And this Neanderthal says we can forget about the five Magnums while we're at it . . ." Kelley went on banking his rhetorical fires. Five Magnums! Too attractive an offer by far. Scortia was not a bigger name in the Oregon Cascades only because he liked to manage all his operations. If he sprang for a handful of Magnums, everybody from Weyerhaeuser on down would follow suit.
I half-listened to Kelley drip drollery instead of excitement. Like Scortia, Kelley was self-developed and knew his best operational modes. Kelley had started as a cards-lucky kid in the Seabees and never lost his fascination with heavy equipment that functioned with precision. But he also had an eye for what the equipment was all about, the massaging of man's world. When he realized the future of glass fibers around 1950, he sank a month's poker winnings into Corning and didn't regret it. By the time I was born he was building military runway extensions and saw what was about to happen in air travel. He got fatter on Boeing, then on fluorocarbons. Finally he saw he was still gambling with paper when he wanted to do it with hardware and his goofy solid-states. And he took his twenty million right in the middle of the recession and sank it into man-amplifier systems. The Magnum was his heavy bet.
"I know what your contract says, Keith, but I also know what I told you. And if Howard Scortia doesn't take Magnums, his competitors will," Kelley finished, whistling in the dark.
I swirled my beer, thinking. "Well, it's nearly June. By the time we have enough Magnums, there'll barely be time to get 'em in full operation before the rains." Scortia nodded; in Western Oregon you aren't a native until your gill slits begin to function. "Fifty days of familiarization. I can lift down to Ashland in an hour if you need me," I said to Kelley.
"And what if you have to start training with only one Magnum," Kelley asked softly. Infante was perfectly still, listening to something in his head.
"Add thirty days," I hazarded. "I don't see how we can spook up a new Magnum before July, though. Unless somebody slips a cog and we sell a proto."
Now Scortia laughed openly. Kelley made a rueful face: "Guilty as charged, I guess. Keith, I promised him the Seven."
"When?" Infante's question was soft but his corneas were pinpricks in his eyes.
"Is she a hundred percent now?"
Infante hesitated. Kelley glanced at me, and I nodded. Kelley spread his hands. "Then she stays here. Anything wrong with that?"
"I hear rumors you're the boss," I grinned. What bothered me was George Infante. I wished I could read behind those eyes.
"One thing," Scortia said. "Could I hitch a, uh, walk to my Cottage Grove office? I want to enjoy my Magnum before she gets all scruffy. A walk through town is more than I can resist."
"I can resist it," I said, counting off on my fingers. "No street license, too wide for state code, and a risk of equipment, for starters."
He winked, "I'll take care of any problems. I want my new rig under my office window for a few days."
Somehow I had never thought of the Magnum as a status symbol. But there it was: the kid in Howard Scortia was loose in our toyshop. "I believe this man has it worse than we do," I said to Infante. "Promise you won't kick any Buicks?"
"It's your show," Infante replied easily. "Why don't you tote Mr. Scortia downtown?"
I was glad to; we had no experience in real-world traffic yet, and this was underwritten. But as we sauntered out to a chill afternoon breeze, I filed a question away. What made Infante so ready to divorce his amplified self, the Magnum Seven? Whatever had been behind his unreadable expression, it had changed when Scortia asked me to park the Seven in town.
I highballed down from Scortia's site to the interstate freeway in an hour, keeping to the verges with all subsystems fully retracted. That way we made a package twelve feet wide, thirty-two long, and scarcely ten high. It was only a bit cramped in the bubble, though I'm average size and Mr. Scortia is a fee-fie-foe-fum type. Naturally we picked up a patrol cruiser as the Seven walked chuffing into town. When he heard the beeper, Mr. Scortia waved joyfully. The cruiser was almost as massive as Caddies of the old days, and dwarfed normal traffic. Yet from the Magnum it seemed a bantam, challenging the cock of theahwalk. Whoever said, "Power corrupts . . ." maybe I should give him his due. Sacrifice a goat to him or something. I was uncomfortable with the thought that, momentarily, the police seemed insignificant. Walking a Magnum is walking very, very tall.
The police beeper and beacon went off; the cruiser drew alongside and the big man made sign talk to the effect that this was his rig and Gawd, Nell, ain't it grand? They didn't stop us, but they didn't leave us either. My rear video was full of cop cruiser from there to the Scortia offices.
Once in his parking lot: "Waltz us around, this is private property," he said. I did, while he watched me. I knew my first trainee would be Howard Scortia and smiled, wondering how many miles he would perambulate his Magnum around that space in the next few days. Then we set the operator harness for the Scortia bulk and got a half-assed calibration for his particular combination of synapses and rhythms. Once an operator is thoroughly calibrated you can insert a program card for him into the console. But for a new operator, the calibration is rough. Under the lumberman's control, the Seven lurched a few times just as the Six did, until I set the verniers again.
By nightfall my trainee could amble around with reasonable safety. I keyed all extensor subsystems for access only by primary operators, so I wouldn't worry about Scortia accidentally shoving his remoting axle through a brick wall while I was in Ashland. Then he hauled us all into Eugene where we feasted at some place called Excelsior. Then we met a copter at the river and lifted down to the Ashland plant.
Infante, Kelley and I stayed at the plant awhile, burping quiche Lorraine and debriefing. Kelley made notes. Infante shuffled call-ins before deciding to answer a miz and arranging to be picked up. To my surprise, he asked if I would make it a foursome. To my further surprise I said OK. I wanted to say good-bye to a miz, expecting to be gone awhile, and thought it would be less a problem if I did it in company. Besides, it did not seem the right time to make George Infante feel rejected. So much for Keith Ames, boy psychoanalyst . . .
I don't know how long the phone buzzed before I lurched up from a maelstrom dream and slapped the "accept" plate by my bed. I said something nonaccepting.
"Always the last place you look," Kelley grated, not amused. I lay back, glad I had no video on my phone, and tried not to breathe hard. It hurt. The light hurt too. I kept my eyes shut. "How long've you been there?"
I thought for an eternity, and even that hurt. "What's the time?"
Kelley delivered a word he keeps for special occasions, then, "Eight-fifteen, and time you answered my question!"
"Ihonest to God, I don't know," I moaned. "Mr. Kelley, I need time to think. I feel rotted away."
"You may get fifty years to think while you sure 'nough rot away," he said, and my eyes snapped open. Whatthehell now? "Keith, if you're not at the plant in ten minutes you can handle this mother alone! Uh, you're not hurt?"
"I'm mummified. But I don't think I'm"
"Move your ass, then! And walk. Up the alley. All the way." He slapped off.
Once on my feet I felt better, but nauseated. I struggled into a turtleneck and coverall, nearly passed out while putting my boots on, and shouldered past my back door wishing I had something to barf up. Whatever was wrong, it was screwed up tight and twisted off. I had gone three of the six blocks down my friendly informal alleys when I heard police beepers heading down Siskiyou, and so fuzzy-minded I didn't connect them with Kelley's call.
Tom Kelley opened the alley gate himself and hauled me in with desperate strength, as though the plant meant safety. Maybe it did. Hurrying to his office, he held my sleeve as a truant officer had, once. He kept gnawing his lip and muttering. I began to feel well enough to hit somebody. Infante, maybe; what had I been swilling?
Halfway through a skull-ripping question-and-answer session with Kelley, I was still trying to get his drift when the phone buzzed. The close-cropped curls of a lady cop flicked onto Kelley's video. Kelley made the right decision: yes, I was with him and no, I wasn't their man, and since I was in no condition to visit the station, could they come to the plant?
When police lieutenant Meta Satterlee arrived, I was trying not to spill mocha on the table every time I shuddered. Satterlee reminded me of a loose-jointed math prof I knew. She asked for a blood sample and took it herself, expertly, but I fainted anyway. They both eased up then. The police already knew where I'd been until midnight, from a talk with my miz. Some of it came back to me. I hadn't been drinking heroically, but somehow I got a gutful of something so potent, Infante took me to my apartment. That's all I knew. "Maybe Infante can shed some light on this," I said.
Kelley and the cop exchanged a wry look. "A meeting devoutly to be wished," Satterlee replied, savoring her line. "Mr. Kelley has been less than completely open with us up to now, but I think we can all benefit if I can see some personnel files." She raised a questioning brow toward Kelley, who mooched off through the deserted offices to hunt up our files.
Satterlee sat on the table edge, swinging one trousered leg. It was quiet for a moment, except for the ball bearings someone was grinding in my head. "I'll accept as probable that you didn't know about the APB out on you," she said at last.
"Who told you that?"
"Did you?"
I realized Tom Kelley had known even if I hadn't. "No." The leg began to swing again. "I woke up withuhbuzzing in my head, and something seemed all wrong, and I got up and walked down to the plant like I usually do."
"Uh-huh. You usually run down alleys every Saturday morning?"
I raised my head, not wanting to shift my eyeballs, and almost managed a smile. "If I had tried to run, lady, my body would've simply disintegrated. You have no idea how I feel."
She caressed the blood sample. "Not at the moment," she admitted. She added something under her breath and left quickly, returning without the sample. I wondered how many cops were milling around in front of the plant. Hell of a public image.
Kelley spread a pair of folders on the table. Satterlee took them, evidently speed-reading, then tapped one with a finger while looking off into the office gloom. Then she said, "I have to take some risks in this business, Mr. Kelley. I'm taking one on you now: are you certain Ames is not involved?"
Tom Kelley stared his best two-pair bluff straight into her face. "Onehundredpercent."
She registered faint amusement. "I'll settle for ninety-five," she replied, "if I can place him in your custody."
A nod. I looked from one to the other. "Will you goddamn kindly tell me what has happened," I asked. "A hit and run?"
"Altogether too good a guess. Using that vehicle of yours."
I was slow. "My Porsche?"
"Your tree harvester," she said tiredly.
I put my hands over my face. "Oh dear goddy," I said. Infante!
Satterlee went on. "I'm from Eugene; we have a copter waiting . . ."
"Hold it," I said and looked up, alert. "Where's the Seven?" Satterlee was slow this time. "The Seven. The Magnum. My bloody tree harvester," I cried, exasperated.
"Mr. Infante seems to have it at the moment," Satterlee said, "and we have nothing that can catch him." She saw my alarm and went on quickly, "Oh, we'll take him eventually; and I understand your concern over your new machine. But right now I wish there were somebody else with a similar vehicle."
"There is," Kelley said. He jerked a thumb at me.
Satterlee taped my statement as we lifted north to the Eugene-Cottage Grove strip city. She began to leak the story as she had pieced it together and Kelley glumly watched wet green-black forest and fogwisp slip below the copter. Editing out my questions and some inevitable back-tracking, Satterlee put it roughly this way: "Sometime around three A.M., a poker crowd in Cottage Grove heard chainsaws ripping through a third-floor wall nearby. All they knew was, it was one awful racket for a few seconds. This was near the city limit where the cities are snarling over jurisdiction.
"Turned out someone was after a payroll in the Daniel mill. Don't ask me what it was doing there on a Friday night, some of these old outfits keep a bushel of raw cash around with only a steel-faced door between themselves and bankruptcy. About eighty-five thousand in cash was taken, minus the change.
"Then a Eugene prowl car spotted something proceeding east at high speed. The officer gave chase. Very excited. Said the thing ran on legs across a suburban mall but that he was catching it.
"And then it caught him. It evidently grabbed his cruiser near the front window and picked it up, judging from the debris, and threw two tons of prowl car into the Safeway front window, setting off the alarm. And incidentally," her jaw twitched once, "killing the officer.
"We were fit to be untied after that hot-pursuit crash. A bright cadet found oval depressions big as coffee tables in the mall and surmised it truly was a hellacious big machine on legs. Road blocks all negative. Then Pacific Tel reported vandalism on some old phone lines over a street in the east outskirts of Cottage Grove. Something tall as a telephone pole took the lines down like a grizzly through a spiderweb. But no oval tracks. Then a drunk convinced us there was a gaping hole up on the Daniel Building.
"From then until now, it's been our biggest Chinese fire drill since the Bowles escape in the Seventies. A Mr. Howard Scortia reported the theft of his Magnum from his very own personal parking lot in the night, and you can imagine the confusion then." Kelley and I swapped miserable chuckles. She continued, "When we realized he was talking about a big vehicle instead of a handgun, we first hypothesized Scortia was involved. But he had some things going for him: an alibi, a local rep any politician might envy, and the nearest thing to a genuine speechless rage I ever expect to hear. He put us in touch with Mr. Kelley. I was already airborne so I lifted for Ashland.
"We got some fingerprint ID's then, but prints can be planted. Mr. Kelley couldn't believe either of his top operators had done anything offbase, but he gave us a pair of names. The Ashland force is very sharp. I suppose it helps when they know everyone in town."
She gave a little snort. "Oh, yes: there's a traffic control officer in Cottage Grove who verified that Scortia could've driven your monster machine. Said officer is in deep yogurt for failure to report your attractive nuisance meandering through congested traffic yesterday. If he'd logged a description in, we'd've been hours ahead."
I explained the traffic incident, adding, "There are lots of odd agriculture rigs. Since we didn't by-God disturb traffic, maybe he dismissed us as just another new plow or something."
"He may shortly face another kind of dismissal. I can't even guess all the ways your new plowshare can be used as a sword."
I was in a better position to guess. Even in darkness, Infante could use infrared video to guide an extensor through a hole in a wall, using his gangsaws. I didn't see how an extensor could scoop up cash, but since Infante's prints were in the cash room, that one was simple enough. He had shinnied up the duralloy beam and personally ransacked the place. "If he filled his plenums first," I offered, "he could do it all on air pressure for several minutes without using his turbine. Quieter, except for going into the wall. You could park nearly a half-block away and run the gangsaws out to a wall, so long as there was room to extend the remote axle as a balancing moment."
Meta Satterlee broke out a sheaf of faxed maps, confirming that Infante could have done it that way. "Your inferences are awfully good," she said, "for someone who hasn't seen an aerial map of the scene."
"Maps," I yelped. "You have charts of the terrain east of here?"
She did. Kelley came alive then, and we began tracing the likely paths Infante might take. Satterlee was optimistic about the Six and called to get its fuel tanks topped off by Scortia's crew. As we swung up a valley I could see Cottage Grove to the northwest. Copter lights blinked in and out of a low voluptuous cloudbank advancing on us from the Cascade range. Patrol copters were running search patterns with IR, radar, and gas analyzers, but had turned up nothing promising. That wasn't surprising, our pilot announced. The Cascades are so steep, with so many sources of heat and emissions to check, it might take days to find a Kelley Magnum. Especially if Infante was smart enough to minimize the use of his turbine. The heavy weather front made it worse. It doesn't rain all the time there in May; only half the time.
It was an hour to lunch when the copter whirred down in the clearing next to the Magnum Six. Satterlee shook her head in dismay, perhaps beginning to realize the full destructive potential of the beast we hunted. With lifting heart, I saw Scortia in the Six's bubble, manfully trying to hotwire her ignition. Standing alert in the drizzle were a dozen of his gang. Not one lacked a shotgun.
While I checked out the Six and filled her plenums, the others lifted to Scortia's dome to confer with remote units by com set. My head was clear by then and, best sign of all, I was hungry. I highballed back to the dome and was met outside by an oddly different Meta Satterlee.
"Whether your friend Infante is working alone or not," she said, "I'm happy to report he is not your friend."
"Where were you yesterday," I grumped.
"It's where the Ashland lab people have been that'll interest you," she said, matching strides with me toward the dome that shed rivulets of Oregon rain down its faceted flanks. "You, sire, were drugged like a horse. Ahit's safe to say you didn't brush your teeth or gargle this morning."
"Jeez, is it that bad?" I tried to smell my own breath.
"Could be worse, dear. Somebody hypoed more alkaloids into your toothpaste, and made an interesting addition to your mouthwash."
"For Christ's sake! What for?"
"To zonk you out the minute you became functional again. A cute little notion favored by the Families back east, I'm told. Which ties in nicely with George Infanteif you call that nice."
"Mafia?"
"Splinter groups of it. The man with George Infante's fingertips was believed to be wheelman on a major crime last year in Gary, Indiana. Not arraigned; lack of evidence. They gave him a long, long rope and it led here. Nice of 'em to warn us. Oh, hell, too much of that and I suppose we'd have a police state."
Infante a getaway driver: it figured. The sonofabitch was a natural. I began to shake with anger as well as low blood-sugar. In the dome I calmed down with sweet coffee and eggs served up by Scortia himself. My only cheering thought was that Satterlee seemed to be accepting my innocence as very likely.
A burly captain of the Oregon Highway Patrol mumbled with Satterlee over the high-relief area charts. He had some trouble with her gender; not because she was all that attractive a miz, but because she insisted on doing her job like any other cop.
Reluctantly he offered her a heavy parcel, which she pocketed. "Pretend you're using a carbine," he said. "Forget about long leads or aiming high. And watch that recoil," he sighed, with a glance at her narrow shoulders.
"I've qualified with boosted ammo," she said a bit crossly. "I only wish we had some of the new API stuff."
"It's coming from Salem," he said helplessly. "Can you wait?"
I interrupted her negative headshake as I approached their work table. "I still don't see why Infante tried to poison me when he could've just as easily cut my throat," I said.
"He wanted you alive but on ice," Satterlee explained. "My guess is, he didn't expect to be seen, and thought he'd have until Monday before we connected the payroll job with a missing Magnum. Since you could've done it as easily as he did, he wanted you as a live decoy. By the time you were on your feet, he could be back in Ashland, maybe having switched your mouthwash. Then he could wallop himself with his own drugs and have a story at least as good as yours. He just didn't plan on his murder spree."
The OHP man rasped, "Sure as hell didn't shrink from it."
"Lieutenant, you really think George Infante planned to stick around after the job, with his known background, and put his word against mine? Does that make sense?" I asked.
Satterlee tapped a finger against the projection of the Three Sisters wilderness area in impatient thought. "Not really. From the profile we're developing on him it's hard to say. I could give you a long academy phrase for Infante, but let me give it to you without the bullshit: I think we're dealing with a crazy man."
"Foxy crazy," the captain reminded her. "We may never find out how he got from Ashland to Cottage Grove so fast; and you don't know how he got a fix on that payroll. But he damn well did it. And unless the forestry people are crazy too, he tried to get up here to your other unitthe Six?early this morning."
This brought Howard Scortia onto his feet, his stool over backward. It suddenly occurred to me that this old gent had started in his business when it was a brawler's job. "You didn't tell me that," he roared.
"Betcherass I didn't." The OHP man grinned. "You'd be chasin' around up there with a willow switch"
"And my eight-gauge!"
Kelley spoke up from his well of gloom. For the first time since I'd known him, he was sounding his age. "Barring luck, Howard, you might as well have one as the other. They're right, it's plain stupid to go after the Seven without special weapons. But what's this about it being around here?"
Infante was no longer roaming the heights above us, but there were fresh prints skirting a nearby ridge, and they hadn't been there the day before: prints only a Magnum's feet could make. I calculated this would've been about dawn if Infante went crosscountry. And he would not have kept to the roads. Infante wasn't that crazy. "One thing sure," I said. "Infante didn't intend to switch to the Six. Hell, he won't even operate it, he thinks it's hexed. Maybe he wanted to destroy it."
"Probably something scared him off," the captain said.
"Beats me what it would've been," Scortia mused. "I called and put a crew on guard only after I realized my Magnum was gone, around eight A.M. or so."
"Damn, that's right." Satterlee was tapping like mad. "This is rough country; knowing it halfway is infinitely better than not knowing it at all." Scortia nodded. "What if he wasn't interested in the other vehicle?"
"Then why come up this way?" This from Kelley.
"I don't know. He could buy time by evasion in these wilds. He probably has the money with him. All he needed to do was ditch the vehicle and catch the valley monorail to Portland. Unless he had further plans for the Magnum!"
Kelley and I burst out talking, convinced she had doped it right. The OHP man was vehicle-oriented, sending us back to the relief charts with: "If that thing can do only seventy on wheels, how does he expect to escape in it?"
One answer was, he could select a mountain lake and ditch the Magnum in it. But he might not get it back. A second was, he had a rendezvous with an equipment carrier within fuel range of the Magnum. The third answer was that Infante was nuts.
If it were number one, the Magnum was already underwater. I didn't think Infante would drown his alter ego. If number two, we might try searching every road that could accommodate a semi-rig or transporter. And if number three, logic could gather dust on the shelf. Infante might be reasonable all the way, or some of the time, or not at all. Or he might change modes every time a bell rang in his noggin. The OHP and Eugene forces were patched into the captain's neat com set and, given time, would have all the people needed to comb the area. But Satterlee decided against waiting and prepared to lift up to some nearby lakes in her copter, to check on the "drowned Magnum" hypothesis.
She had already lifted off when the OHP announced paydirt. A hint from copter radar was followed in dense fog by a highway cruiser. An old diesel transporter was stashed away not far off Highway 58 near Willamette Pass. It was on firm ground, fitted with wheel ramps, and had jacks under one set of duals but nothing evidently wrong to justify the jacks. It could have been there a week or more.
We heard Satterlee's cool contralto ask for a stake-out at the transporter, and she was trotting back to the dome a few minutes later. "This looks likely," she said, "but could Infante have parked it himself during the past ten days? It's crucial: he may have help in this, and there are"her gaze flickered past me"complications if a second equipment operator is in on this."
I knew, but let Kelley think it through for himself. Satterlee would value it at zip, coming from me. "Yes," Kelley said slowly, "last weekend. We all knew we'd have both Magnums up here for the Scortia demo."
"So did fifty people in my organization," Scortia rumbled. "It wasn't exactly a state secret."
Satterlee smiled, a brief sunburst of good teeth. "Which gives us fifty more suspectsbut no matter. The patrol officer took microscan prints from the transporter, and we can get positive print ID by video." She was standing as if relaxed, but if I had said boo she would have ventilated me by reflex action. I realized Satterlee had returned with the idea that somehow I was, after all, tied in with Infante. I liked her, and I didn't like her. Perhaps it was just that I couldn't blame her, but I wanted to.
I walked to the coffee pot, a huge old veteran that had seen campfires long before it saw the inside of a geodesic dome. I was nervous as a rabbi in Mecca, knowing that Meta Satterlee was gauging my every move.
Then the com set displayed a pair of apparently identical thumbprints. Eugene confirmed: George Infante had recently driven the transporterand placed the jacks, too. The OHP man whistled. Satterlee shook her head wonderingly. "This little man has had some busy days, and some luck. How much is the Magnum Seven worth, Mr. Kelley?"
"Six hundred thou," Scortia replied instantly, accusingly.
"Or to some other firms, ten times that," Kelley answered the accusation.
"No telling how much it might be worth to factions of the underworld," Meta Satterlee said. "Keith Ames, I apologize for some reservations about you. I didn't say so, but . . ."
"The hell you didn't, it was all over your face. `Act natural, Ames, or I'll letcha have it,' " I said, aping the old Bogart style.
She tried not to grin, failed, then sobered. "Sorry. But you have been in rough company. Bear in mind that your Mr. Infante has intimate connections among the Families."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning his reference groups are pretty restrictive," she said. "More simply: he is as likely to care about most human life as he is about a bug on his windshield. I don't want you to be in any doubt about that."
"Why me, especially?"
"Because this weather front is going to impede air search for days. Because Infante might run across dozens of hikers or workers during that time. And because you're the only person trained and able to cut that time short, if you're willing to be deputized to run him down with me."
It was Satterlee's idea to use the transporter as a jumpoff point, and mine to run the Magnum Six in wheel mode up Highway 58. We estimated that Infante could already be nearing his transporter after several hours' head start in heavy rains across the Diamond Peak wilderness area. There were no navigable trails short of the highway, so we'd be unlikely to cut him off. If we simply trailed him, we could only learn what he'd done after he'd done it. Better, thought Satterlee, to intercept him. I had a half-formed notion I could reason with him if we managed to confront him from a position of more or less equal footing. I believed as Satterlee did; real or spurious, the equivalence of the two Magnums might alter Infante's plans to muscle his way through, leaving still more grief in his wake.
Kelley was right; with no load but Satterlee and her riot gun behind me in the bubble, the Magnum Six exceeded seventy miles an hour on level stretches. An OHP cruiser ran interference for us most of the way and at two P.M. we were at Infante's transporter. The lone stakeout man was considerably more nervous when we left him, having seen from ground level what kind of vehicle he was to stop. Satterlee's ammunition did not fit his weapon. His orders were to blow tires if possible, then aim for the air plenums. Without a prime mover Infante was only a hundred and sixty pounds of maniac, instead of eight tons of it. Or he could make it sixty tons if he chose to use a tree for a battering ram. Satterlee put in an urgent call for more help at the stakeout. They were promised within the hour.
Satterlee made an obvious target perched up behind me. If he had a weapon capable of penetrating the bubble, and if his own bubble were raised, Infante might bushwhack us from cover. She saw the logic of hunkering down in the equipment hopper. She didn't have to like it. I could receive police frequency, but dared not reply and we had not thought to patch in an extension for Satterlee outside the bubble. Infante could monitor us, and I didn't want him hearing my voice or the strength of my signal.
A damnable dialog kept looping through my head. What would I do if I were Infante? The refrain was always . . . anything at all. Still, Satterlee made sense. If Infante did something really wild it would probably impede him. If her quarry were smartest he'd he most dangerousand he'd rendezvous with the transporter.
I went to walk mode en route to a knoll a half-mile from the transporter. Poised on the forty-five-degree talus slope, sliding only a little, I heard a patrol copter pass in the low overcast. A few moments later a strong negative report signal reached my com set. And if they couldn't detect us with our turbine running, they might pass over Infante the same way. The ugly handgun Meta Satterlee gave me seemed like useless weight in my coverall. I had more confidence in the boosted slugs her riot gun carried. Though far from muscular, she handled herself with grace and confidence. The twelve-gauge would be a double armful but she was one smart, tough miz and I never doubted she could use it. If she got the chance. Trouble was, Infante was sheer entropy on wheels; one of those people who lives on uncertainty.
We shifted vantage points twice, getting further from the transporter as we eased toward where we thought Infante might approach. As I walked the Six carefully to keep the pneumatics quiet, my hopes went in both directions. It was like preparing for a race in chancy weather, you don't know whether to count on rain or shine, so you choose your equipment and hope. And get the butterfly-gut syndrome. And you live with it.
I was on the point of suggesting another move when Satterlee made a startled motion. I followed her outstretched hand and saw George Infante scrambling into his harness, not half a mile off in a creekbed. The Seven had been therehow long? I wondered if he knew we were there. It seemed he didn't; he came up from the gully on legs, but cautiously. As the Seven approached the transporter, Infante showed less caution. Satterlee guessed why.
I accelerated for the transporter and saw exhaust pluming from its old diesel. "He has it running," Satterlee shouted, pounding on my bubble. "He took our man out! Go, goddammit, go!"
I reached the road and went to wheel mode just as Infante vaulted from his Magnum. It was already on the transporter, but he hadn't chocked or strapped down. When he saw us he stiffened in recognition as if from electric shock. We were already too near for him to reach the cab-over. I wished we'd waited until he got started; a Magnum can outrun a transporter and eat holes through it.
Infante opted for his Magnum, pouring back into his harness as we neared shooting range. Ever see a quarterhorse rear back? When Infante rolled backward off that ramp, he went to walk mode so fast the Seven actually went up on her hind legs before setting off down a ravine.
Satterlee risked a shot and missed, nearly falling with the recoil. We exchanged glances as I whirled the Six on wheels down a gentler incline, hoping to snag Infante with something. Both of us saw the terrible, bleeding lump of meat wearing tatters of a police rain slicker. Infante had run over the stakeout man. I hoped it was after he was already dead.
I broke radio silence and called for everything in Oregon. Then I brodied as hard as I could. Infante had neatly suckered me into building up velocity downhill and had his magnificent, deadly goddamn Seven running backward toward the road.
I stayed in wheel mode but without pausing to think about it, momentarily engaged the legs to stilt us over a narrow gully. It saved us a few seconds. I dared not give Infante time to select a tree or he would have a bat and we, the baseball. We reached the road two hundred yards behind Infante and both Magnums went howling toward the main highway, turbines like sirens. Satterlee somehow put a shot directly into Infante's rear video sensor. To me it looked as though the sensor had simply exploded. Infante raked his duralloy gangsaw beam back, elbowed it, and made it a shield for his bubble. I saw a long clean scar appear along the beam as Satterlee fired again. She might as well have hit a bridge pillar.
Infante saw the patrol cruiser's flasher before we did; he crashed off into the brush parallel with the road. I shouted a warning on my com set. Too late. As the cruiser rushed toward us, Infante swept his extensor beam out across the road and the driver barely had time to duck before a set of wailing gangsaws took away his windshield and roof. They tell me the officer lived.
I had gained over a hundred yards. On a hunch, I motioned Satterlee out of the way and manipulated my beam out ahead about fifteen yards. What would I do if I were Infante? Run that third axle back as a feint to make us swerve, maybe. I hoped he would, so I could hook onto it and set my brakes.
Craning his head back as he reached the road, his rear video only a memory, Infante saw my strategy. Then he saw the campers. Ahead, parked in disarray along the shore of a small lake, a group of Oregonians were going about the lovely business of fishing, rain or no rain.
Satterlee shouted something. All I caught was " . . . hostages!" If Infante got among those poor devils he could grind all but one to powder and still have himself a ticket out. He turned sharply but had to avoid an arroyo. I stilted it, by God, something I could still teach him. Then I held my breath and drove straight through a grove of aspen. Both Infante and I saw that I had the momentum. I might, could, I surely would ram him scant yards from the nearest camper. I shouted for Satterlee to jump.
Angling his course off behind the parked vehicles, Infante unlimbered a silenced handgun and fired through his bubble. A mistake; the polymer turned the slug and gashed his own bubble. Then he swung his duralloy beam out as if to sweep three kids and a woman toward him. It probably would kill them outright, at the rate he was moving. Racing parallel with him, a covey of horrified campers screaming between us, I lashed my extensor out and parried his with a jolt that nearly tore me from my harness. With a cry of anger, Satterlee flipped clear of my rear wheels. Her riot gun got thoroughly graunched, but it proved one thing: the slug it fired in the process blew out the right rear tire on my remoting axle.
Infante's gangsaw extensor waved in an arc, bent at its elbow. In one wild swing his gangsaws cut a swath through the back of his bubble. My parry had sideswiped the length of his duralloy beam, taking limit switches with it. For the first time, now, Infante had a real mechanical malf. Those switches prevent the beam from swinging back to hit the vehiclebut only when they work. Infante ducked away from the shards of plastic that spewed around him in his bubble, then turned away from me as he stopped the extensor beam.
I thought he intended to run, but instead, he fired at me through the hole his own gangsaws had made. A hole appeared in my bubble with the toll of a muted bell. The slug stopped on its way out. I thrust my gangsaw beam ahead as a shield and tried to accelerate, intending to ram him from behind. Part of me was scared puckerless, remembering what Infante would do to a man. And part of me, looking past that bullet-hole, just didn't give a good goddamn. Now I saw I could engage his rear axle if he slowed, or pursue him toward the lake if he went ahead. In either case he was beyond taking hostages. I rolled smashing through a litter of unattended camp equipment, boats and all. Infante ran for it in wheel mode, not realizing the trouble I had just to move straight with that deflated rear tire. I saw I would have to give it up, and went to walk mode faster than I thought possible. The Magnum Six leaped up on her legs with hard pneumatic coughs and I ran her straight at him. Still on wheels, looking back without his rear video, Infante laughed as he easily outdistanced me.
And found himself boxed.
He faced the lake on the right side, and an almost straightup bluff on the left. Fifty yards ahead, the bluff came to the water's edge. It was thirty feet up, much too vertical even for a Magnum. And directly behind, I loped the Six with a spine-jarring stride. She staggered, but she was highballin'.
Infante risked going into the water to get around the bluff. Another mistake. It was a steep dropoff and even with her right-hand legs on full extension, the Seven tilted over at a dizzy, crazy angle. Her turbine swallowed water and seized explosively with a flashing exhaust spray. But he still had his air plenums. Popping his bubble back, Infante set his gangsaws howling as I raced down on him.
I ran my duralloy beam out and above him like a great arm to wave him back as he leaped and clawed up the brush-covered precipice, money spilling from his jacket. His gangsaws moaned just over my bubble and continued the arc Infante had programmed. He saw my beam and made a lightning decision to dive for the lake. With no limit switches, his beam elbowed at precisely the wrong angle, George Infante met his own gangsaws in mid-air.
Kneeling at the lake's edge, I lost the meal Scortia had fed me. Satterlee had the decency to let my brief spasm of heaves and tears pass before she approached. I washed up in the icy clear water and stood shaking, judging the path of Infante's murderousand suicidalweapon. It was still swinging in the same arc. There was no danger to me, so I climbed the chassis to the ruined bubble and flicked off the pneumatic valve switches. I did not look at the gangsaws again.
Satterlee refused to let me rig a sling on the Seven until a crew arrived to make the necessary police videotapes. I couldn't argue with a bruised miz who had, in a way, poked out Infante's eye when she obliterated his rear video. I owed her. I would've kissed her if she hadn't been a cop. After the first camera passes, the police asked me to move the Six back a bit, and I made myself think about something else. It had been gnawing at me since my first inkling that Infante himself was erratic.
And in a half-hour I isolated the malf in the Magnum Six. I erased all calibration programs, including mine and Infante's, and carefully recalibrated myself. The campers watched me with suspicion, unaware that I was only making a checkout. Well, maybe I played a little, running backwards and essaying that slanting gait Infante had used.
When Tom Kelley arrived in the police copter, I had good news. "Hey, your new solid-states in the Seven did more than you thought," I hailed him. "They damped out a malf that we put in, ourselves."
As I explained, Kelley furrowed his brow. "But it doesn't work that way," he complained. "Dammit, it won't program a random error, Keith."
I nodded. "I didn't say it was random. In some complex way it was predictable and not a random aberration. It was picked up and integrated by the multigraph functions monitoring his behavior. I checked out in the Six first; but remember, Infante was the first one you calibrated closely because his reflexes were so sharp."
Kelley was silent for a long moment. "So I built in a malf that the damping circuits cured in the Seven. Huh! I'm smarter and dumber than I thought I was. Well, we don't know enough about psychophysics, but systems theory should'a told me," Kelley grumbled. "When you have a sane man who overrides a master control, the real master control is the man. That's why you were better in the Six than Infante was."
"Come on," I said, remembering Infante's panache in a Magnum.
"Infante was flashy; you were predictable, Keith. Your manual override was really a mental override. That makes a malf fundamentally a feedback-correctable item. No wonder Infante thought the Six was nuts, it was feeding his own aberrations back to him amplifiedworse than it was for you. That kind of feedback might push a man over the brink; I dunno. I do know that the original malf was Infante."
I gazed out on the lake, where calm gutty Meta Satterlee watched police gather most of eighty-five thousand dollars in bills, like leaves on the quiet water. "I wonder if his malf could've been traced," I said.
But the real world is not a neat circuit. As the OHP captain predicted, we never learned how, or even if, George Infante managed so much by himself. Nor what plans he had for the Magnum Seven.
Kelley's crystal ball wasn't bad, either. By the time I trained Scortia's operators, there were Magnums enough to go around and orders enough to please him. Kelley got his bonus in media coverage. And I got mine. It cost Howard Scortia a bundle to get his pocketwatch duplicated.
I had no idea, when I wrote "Malf," that fourteen hundred miles away and twenty-five years later I'd be a resident of my protagonist's little Oregon town, remanufacturing a vehicle called the Magnum. The similarity stops with the name, however. My real Magnum has only four wheels, weighs 1300 pounds, and uses carbon fiber, balsa/glass sandwich, and a bit of titanium. It has no turbines, no walking mode, and definitely no chainsaws. In any encounter with any self-respecting Oregon fir tree it would lose, big-time. So much for the real world!
A lot of tree harvesters are available now. So is a machine called a "spade," which can dig out a fifty-foot tree with a largely intact root ball almost eight feet across. The spade can tote that tree to another location and replant it. Technology isn't always the environment's enemy.
Ready for the real coincidence? I have a friend named Kelley, a grad student when I wrote the piece, and in a field largely unconnected with engineering. We lost track of each other for many years but we met again recently. Kelley is now an executive in a firm that produces very large advanced vehicles with lots of wheels, pneumatics, solid-state controls, and oh yes: turbines.
Perhaps I should write a story in which I get younger, more talented, better-looking and very, very rich. Stay tuned . . .