Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [1]
Suddenly Montoya flailed out with his cuffed hands, causing the surprised CS man to lose his grip. With all his strength Montoya grabbed at his case, ripping it out of the other CS man’s hands. He whirled toward the edge of the roof and flicked the catch on the case. Both CS men scrambled to hold on to him and the case, but Montoya was too fast. With a triumphant yell he flung the case outward; it opened as it fell toward the ground far below. Yellowed old pages fluttered free and scattered in widening gyres on the wind.
The CS men regained control of Montoya. The small man let them push him into the hovercraft. As it took off he leaned toward the window and saw the pages being borne in all directions.
He smiled to himself. His trick, his sadness, had worked, a sop for the one-eye so the device wouldn’t guess at his spontaneous last act and kill him to prevent it. He kept his eyes on the pages as they grew smaller and smaller.
For several minutes after the hovercraft took Montoya away, the pages from his case floated and drifted down, coming to rest on the streets of the metropolis called Verity.
A hundred CS officers and special agents converged on the area where the pages had fallen. They all wore protective helmets with electronic visors that turned printed words into gibberish for their eyes.
They quickly set up roadblocks and evacuated residents, then set to work finding the scattered pages and burning them in portable mini-incinerators.
When the clean-up was complete, the streets were reopened. But one-eyes remained; they floated among the pedestrians and traffic, their antennae hunting for the mind-echoes of the pages that were now ash.
One page had floated far; it alone had escaped the CS and their incinerators. It lay nakedly on a small patch of grass behind an elementary school.
At noon recess, a red-haired girl from the third-grade class chased a ball and came upon the page. She had never seen such an old and discolored piece of paper. She picked it up, and with big green inquisitive eyes, looked at an illustration on the page.
It appeared to be of a man tied onto a kind of sled and surrounded by a busy swarm of people no bigger than his finger.
She read the words on the page.
About four Hours after we began our Journey, I awaked by a very ridiculous Accident; for the Carriage being stopt awhile to adjust something that was out of Order, two or three of the young Natives had the Curiosity to see how I looked when I was asleep; they climbed up into the Engine, and advancing very softly to my Face, one of them, an Officer in the Guards, put the sharp End of His Half-Pike a good way up into my left Nostril, which tickled my Nose like a Straw, and made me sneeze violently …
The green-eyed girl laughed.
She looked at the top of the page and saw a title line:
“GULLIVER’S TRAVELS—A VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT.”
She sensed that the page was something forbidden, something the grown-ups told you to never ever touch or look at, or you’d get a disease. But looking at it now she found that she didn’t believe all that. They always told you not to do the things that were fun. Besides, how could you catch a disease from a piece of paper?
Her fascination with the page overcame her caution. She hid the page in her dress, hoping to take it home that day.
Chapter Two
COUNSELOR DEANNA TROI sat in her cabin on the Enterprise, her fathomless, dark Betazoid eyes gazing at her computer, her black hair cascading over her shoulders. She was about to fulfill, in her own way, the primary mission of the starship U.S.S. Enterprise—exploration of new worlds and discovery of alien life.
She was about to peer into a boundless new universe, a separate realm, teeming with infinite life-forms.
To open the “door,” all she had to do was utter a single word to the computer. She wouldn’t even have to leave her comfortable private cabin. The new universe could be observed via the small screen before her.
But, as though she