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14

 

An hour and a half of fast travel later I stepped out into a concourse crowded with people looking like travelers have looked ever since home got to be a place to get away from. I saw a few lads in dark uniforms standing here and there eye-balling the scene, but the uniforms were gray and had MVNT CNTRL lettered on their pocket patches. But they packed guns, just like real Blackies.

There was a railing on the right, and below it a spread of pavement with a rank of big torpedoes lit up like Christmas trees. Little cars like U-dodge-ems were ducking around between them, ferrying passengers. I went along the gallery, took the down escalator. Two of the men in gray were standing at the bottom looking at faces; two pairs of eyes lit on me. I felt them all the way down and across the tarmac, but it must have just been my conscience bothering me. They let me go.

I crossed the big glassed-in concourse full of people and flashing lights and noise, went down a sloping ramp and was outside, under open sky. There weren't many people here. In the distance, the city lights were a jeweled wall.

The signs here weren't much help. Over on the left, beyond half a dozen sets of what could have been roller-coaster rails, something whooshed and a low-slung vehicle riding on two fore-and-aft-mounted wheels came slamming down the track and stopped and the lid popped up and a fat man and a thin woman got in. It racketed off and another one came down the line and curbed itself.

There was a low rail between me and the cars. I jumped it, went along a narrow strip that looked as if it might not electrocute me; I went around the back of the car and put a hand on the door and behind me a cool voice said, "Stop there."

I turned around, not too fast. Two gray uniforms were coming over, relaxed, taking their time. One of them said, "Movement control," and the other one said, "Step over here." No pleases and thank-you's for these boys.

I came around the car and across in the indicated direction. The one on the left went past me toward the car, which put me between them and a yard from his partner. I doubled my fist and hit him low in the stomach and grabbed the front of the gray blouse and swung him around. The other one had heard something; he came around, reaching for his hip. I threw his friend at him and socked him in the throat and vaulted into the car and slapped the big red button and the wheels screamed and I was off.

* * *

For the first hour I drove with my shoulders tight, listening for the sirens or whatever they might have thought up to replace them in this new, improved-model world. Then I had a thought that cheered me some. This was an Autopike; the coppers probably had ways of pinpointing any vehicle operating on it anywhere—as long as he was locked into the system. But I was on manual. As long as I stayed with the pack, there was no way to pick me out—maybe.

I held the car at 200 mph for five hours. About a hundred miles northwest of where the little map unrolling on the dash screen said the sprawl of light called Chago was, I pulled off on a lay-by marked with big arrows of luminous rose paint. Inside my left jacket cuff there was a plastic button Minka had put there to fool the scanners. I ripped it loose and tossed it on the floor. Then I flipped the controls to AUTO and hopped out. The car jumped off from the rail and curveted on her two wheels along the metal strip in the road, angled out, and joined the main lane, picking up speed fast, running empty. She went over the rise howling, with her controls pegged at top emergency speed. I went over the guard rail and down a grip on the edge and felt for a toehold and started down.

* * *

By the time the sun was an hour in the sky, I was five miles north of the pike, working my way through a swampy patch toward higher ground north and west of me. The years had made a lot of difference in what had been farming country and tame woods back in my hunting days. Now it had the look of a forest primeval. The oaks and elms and maples were four feet across at the base, and there was a new tree I'd never seen before, a tapered, smooth-barked conifer that probably all started from a salted nut dropped by a tourist along the roadside. It was late in the year, later than the temperature would make you think. Leaves were already turning red, and the smell of fall was in the air.

This part of the route was easy; I steered by the sun, stayed away from the right-of-way of the few roads I came to that had cars on them. It seemed that the national passion for touring the country in the family station wagon had finally worked itself out. People either stayed in their hives, close to the buttons they needed to push for life's necessities, or did their traveling by air or cross-country tube. I saw a few high contrails, and once a copter whiffled past a mile away at treetop level; but whatever the boys used to sniff out fugitives wasn't geared to a guy without the little telltale set in the bone back of the ear. I was an untagged man, and as invisible to them as an Indian was to General Braddock.

Just before noon I crossed a strip of broken concrete with a rusted sign fallen on its face that seemed to say US 30 A. As well as I could remember the map, that would put me somewhere to the east of Rockford. I had a full set of blisters, but otherwise was holding up swell. The leg gave me a little trouble, but Minka had told me that I was walking on the best permanent-oil titanium alloy hip joint money could buy, so I let that thought console me.

Late in the afternoon a pair of copters came pretty close, crisscrossing the country to the north. They seemed to have a general idea where I was, and that worried me some; but maybe it was just coincidence. They worked their way on to the east and I had the world to myself again.

Just before sunset I came up onto a clear stretch covered with concrete foundations and broken-down chimneys and a few walls still standing, well blacked by a fire. Letters cut into a piece of cornice from what would have been the town's best building said BRODHEAD NATIONAL BANK. That put me over the line into Wisconsin, about thirty miles south of where I wanted to be.

I spent the night there, on the back porch of a brick house at the north edge of town. It wasn't that it was more comfortable than a nest in the woods, but maybe by then I was getting a little lonely. And even in ruins, the little town was something that was almost familiar.

I went on before the sun was up, hit a little stream west of the town, followed it northwest. About noon I saw an airplane, a short-coupled job with vertical jets that made a big noise and curled leaves in the tops of the trees. It went past, a quarter of a mile north of me, moving slow enough to make me stand under a tree and pretend to be a natural formation. A few minutes later, I crossed another road trace and was into rising ground. I picked a route along a ravine between wooded ridges and in the next hour hit the dirt three times when little one-seater aircraft came whistling over at low altitude. It began to look as if the Blackies were closing in on me. How, I didn't know. There didn't seem to be any posses combing the underbrush with dogs so far; that was something. I went on, keeping to cover now. But I was starting to feel hemmed in.

* * *

By midafternoon I had crossed three ridges and was coming down into a valley that had a half-familiar look. The trees were a hundred years bigger than they should have been, but otherwise it all looked just the way it had the last time.

I couldn't exactly place the last time.

I went on down to a gravel strip that had been a road, thought it over and tried the left-hand direction and ten minutes later recognized the turn-off that led up to Musky Lake.

Things got a little more rugged after that. Twilight was coming on, and it was chilly up here on the high ground. There was a lot of loose shale that made the footing tricky, and the light was no help. It took me an hour to reach the top of the ridge. The growth was heavy here. I picked a route back toward where the road sliced through and saw a light through the trees and hit the dirt. It seemed that Musky Lake wasn't the unspoiled wilderness it was in the old days, after all.

I counted the lights shining through the dusk. There were eight of them, spaced at regular intervals on the other side of the rise of ground ahead. I was still admiring this view when something big and dark with lots of blue and red navigation lights whiffled overhead and disappeared over the ridge. The place I was heading for seemed to be a popular spot with the airborne set—and the look of the jobs I'd seen spelled military.

In front of me, a deep black shadow angled across my route, the same gully that I'd bridged once with a pine log. The log was gone, and I had to go down through a healthy growth of brambles to get across it, but up ahead was the ridge, and on the other side of it was the spot I was aiming at. I made it in another five minutes and pushed my face out between broken rock to take my first look at what had been the prettiest spot this side of Wales, with the lake in the center like a star sapphire laid out on green velvet.

It wasn't like that now. In the late twilight I could see trees that thinned out for fifty feet down the rocky slope to a stretch of open ground a hundred feet wide and a cluster of buildings beyond, all of it lit like a prison yard on hanging night.

* * *

It was full dark now, with no moon. A couple more copters had flitted overhead, and a big VTOL job had made a noisy descent a couple of miles away, on the other side of the valley.

I backed off below the ridge line and started around. An hour later I was on the east side of the valley, looking up at a tall building with lots of windows with lights behind them, and fenced grounds all around. The rest of the enclosure seemed to be nothing but virgin forest. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to wall in a patch of woods no different than the seventy miles of the same thing I'd traveled through for a day and two nights getting here. Maybe the place had been converted into a private resort for the big shots of this day and age. The big building would be the ritzy hotel, and the blockhouses over on the other side were the servants' quarters. And the air traffic wasn't looking for me; they were ferrying the rich tourists in to enjoy a rustic weekend back of a wall that kept the peasants out.

It was a swell theory, but I still kept my head down and looked for the angle.

It took me half an hour to find a route in the dark. The old drainage ditch, choked level with weeds, was it. It wasn't over two feet deep where it went between the lights. I hugged the dirt and did it with my fingers and toes, an inch at a time. Fifteen minutes of this put me far enough inside the lights to risk sticking my head up. The coast was clear. I moved off in the cover of some deep grass to take a closer look at the big building.

* * *

An eight-foot fence made of black iron spears with big barbed heads was only the first obstacle. Beyond the bars a sweep of manicured lawn broke like green surf against a line of tailored shrubbery, and back of every clump a light was placed just right to cover a section of the perimeter. There were Blackies here—squads of them, pacing around the grounds like a bunch of butlers looking for the duchess's lost diamond choker. They had packs clipped to their belts with wires leading to the sides of their helmets, and I didn't need a set of technical specs to tell that these were something that worked a lot better than leashed bloodhounds. I stepped on a dry stick about then and two of the boys turned and started drifting my way. I backed out softer-footed than the time I stumbled into a cave that had a sleeping cougar in it, and moved back a couple of hundred yards into deep woods.

It took me an hour to scout all the way around the fence. It enclosed about fifty acres of park with the fairy palace in the middle and a nice little pad for short take-off aircraft at one side, well stocked with everything from one-man hoppers to a deep-bellied heavyweight big enough to carry a full battalion complete with artillery. Nothing I saw gave me any encouragement.

About then I noticed some activity over on the left, not far from where I'd made my first approach. A section of fence swung out and a small air-cushion car came through it and moved along in a puddle of yellow-white made by its bow and stern lights and the gate closed again. There was nothing in that for me.

The car came along my way, and I faded back along a sort of trail until it dawned on me it was using the same trail. I did a fade into the brush then, and lay flat with my cheek in the dirt while it whirled its dirt cloud past and snorted on off toward the barracks across the valley.

I stayed there for a while and told myself I was watching the lights moving beyond the fence. After a while my chin bumped the ground and woke me up. I got up and moved back deeper into the woods, with a vague kind of idea of finding a nice dark spot to hole up in and nap until the next brain wave hit me.

The going was easier in among the big timber. There was a slight downward drift to the ground, and not much in the way of underbrush. Then I saw a gleam ahead that looked like riffled water with moonlight on it and came down the last slope and clear of the trees and was looking at Musky Lake.

* * *

For a long, timeless minute I looked out across the water and listened to the old voices, whispering to me over all the years, as if no time had passed at all. From here, you couldn't see the barracks or the fenced-in tower; just the lake, stretching to the far shore with the rising wall of big pines behind it, and over to the left the point where the cabin had stood, the one Frazier and I built barehanded one summer just after the war. I looked toward it and at first the shadows there under the big trees fooled me, and then I blinked hard and was still seeing the same thing. The cabin was still standing, right where we'd left it.

I took the path along the soft ground at the edge of the water, and had the feeling that if I blinked again, it would go away. I came up on it from the left, the way we used to come down from shooting in the woods, and even the melon patch was still there, a little overgrown, but clear enough in the moonlight. The dock was off to the right, and the old flat-bottomed skiff was tied up at the end of it, with the bow offshore, the way I'd always anchored her. I had the damnedest impulse to yell and see if Frazier would come out the door, waving a jug and telling me to hurry up, the serious drinking was about to begin. . . . 

I came up with the little gun in my hand, skirted the place at a hundred yards, then worked my way in, ready to drop or shoot first, whichever way it worked out. Fifty feet from the cabin I lay flat and watched the back windows. Fifteen minutes went by, with nothing but a few mosquitoes whining around my head to prove I wasn't a ghost. Part of that shrewd calculating machine that was what passed for the Dravek intelligence was telling me I was taking chances, wasting time leafing through the faded gardenias of my yesterdays; but another part didn't give a damn. This was a place I knew, that was part of my life, the life I remembered. From here, strange people like Jess and strange places like the slum they called dirtside and man-eating corporations called ETORP seemed like something you'd think up in the dark hours of the night after too much lobster and fruitcake.

I made my final approach standing up. If anybody had the place staked out they could nail me as well creeping as walking, as long as I was coming their way. But nobody jumped out and put a spotlight in my eyes. I came around the side of the cabin and heard a bullfrog say moo, like a cow, down by the water. There was a small window to the left of the door. I came up to it and looked in, saw nothing but some reflected moonlight, went on past it to the door. It opened without an argument. The hinges squeaked; they always squeaked.

Inside nothing had changed, not even the dust on the floor or the soot on the ceiling above the fireplace. I tucked my toy gun away and started in to search the place.

* * *

An hour later the sky was beginning to gray up and I had covered the one-room cabin three times and turned up nothing.

I sat on the edge of the bunk and chewed my teeth and tried to be as smart as the note-writer expected me to be. He said as soon as I got here I'd know where to look.

The cabin was a lousy place to hide anything. The walls were plain one-inch ship-lapped redwood, with open studs, no paneling inside. The ceiling was bare rafters and boards. There was one cupboard, with a few chipped plates and cups in it. The fireplace had a liberal drift of ashes and a few chips of charred wood. The bathroom had nothing but what you'd expect, and the flush tank hadn't yielded any secrets suspended by a string from the float, or inside it. And if there were any compartments under the floor, they weren't anything I'd had a hand in. The trick drawer back of the strongbox in my office had been the extent of my instinct for conspiracy.

A little pale light was coming in past the red-and-white checked curtains that had been some short-term girlfriend's idea of woodsy atmosphere. I went over to the door and eased it open and stepped out and looked out across the lake and just like that, I had it.

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Framed