Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [59]
“We’ll be up and down in no time at all,” Grayson told Damon before taking his own seat and fastening his own belt. “Might be a little rough in the wind, though—I hope your IT can cope with motion sickness.”
“I’ll be fine,” Damon assured him, taking further insult from the implication that in the absence of his IT he’d be the kind of person who couldn’t take a few routine aerial lurches without losing his breakfast.
While the plane taxied onto the runway Damon watched Karol Kachellek jump back into the jeep and drive away, presumably hastening back to the puzzle of para-DNA. Damon had a puzzle of his own to play with, and he had no trouble immersing himself within it, taking up the work of trying to figure out whether there might be something in what Karol had said to him that might lead to a fuller understanding of the game that Operator 101 was playing.
He was so deep in contemplation that he took no notice of the plane’s banking as it climbed. He watched the island diminish in size until it was no more than a mere map, but even then it did not occur to him that there was anything strange in the course they were taking. Ten or twelve minutes had elapsed before it finally occurred to him that the glaring light which had forced him to raise his left hand to shield his face should not have been so troublesome. Once Grayson had settled the plane on its intended course the sun ought to have been almost directly behind them, but it was actually way over to port.
“Hey!” he called to the pilot. “What’s our course?”
Grayson made no reply.
“Isn’t Honolulu due west of Molokai, away to the right?” Damon asked. He was beginning to doubt his knowledge of geography—but when Grayson again failed to turn around and look him in the eye, he knew that something was amiss.
He tested his safety harness and found that it was locked tight. The belt which Grayson had advised him to keep locked couldn’t be unlocked; he was a prisoner.
“Hey!” he shouted, determined not to be ignored. “What’s going on? What are you doing? Answer me, you bastard.”
At last, the pilot condescended to turn his head. Grayson’s expression was slightly apologetic—but only slightly.
“Sorry, son,” he said. “Just take it easy—when there’s nothing to be done, that’s what you might as well do.”
The homespun philosophy was a further annoyance, but Damon still couldn’t unfasten the seat belt. Like Silas Arnett before him—and possibly Surinder Nahal, not to mention Catherine Praill—he was being kidnapped. But why? And by whom? The mystery briefly overwhelmed the enormity of the realization, but the brute fact of what was happening soon fought back, insistently informing him that whoever was responsible, he was in danger. Whether he was in the hands of Eliminators or not, he was being carried off into the unknown, where any fate at all might be waiting for him.
His years of experience on the streets were supposed to have hardened him against fear and dread, but all that seemed futile now. However mean the streets were—and however one might try to dignify them with titles like “the badlands”—they were only a half hour away from the nearest hospital. As he had explained to Lenny Garon, people did die in knife fights—but if one drew back to consider life less narrow-mindedly, there were still a thousand other ways a man might die, even in the New Utopia. It didn’t require a bullet or a bomb, or any act of violence at all. A man might drown, or choke, or. . . .
He abandoned the train of thought abruptly. What did it matter what might happen to him? The real question was what he intended to do about the ugly turn of events.
“Who are you working for?” he called to the pilot.
“Just doing a job,” Grayson called back. “Delivering a package. You want explanations, I don’t have them—I dare say the man on the ground will have plenty.