Chapter 14

2082 a.d. – the same day

Soul Searching

Jake stood and stared at this marvelous, malevolent female poised in his shower stall. She looked like Athena bathing in the mists as the swirling little showerheads surrounded her voluptuous form with hot steam and water. Realizing she was mesmerizing him, again, he abruptly turned away and walked into the bedroom. He stopped, trying to think what to do next.

'I can't think with her here!' he realized frantically. 'She'll make me forget anything I try to figure out. I've got to get away!'

He remembered that he always kept his flyer equipped for backpacking. There was a tent, a bedroll and canned supplies for several days. He took the stairs down two and three at a time, jumping over the final railing. Opening what looked like a closet door under the stairwell, he trotted down the next set of stairs into the underground garage where he kept his vehicles.

Currently, he only had two; a two-wheeled old-style two-cycle combustion engine motorcycle of unknown vintage and the Mitsui Mach II flyer he'd received as part of his retirement package along with the cabin. It wasn't a top-of-the-line model; its altitude ceiling was eight thousand feet and it would only do twenty two hundred kph. It was also a real gas hog, being equipped with only a turbine and not the much more efficient turbo-ramjet stutter combination that was just beginning to become popular when he retired.

Jake checked his flyer, quickly. It was fueled and ready to go. He climbed in and fired it up. The automatic doorway to the ramp opened up, revealing a sharply angled exit ramp leading to the desert surface. Bright sunlight lit up the ramp as the outside doors raised to clear a pathway for the flyer. The floor quickly lined Jake's flyer up with the exit ramp and began moving it through.

When the flyer was halfway up the ramp, Jake pushed the throttle forward and was airborne, shooting into the sky. He pressed 'Auto Location #1'. This set the autopilot to take him approximately fifty miles north of Bozeman to the town where he grew up and connected his vehicle and flight path into the nationwide flight grid.

He changed his mind and pressed 'Auto Location #2'. This took him another ten minutes north and much further east to the mesa near where Béla's cabin used to be. That was the most solitary place he could think of now that Alicia had pre-empted his personal living space.

He sat back and watched the scenery on the horizon as it quickly grew, then flashed beneath him. The first few minutes of his flight were noisy and irritating. Then, with a slight feeling of being pressed back into his seat, the little flyer passed through the sound barrier and settled into the quiet, monotonous sound of air passing smoothly over the outside hull, a comforting sound familiar to all air travelers.

"Uncle Jake," the speaker in the instrument panel squeaked. "Uncle Jake, I know you can hear me. Please come back." It was Alicia's voice, pleading for him to return to her. It sounded tinny and artificial coming from the tiny speaker. He clicked off the speaker box.

Fifteen minutes later, he passed over Bozeman. He didn't like big cities, and, although he knew Bozeman wasn't big, compared to New York or Chicago, it had done its share of urban sprawling in the last century. Skyscrapers, shopping malls and housing developments swallowed up the forests and farmlands that once separated Bozeman from his hometown.

The console beeped twice. Jake looked at the display. It was requesting a landing site. On 'Auto Location #2', there were three selections that he had input when he created the program. He chose number three. It was the most desolate place he knew of, and, to him, the most precious piece of real estate on the planet.

The console immediately beeped again. He looked at it, wondering what was wrong. Jake read the display and laughed. He thought that was a pretty good idea.

Admin code required.

Delete VR Alicia.

He punched his admin code into the console.

Admin code confirmed.

The screen went dark. Jake suddenly realized he wanted to know what Alicia was doing behind his back. The console lit up when he touched it.

"Monitor Alicia," he told it. The display lit up, showing her in a tight fitting red flight suit carrying her bags through the front door toward her flitter. Even in the tiny monitor, her rear end looked delicious and he wished he'd gotten a better look at her when they'd made love in the middle of the night.

'I hope she didn't take anything of mine, ' he thought to himself, annoyed that he was still attracted to her.

Jake watched the desolate landscape grow as the little craft descended toward the top of the mesa where he and Béla had fallen in love. At one thousand feet, he switched to manual. All but one of the console lights showing his connection to the nationwide grid went out. Jake looked at it and tapped it with his finger. The button was marked 'Tracking'.

'Damn, ' he thought, angrily. 'Alicia is getting a little too nosey.'

Jake tapped his console. "Locate tracking source," he told it.

He turned his flyer in a tight circle, killing off most of his speed, just as Alicia had done last night, circling around his chosen landing site. No matter how depressed he was, this old thing was fun to fly. He was down to less than two hundred kph, his back and legs settled deeply into his seat cushion by the force of his sharp circling. In a few minutes, the flyer squatted down in the sand, the air cushion created by the downward blowing turbine blasting sand and dust high into the air.

His console beeped.

Tracking source located.

Tabor Investigations, Inc. Bozeman, Mt.

Turbine shutdown procedure completed.

So, it was Frank or Tanya who had noticed his fly-by. Well, if they noticed where he was going, then they knew he wanted to be left alone. He felt slightly guilty about mentally accusing Alicia of snooping, but only slightly.

The console beeped again.

'What now?' Jake thought, getting irritated with all of these interruptions in what was supposed to be his self-inflicted exile. He looked at the display.

Alicia outside tracking area location #4.

Recorded destination: Boston, Ma.

Continue tracking?

"No." he told the console. It went dark. At least, she wasn't coming up here after him.

Opening the hatch, he was struck by the early spring heat of the blinding sun, high overhead. He climbed out and dropped to the ground.

'I should have worn a flight suit.' Jake realized. 'It would have protected me from the heat of the sun and the cold of the wind.'

Then he remembered that he had packed one in the luggage compartment. He went back behind the flyer and changed into it. Although it was an older, two-piece pants and jacket combination, it was still temperature controlled and he immediately felt more comfortable.

He looked around. It had been almost fifty years since he had last come here. There was no longer any trace of the old mining shack. The wall next to it, which had evidently been part of an even larger structure hundreds of years earlier, was only fallen rubble, now. There was no sign of where the ancient water pump had been. It had rusted completely away.

Jake walked around his flyer; checking it over and making sure it was still flight-worthy. He didn't find anything wrong. Pulling out his ration case, he opened a bottle of water and sat down on the low wing, wondering why he had come up here.

Alicia, of course, beautiful, blonde, the reason the word bombshell was invented – just to describe her and the effect she had on people's lives. Did he love her? Of course not, he knew what love felt like. Did he hate her? Again, no. She had deceived him, but only regarding her pregnancy. Amend that to 'pregnancies'.

He pulled out his palm display unit and inquired into Alicia's history. As he read the display, he realized his private beliefs were being tested. He believed a girl should be allowed to get pregnant if she wanted to. And if she didn't want to, she shouldn't be forced to. She had told him up front, in the beginning, that she wanted his child. At the time, she had also wanted him.

Now, Jake understood why Alicia had suddenly changed her mind and let him go. She'd settled for having his child. She had simply looked elsewhere for a suitable father. While she was looking, she had expanded her plans for her little dynasty to include much more wealth and power.

'She found a rich, powerful man to help her to raise my firstborn, ' he thought to himself as he read the display. 'While she was at it, she pumped out a bunch of half-brothers and sisters to keep my child company and to please the man she'd married.'

Afterwards, she'd tracked down Jake and gotten pregnant again, and did the same thing with her next husband. 'Is there actually anything WRONG with that?'

The only reason he caught her was that she'd confessed. For some reason, she had decided to play straight with him this time. Her parents could be coercing her. They didn't like the idea of keeping secrets from their love partners. Or, maybe she was telling the truth. His daughter really did want to meet him, and she was no longer able to keep her covert agenda hidden.

Jake knew that if he had impregnated Alicia this morning, he probably wouldn't see her again until her next husband died. He also knew that, however long it might be until he saw her again, he would forgive her. She had already asked his forgiveness, last night, before even telling him why she might want it.

He decided he did love her, after a fashion. He also knew he could never live with her. The complexity of her mind and her devious methods of solving problems would drive him nuts. She simply had way too much ambition for him to want to be partnered with her.

Jake woke up and looked around. He had fallen asleep sitting on the wing and leaning against the side of his flyer. The sun was setting, huge and bloated, on the horizon, painting the earth and the cirrus clouds red, purple and orange. A cold, evening wind had picked up and had blown loose sand in his face. As it happened again, he realized that was what had awakened him.

He got up and stretched, trying to ignore his cold, stiff joints as they complained loudly about his falling asleep in this cool weather. Then he picked up his water bottle and drained it down his throat, ignoring the few grains of sand that had blown into it through the open top.

Opening the back of his flyer, he pulled out the pup tent and sleeping bag he'd packed into it over a year ago, knowing someday he'd want to come up here again. The food rations were canned and self-heating, so he wouldn't really need a fire. But, after setting up his little camp, he searched out some brush and small pieces of wood, and built one anyway. The desert night was cold enough to warrant one this early in the year, even though the wind was brisk enough to prevent him from getting much enjoyment from the heat.

He ate, not tasting the food, thinking about flying vampires and roasted wild rabbit as he sat, staring into the fire. Eventually, he fell asleep, again.