Chapter 12

When Dalton got behind the wheel of the motorhome once more, he noted with dismay that the system’s power had plummeted to 38%.

They were barely twelve kilometers out of Richport.

“Problem?” Chumley asked, buckling himself in.

“Hoped we’d get farther than this tonight.” Dalton brought the vehicle up to thirty kilometers per hour, hoping the slower speed would keep the power from draining so quickly.

When the power level dipped below 35% a few minutes later, Chumley cleared his throat and said, “So, your arm.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You brought it up.”

“I was making a point.”

“Did a Green really eat your arm?”

“I said—”

“Right, right. I shouldn’t have asked.” Chumley turned his head toward the passenger window. “You said there were only two survivors.”

“You strike me as someone who’s not nearly as stupid as you act.”

“I suppose that’s a compliment.”

“If you say so.”

“Fine. I just thought since we’re working together, that maybe, well, we should be open with each other about things.”

“What for?”

“To create rapport, or something.”

“I’m not creating rapport with you. Now shut up before I drive this thing off a cliff.”

Chumley fell silent.

The power level fell to 34%.

They were now fifteen kilometers north of Richport.

They had a long way to go.

Dalton’s soft snoring would not allow Chumley to drift off to sleep, so he grudgingly stepped out of the parked motorhome and lit up one of the few remaining stale cigarettes Dalton had given him.

Stars blanketed the ink-black heavens like jewels—he could see the pale, yellow dot that was Sol, Earth’s sun, twinkling amid a distorted Sagittarius, and it made him feel a little sad to think of how far he’d come since the beginning.

Random rock formations stretched upward from the ground like ruddy obelisks. To the south, a faint glow on the horizon indicated the location of Richport, and to the north, another glow spoke of fire and destruction.

Just how large did a fire have to be to be visible from that far away? It had been hard to discern specific details from the dying Green’s thoughts, but Chumley guessed it would have to be a cataclysmically raging inferno far larger than anything he could imagine.

Had someone taken pity on Molorthia Six and opted to rid the planet of the Greens once and for all? It seemed a bit extreme, but mad rulers of old had burned whole cities just to rid them of antiquated infrastructure, and plenty of tyrants had turned to genocide and called it societal advancement.

But who were the tyrants here? Humans? Other Greens? Someone else they didn’t know about? There had been some article Chumley read perhaps only a year or two earlier, something that had pertained somehow to this situation, but as much as he strained to remember what he’d read, the more the facts of it remained elusive. He’d probably been drunk when he read it.

Don’t forget you have your Cube now, a tiny voice reminded him. Why keep wondering when you have that?

Good point.

Chumley finished his cigarette, flicked the butt out onto the sand, and tiptoed back into the motorhome so he wouldn’t wake its cranky driver.

He’d tucked the Cube beneath his pillow for safekeeping. He removed it now, glanced to Dalton to make sure he was still asleep, then activated the holographic archway leading into his portable universe before setting the Cube back onto the thin, cot-like mattress.

Chumley had not been lying when he’d told Dalton he’d lost everything in the hotel fire. Well, he had, unintentionally, since all his belongings were here now save for the few that had been left out in his hotel room, but he hadn’t known that at the time. Losing his Cube was as good as losing all his belongings, because that’s where he stored them.

The holographic archway flickered as Chumley stepped through it into a room that did not exist anywhere in the known universe.

It wasn’t an overly large room; only about twenty feet per side. He’d done his best to decorate it like the room he’d had as a child before everything had gone to shit, so the full-sized bed was shoved into the corner beneath two dozen glow-in-the-dark stars dangling from the ceiling on near-invisible strings. The room also contained a minibar, a wardrobe, a computer workstation where he printed out his fake brochures and business cards, a shelf full of knickknacks, a small exercise machine that kept him trim enough to outrun the police if needed, and one hamster cage, currently unoccupied.

One doorway led to an attached bath, and another provided access to the veranda, which (since the portable universe was much, much smaller than the real deal) looked out onto a holographic garden populated with rosebushes and privet hedges. Chumley poked his head through this latter doorway to see a holographic night sky spread out above it, resplendent with the constellations as seen from Pelstring Four.

It looked the same as when he’d checked earlier. Good to see that the fire hadn’t even disrupted the portable universe’s current settings. The one time he’d accidentally dropped the Cube into the toilet at Major Tom’s Bar and Grill near the spaceport on Axaloon, the veranda had looked out onto a holographic seascape filled with narwhals for a week.

Chumley closed the door and threw open the drapes on the two windows that gave view of the veranda. Then he withdrew a glass, a corkscrew, and a bottle of chardonnay from behind the minibar and took them over to his workstation, where he uncorked the bottle and filled the glass while he waited for his computer to wake up. He swirled the wine in the glass and took a sip, then leaned forward and switched on the security screen beside the main computer screen.

It showed Dalton, unmoving, on his bunk.

Good.

He cracked his knuckles and typed “burning planets” into the database search box, then leaned back in the swivel chair while he watched the screen populate with results:

1. Wildfires in the Streetha Plains of Vu-Ong Twelve enter third week; thousands evacuated as drought continues.
2. Fourteen-year-old charged with arson in Omicron Delta’s Prime City after being found responsible for the apartment fire that spread through four city blocks, killing three people.
3. Controlled burn in Glades National Forest ensures new growth for coming year.

Chumley rubbed his chin. Controlled burn? Was that what he’d been thinking of? He still wasn’t sure. He’d heard somewhere as a kid that certain types of plants could only reproduce if they caught fire first, and some parks here and there amongst the settled planets set areas on fire to clear out old growth and invasive species.

It seemed so unlikely on Molorthia Six. Not enough people lived here to care about how well the forests were doing, especially when the forests tried to eat them.

Speaking of which . . .

He turned to the other screen. Dalton had rolled over and jammed a pillow over his head, but he still appeared to be asleep. Chumley couldn’t help but notice the man’s arms, which were bare since Dalton had gone to bed shirtless.

Had Dalton been pulling his leg about the arm thing just to give him a hard time? Why would anyone even do that? But if Dalton had been telling the truth, that meant . . . but that was too unbearable to think about. Only two survivors?

Chumley cleared the search terms from the main screen and typed “Piney Gulch Molorthia Six” in their place.

1. Piney Gulch, a scenic gorge in the northeastern desert region of Molorthia Six, is a popular vacation spot for desert-dwellers who yearn for peaceful, Earth-like forests.

That was all. Maybe if Chumley was close enough to civilization for the database to gather updates from the local net he’d learn more, but he didn’t really think so. These desert types didn’t have the media lurking around like piranhas, waiting to dig their teeth into the next juicy story they could sensationalize beyond any semblance of reason.

Only two survivors.

Chumley thought of the woman who’d lent them the motorhome and shivered.

He thought of the empty bunkbeds in Dalton’s house and shivered some more.

On the security screen, Dalton was rolling over again.

Chumley drained the rest of the wine from his glass. He’d better get back out there before the sheriff woke and wondered where he’d scampered off to.

He shut down his computer and stepped back through the holographic archway into the real universe.

“See, I told you the power would climb back up in no time,” Dalton said as they cruised over a patch of bumpy ground the next morning. Multiple plumes of smoke blackened the sky in the distance, and Dalton had angled toward the largest one.

“I didn’t doubt you.” Chumley sat in the passenger seat with his arms folded across his chest. They hadn’t turned the air conditioner on yet, and the temperature inside was climbing just as rapidly as the system’s power.

They’d reached rockier terrain within ten minutes of setting out after a quick breakfast. A three-pronged rock formation jutted from the ground off to their left—Dalton recognized it as Chicken Foot, which lay thirty kilometers north of Richport. It felt both good and terrifying to be so much closer to the forests.

When it got too hot for comfort, Dalton switched on the air conditioner—ironic, how desert-dwellers kept them in their motorhomes but not in their houses—and then wondered how the FCU people were getting on back in Richport. Were they really connected to the people in white? They’d given off completely different vibes from the invisible intruders, so Dalton was no longer certain.

“Is it getting darker?”

“What?”

Chumley leaned closer to the windshield. “I’d swear it’s getting darker.”

“I’m wearing shades, and the sunlight’s still trying to sear off my eyes.”

“Take them off.”

Dalton was about to object when something ticked softly against the driver’s side window, and the entire vehicle gave an unexpected lurch.

He yanked off the shades just in time for a shadow to pass over them.

“Dalton? Are you there?”

It was Errin Inglewood’s voice, barely masking worry. Dalton dug one-handed for his comm unit, which Chumley plucked off the floor and handed to him. “I’m here,” Dalton said. “What is it?”

“Our sandstorm sirens just started going off.”

“But it’s too early for—”

“Wildfires can disrupt normal atmospheric conditions. What’s your current location?”

Dalton braked and put the motorhome in park as the left-hand side of the vehicle ticked more frequently. He relayed the location back to Errin using the comm’s positioning system, then said, “Do we know how big this storm is?”

“Just by looking, we think it’s . . . ometers wide.” Errin’s voice dissolved in a burst of static. “No other reports . . . other towns . . . moving toward . . . theast?”

The sky continued to dim. The motorhome rocked in place. Chumley’s knuckles turned pale from gripping the armrests so tightly.

Dalton glanced out the window toward the southwest, regarding the kilometers-high wall of airborne sand barreling toward them.

He’d been too preoccupied with looking at the smoke ahead of them to even notice it coming.

It slammed into them within seconds, turning the sky and everything else around them such a dark shade of brown it was nearly black. The wind shrieked like ten thousand ghouls, and fine particles of sand found their way through the tiniest gaps and sifted into the vehicle.

“Errin?” Dalton shouted into the comm unit. “Errin, do you copy?”

The comm unit only hissed.

“How long do these things last?” Chumley asked, making an admirable effort to appear calm.

“Up to five days.”

“We can’t be stuck in here that long!”

Dalton rose and went into the kitchenette, pulling two dishcloths out of a drawer and dampening them with water from the sink. “Put this over your face and breathe through it,” he said, tossing one of the cloths to Chumley. “It filters out the particles you’d be breathing otherwise. It can cause lung problems.”

Chumley’s eyes went round as he put the cloth over his mouth and nose. Dalton did the same with his own cloth, then shut off the engine.

They wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.

Not like he’d been in a huge rush to get to Green territory, anyway. Maybe getting stuck in the sandstorm here was saving his life.

The storm raged onward.

“What’s the shortest one of these things can last?” Chumley asked when the outside world grew to the color of pitch. Dalton couldn’t see his own hand in front of his face and sneezed in spite of the cloth protecting him.

“About two hours.” Dalton sneezed again. “I wouldn’t count on it, though.”

“What are we supposed to do if we’re stuck in here for five days?”

“Sing songs, talk about our feelings.”

More static burst from the comm unit, making Dalton jump. He patted around for it, and once he’d located it, held it up to his protected face and said, “Is anyone there?”

Words in a language unknown to Dalton spilled into the room: “Pip-pip! Ammru gugaa’a shora . . . ”

Dalton tapped the comm. “Who’s there?”

“ . . . jejeshu ku’a himms . . . ”

“I take it you don’t understand that,” Chumley said.

“Do you?”

“Aside from the obvious one, I speak a little Gujarati and Punjabi because of my family, but that’s not either of those.”

“It’s not Hindi or Spanish, either. Who is this?” Dalton demanded of the speaker as they continued to carry on. “Why are you contacting me?”

“I think it’s picking up a stray signal,” Chumley said. “I used to have a radio that randomly spouted jargon I couldn’t make sense of. I thought it was haunted until my gran told me it was picking up signals from the lorry drivers on the motorway.”

“But we’re in the middle of nowhere,” Dalton said. “There shouldn’t be anybody out here to give off a signal for us to pick up.”

“So, someone else is stuck in the storm, too.”

“Then why can’t we understand them?”

“You said this planet is a melting pot. Do you have a way to home in on the signal, see if someone out here needs help?”

“Suppose I can try.” Dalton felt his way into the kitchenette and blindly pulled open drawers, feeling for anything shaped like a flashlight. He struck gold in the third drawer down and clicked it on.

Now that he could see, he examined his comm unit and tried to remember if this one featured a trace function. The voice continued to speak in garbled bursts as Dalton located the menu on the tiny comm screen and scrolled through it, finding options like “Group Call” and “Sleep Mode.”

When he selected the option for “Trace Caller,” nothing happened.

“Of course,” he muttered.

“Hmm?”

“If it’s a stray signal coming through, it won’t be able to latch on to where the signal is coming from. The trace can only work if someone intended to call us.”

Chumley twisted around in his seat to look at him. “They’d have to be close, though, right?”

“You’d think.”

“Well . . . we could get moving again; turn the headlights on and see if we can see anyone through all of this.”

The comm unit fell silent. The voice hadn’t really sounded urgent. In fact, there hadn’t been much emotional inflection at all, which seemed kind of odd for someone trapped in a sandstorm.

“I can try to move this thing,” Dalton said, “just to see if we can find our way out the other side of it.” He hated the thought of having to do it. He didn’t think there had been anything treacherous in front of him before the sand blotted out all visibility, but what if he was wrong and drove over an exposed boomstone, or hit a rock formation? Surely it would be safer to stay put and ride out the storm.

But we could be stuck here for days, otherwise.

Grudgingly, Dalton got back into the driver’s seat and started the engine. The interior and exterior lights came on, illuminating copious quantities of sand still seeping in through cracks that Dalton couldn’t see.

The headlights shot through the sand as far as they would go, which was about three meters.

“Here we go,” Dalton said, and set the vehicle into motion.

Very, very slow motion.

He kept the towel over his face with one hand while he steered with the other. The vehicle rocked and lurched so violently that Dalton almost couldn’t keep it straight, yet they were still making progress, small as it may have been.

Chumley glared at the filthy maelstrom. “It doesn’t look any lighter yet.” He lowered the cloth from his face, immediately sneezed, and hastily replaced it. “If anyone had told me two weeks ago that I’d soon be witnessing plants murdering a man, spotting ghosts that no one else can see, and getting myself stuck in a sandstorm, I’d have said they’d had one too many Soul Rippers during Happy Hour at Major Tom’s Bar and Grill.”

“Soul Rippers?”

“They’re made from Kaktian Rum. One shot can drop a man twice my weight if he hasn’t eaten anything first.”

“Mm.” Dalton kept his eyes wide, seeking out any obstacles that might hinder their trip. This part of the desert was supposed to be mostly flat, “supposed” being the operative word.

“I can buy you one sometime,” Chumley went on.

“Why would you want to buy me a drink?”

“You seem like you could use one.”

Dalton had no response for that. He was too busy trying not to drive them off any cliffs he might have forgotten about.

They continued in that creeping, lurching fashion for a time that felt like hours. The gloom neither lightened nor darkened, and the ceaseless wind howled like a thousand angry banshees.

Since the sun could not penetrate the storm and give them any extra juice, the power Dalton had been pleased to regain ticked lower, and lower, and lower.

“I’m turning the interior lights off,” Dalton said, flipping a switch that plunged them into gloom relieved only by the illumination of the high beams.

The foreign voice burst from his comm unit again. “Pip-pip! Annjui mish himms.”

“I wish it would stop doing that,” Dalton said. “The way I see it, if you’re going to land on Molorthia Six, you should at least know Hindi, Spanish, or English so someone can understand if you’re sending out a distress call or not.”

“Or Gujarati or Punjabi,” Chumley pointed out.

“Those too.”

“Maybe they’re not human.”

Dalton shivered. “I met some Heemins once.”

“Here?”

“It was on a spaceport layover when my family was coming here. I thought they were human until I saw their eyes. That can scare a kid, you know.”

“You must not have gotten out much.”

“Aliens don’t really visit Cornwall.”

Chumley moved in the darkness beside him, and a sudden burst of ancient electropop music from the dashboard speakers nearly ruptured Dalton’s eardrums.

“I didn’t mean to push anything!” Chumley shouted.

Dalton flicked the lights back on. Chumley had dropped his face cloth and was scrambling at the dash.

Dalton recognized the cacophony as “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga, an old Earth-based singer whom Summer had been obsessed with some years before.

“It’s the dial right in front of you! Turn it to your left, and it’ll—”

Dalton never got to finish his sentence. The motorhome shuddered, and the ear-blistering music was not loud enough to mask a great shrieking like metal peeling back from itself.

Gravity changed directions. Dalton, who had not buckled himself into the driver’s seat, found himself lying on top of Chumley, who was squashed against the passenger side door.

Lady Gaga told them it would be okay as Dalton killed the blaring sound system with the slap of a hand. He clambered over the side of the passenger seat and stood against the main side door, which was now his floor.

“Dalton?” Chumley coughed. “I think you should look at this.”

Dalton turned. An error message flashed above the power indicator: Warning: solar panel disconnected. Please reconnect solar panel before complete system failure.

Dalton said a word that his daughter Imani had said before Darneisha grounded her for a week.

He scrambled for his comm unit, keyed in Carolyn’s number. “Carolyn? Carolyn, come in, please!”

The device emitted only static.

He keyed in Errin Inglewood’s number. “Errin? Are you there? We have an emergency!”

More static.

“Storm’s disrupting the signal.” Dalton fought to keep his rising panic at bay. “I’ll try calling Paris.”

He tried the numbers of a few of his contacts in that neighboring city closer to the forests. Either the signal couldn’t get through at all, or every human on Molorthia Six had inexplicably begun to hiss.

“Maybe we should try reconnecting the solar panel,” Chumley suggested.

“You might not have noticed,” Dalton said, “but this vehicle is lying on its side. Even if we can reconnect it, we won’t be able to get it on its wheels again.”

“But we’d have power.”

Dalton grunted. “Fine. We’ll see if we can’t repair it. But we’ll need goggles.” He walked over to the cabinets, which were basically now the floor. Dealing with the drawers below the cabinets proved sort of an issue, however, since sliding open full drawers against the pull of gravity tended to result in a struggle and then a mess. Among the mess, Dalton located three pairs of swim goggles and tossed one to Chumley, who promptly slid them over his eyes.

“Try to keep the cloth over your face,” Dalton said, slipping on his own pair of goggles and tucking one corner of the cloth beneath it so he could use his hands. The only logical door through which they could exit was the driver’s side door, which now comprised part of the ceiling.

He went to the door, which lay just a bit out of reach from where he stood. “You’ll have to give me a boost,” he said. Chumley clambered his way and laced his hands together as a sort of step, and Dalton stuck one booted foot onto them and heaved himself upward.

He pulled on the door handle above him, bracing himself for the storm, and shoved the door open.

The howling wind practically yanked the door out of his hand. The hinges groaned as the wind bent them to an angle they weren’t supposed to attain. Dalton hooked his fingers around the doorframe and pulled himself up and out of the motorhome, onto its side, feeling sand particles stinging his few bits of exposed skin.

He lay on his stomach and reached a hand down for Chumley to take. Chumley, slightly taller than he was, stood on the side of the passenger seat to give himself a boost, and Dalton got hold of his hand and helped pull him from the vehicle.

“Why do I feel like we’re going to regret this?” Chumley asked, hopping down from the side of the motorhome onto the ground, which bore scant illumination from the high beams. The cloth on his face fluttered beneath the hand pinning it there.

Dalton didn’t answer. He patted his coat pocket for the flashlight he hoped he remembered to stash there, then pulled it out and clicked it on. He motioned for Chumley to follow him around to the other side of the vehicle, then drew up short when he saw the motorhome’s roof.

“Ah,” Chumley said, joining him.

The solar panel wasn’t just disconnected.

It was missing.

Dalton aimed his ineffective flashlight beam toward the east; the direction in which all this was blowing. Sand stung his ears, his cheekbones, and his hands. He could barely see two meters in front of him. The solar panel was probably kilometers away by now, forever out of reach.

He would not risk walking blindly out into the desert to find it.

Chumley huddled close to the side of the motorhome, which was technically the roof. Dalton could see where the wind had yanked the solar panel from its fittings, and spotted a few disconnected wires flapping in the gale.

“What are we going to do?” Chumley asked.

“We’re going back inside to ride this thing out.”

“But it could be days!”

“Good thing we brought provisions.”

It was an extra effort climbing back on top of the prone motorhome without blowing away, and even more of an effort to yank the door closed. Dalton strained every muscle in his body to get the door to latch into place, but the wind had warped the hinges so badly that all he could do was leave it open and hope the sand didn’t smother them.

“Get into the very back,” Dalton said, stepping across the cabinets into the sleeping area. He walked along the wall between the upper and lower bunk, stepped up to the bathroom door, and yanked it open. “In here.”

Chumley didn’t protest. Still keeping the cloth pressed over his face, he followed Dalton into the cramped room and closed the door above them.

The motorhome’s bathroom contained a sink, a narrow shower, and a chemical toilet, none of which were currently in the proper position to function as intended.

“Never thought I’d have to take a shit sideways,” Chumley giggled as he pulled off his goggles and rubbed his eyes. He sat cross-legged on the tile shower wall and put his head in his hands. Dalton sat beside him with his knees drawn to his chest.

The wind continued to howl.

“You’d think,” Chumley said at one point while they waited, “that your people would have a better warning system about this sort of thing.”

Dalton shrugged. “We have sirens. When high winds hit the sensors twenty kilometers outside of town, it triggers the sirens to go off. You and I are just too far away to hear them.”

“Maybe Frontier Care United ought to give you something a bit higher-tech.”

“Like a fancy colony ship that can haul everyone off this rock to somewhere nicer.”

He felt Chumley shift beside him. “I thought you said Molorthia Six was home.”

“That gives me the right to complain about it.”

Hours passed. Dalton made a few more attempts to contact Carolyn, Errin, and the folks over in Paris, without success.

He ventured into the kitchen at one point to unearth some of the food and water they’d brought with them, trying not to worry too much about the fact that nearly the whole front end of the motorhome had filled with sand. His flashlight revealed that the wind had torn the driver side door clean from its hinges. It and the solar panel were probably off having a party somewhere.

“How is it out there?” Chumley asked when Dalton handed him a packet of mixed nuts and dried fruit.

“Not good.” Dalton sipped at a bottle of water.

“Should I be worried?”

“Nah. We have enough provisions to last us until the storm’s over, and once the skies have cleared, I can get through to Carolyn and have her send out a rescue crew.”

“And we still won’t have seen what’s causing the fires.”

“Maybe it’s better this way.”

Chumley glumly tore open his bag and popped a handful of snack mix into his mouth. Dalton could hear crunching as Chumley chewed.

He bit off a chunk of the jerky strip he brought for himself, but Dalton’s appetite had blown away with the door and the solar panel.

A raspy cough made Dalton jerk awake. He rubbed his eyes and frowned at the door above his head, and then remembered what had happened.

He sat up. Faint light spilled around the edges of the closed door. Chumley stirred beside him on the tile wall of the motorhome’s cramped shower, muttering something about biscuits.

Dalton paused; listened.

He allowed himself the ghost of a smile.

“Rise and shine,” he said, shoving open the bathroom door and clambering out into the morning light. It had been a full twenty-eight hours since the storm hit, and they’d survived.

He looked at the condition of the motorhome and said a bad word.

“What is it?” Chumley mumbled, poking his head up through the doorway. “Oh.”

Sand had drifted as high as a meter at the front of the motorhome and petered out into a fine layer of silt at the back. The passenger seat was completely buried.

Dalton pulled out his comm unit. “Carolyn? Do you copy?”

“Loud and clear, Dalton. How are you doing?”

His eyes stung with tears of relief at hearing another human voice. “We . . . had an accident. Can you send someone up here to get us?”

“I can try, but . . . ” Carolyn coughed. “Richport’s a mess right now, as I’m sure you can imagine. That’s the worst storm we’ve had in two years. Errin’s out on a plow helping clear the streets, and I’ve got about a dozen people lined up outside my office asking for favors—not to mention Naomi and her lot are still hovering around here like flies. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to send anyone for hours.”

“Well, don’t make it take too long,” Dalton spat. “The wind ripped the solar panel off the top of the motorhome and turned us on our side. We’re completely stranded.”

“I’m sorry, Dalton, but we have to follow up with three missing persons reports and reconnect the power for half the town. We’ll get to you as soon as we can.”

“Carolyn!”

The comm fell silent, and Dalton stared at it, dumbfounded. “I don’t bloody believe it.”

He dug another box of provisions out of the accumulated sand and opened a fresh packet of jerky.

Chumley twisted his slender hands together. “Why won’t she help us?”

“She knows I can handle myself just fine.” Dalton ate his jerky, angrily.

“We can’t stay out here all day! I mean, there’s always . . . oh, never mind.”

“There’s always what?” Dalton asked.

Chumley just shook his head.

Fifteen minutes ticked by. The air grew hotter, like an oven. Sweat ran down Dalton’s scalp. He thought, and thought some more, and decided it was too much effort.

“Pip-pip! Mehelu answaa him pahare.”

The voice spoke from Dalton’s trouser pocket, where he’d tucked the comm unit after Carolyn had cut him off. He pulled it out, stared at it a moment, and pushed the button. “Hello?”

“Pip-pip! Kalaa oom himms.”

His pulse spiked as he looked to Chumley, whose dark eyes had gone round. “Hello? Can you hear me?”

“Pip-pip! Melaa’a konash.”

Dalton’s heart continued to thud. That had sounded like a response!

“What language are you speaking?” Dalton asked. Then, in what was most likely butchered Spanish, said, “¿Cuál es su lengua?”

More unfamiliar words spilled forth from the comm unit.

“I don’t think that’s a stray signal this time,” Chumley said in a grave tone. “If someone’s talking to you directly, they could be anywhere on the planet, right?”

Dalton rubbed his nose. Only a few sunburned flakes peeled off this time. “It’s got a range of up to 1,500 kilometers, I think.”

“So there might not be anyone close by to rescue us.”

“Wouldn’t say that. Although,” Dalton added, “if it is the folks whose stray signal we were picking up before, then they might be close after all.”

“It did seem to be the same language.”

“Too hard for me to tell.”

“All that pip-pipping was sort of a giveaway. I’m going outside to see if I can see anyone.”

“Have at it,” Dalton said, making himself comfortable sitting on the closed bathroom door. “I’ll stay here and not die of sunstroke.”

Chumley may have been on Molorthia Six for several days now, but the heat still smacked him like a thousand-degree croquet mallet every time he stepped into the sunlight.

As he strode down a newly-sculpted dune, he patted his pocket for his Cube and withdrew it. Casting one glance behind him to make sure Dalton hadn’t changed his mind and was following him, Chumley activated the Cube’s holographic archway and then hurried into his portable universe. He didn’t take the time to bask in the cooler air; he began yanking open drawers until he found the pair of binoculars he’d been looking for.

Chumley stepped back out into the desert, picked up the Cube, deactivated the archway, and pocketed the whole device before Dalton peeked outside and discovered Chumley’s little secret.

He held the binoculars to his eyes and made a 360-degree sweep of the desert. Tall shapes in the distance made his heart leap for a moment until he realized they were cacti, not approaching Greens.

He didn’t see any signs of people.

Chumley focused the lenses on the smoke pluming on the northern horizon. It was still farther than anyone could go on foot. Not that he’d want to get there on foot, given the resident plant life. But if he could get somewhat closer . . .

He tucked the binoculars inside his shirt, then climbed back up onto the motorhome and hopped down through the opening above the sideways driver’s seat.

“Back already?” Dalton asked. He still sat on the closed bathroom door, looking moody.

“I’m just getting a few things. I’ll walk as far as I can and then come back to report my findings.”

“I already know what you’ll find. Sand. Maybe a rock or two. Watch out for the boomstones, though; if you step on them, they explode.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s something to do with the mineral content. We clean up all the ones we can find near town.”

“Well, that’s brilliant.”

“They’re the lumpy bronze ones. Just watch where you step.”

“Is there anything else I should worry about out there?”

“You might run into a few sand serpents. They’re mostly friendly unless you get near their burrows.”

Chumley grabbed a hat and put it on before he could develop second thoughts about this whole endeavor, then slipped on his borrowed trench coat and loaded its pockets up with bottled water and food. He exited the vehicle again and set off in a northerly direction, keeping an eye out for anything that wasn’t desert.

Sweat oozed from every pore of Chumley’s skin—he’d have to take a shower in his portable universe by the end of the day. Should he tell Dalton about the portable universe? Dalton didn’t seem the sort who’d want to steal it, but you could never be too sure about people. Portable universes weren’t exactly a mainstream commodity, and it was only by pure chance that Chumley had come about getting one in the first place.

He passed a few bronzish rocks and sidestepped them, not knowing if Dalton had been kidding. He didn’t see any snakes.

As Chumley contemplated turning around and going back, a faint, whirring sound somewhere behind him made his skin prickle. He scanned the horizon in all directions, saw nothing out of the ordinary, and decided it must have been in his head.

Saguaro cacti loomed ahead on his left. Imports, Chumley thought. That’s what humans did, wasn’t it? They found a new place to live, and rather than accepting it as it was, they had to turn it into someplace it wasn’t. The ancestors of these wild cacti had probably arrived with early waves of settlers who’d wanted to emulate the deserts of the American southwest.

Something glinted ahead of him in the sunlight.

Chumley halted in his tracks and looked through his binoculars again.

The glinting thing appeared to be a metal structure, much larger than the ruined motorhome. Two figures moved about it, but he couldn’t make out many details at that distance, which was probably at least three kilometers.

Chumley grinned, turned tail, and sprinted back toward the motorhome, taking care not to step on any exploding rocks.

It took him half an hour to get there, panting.

“Dalton!” he cried, vaulting himself up onto the “roof” of the useless vehicle. “Dalton, I’ve found people!”

He heard no response as he made his awkward way through the opening into the sand-filled cockpit. “Are you still in here?”

The sheriff no longer sat on the bathroom door. Chumley negotiated his way through the mess and rapped on it. “Dalton?”

Frowning at the continuing silence, Chumley pulled the door open.

The sideways bathroom was empty.

Chumley checked inside the closet across the corridor from the bathroom, which now lay above him like a ceiling, just to see if Dalton had gotten bored and tried to defy gravity. Several boxes and a citronella candle fell on his head for his efforts.

He got more bottled water and went back outside.

There were footprints in the sand beside the motorhome. Chumley recognized some of them as his own, and another set that could only be Dalton’s. He followed the second set for several meters until it met up with two other sets that made Chumley’s blood turn to ice, for those other sets had appeared out of nowhere.

They disappeared, too.

Like ghosts.

Chumley whisked his comm unit out of his pocket and keyed in Dalton’s number. “What’s happened?” Chumley asked. “Where have you gone?”

“Pip-pip! Imruu himms a’ kolaa,” said the comm unit.

“What?”

He thought he heard a muffled groan somewhere in the background.

Chumley’s heart raced. Dalton had been rescued, dammit, and hadn’t even attempted to let him know about it! Whoever else was out there with them must have spotted the motorhome and spirited Dalton away from it.

Having no other course of action to take, Chumley headed back toward the metal building he’d spotted earlier. Maybe they’d sent someone out on a hovercraft, hence the disappearing footprints. It would explain the whirring sound, too. If Dalton was inside the metal building, then all would be well.

Chumley didn’t run this time. His reserves of energy were waning.

When it felt as though he’d been walking for two hours, he checked the horizon with the binoculars and couldn’t see the dwelling anywhere.

His forehead creased. He’d always been fairly decent with directions, and he’d passed the same clump of saguaros not too many minutes earlier. So where had the building gone? Was it not a building at all, but a vehicle that had looked like a building? It wasn’t fair they’d left him behind out here to die, just when he was starting to feel useful again.

He heard a sudden sound and whirled.

A figure dressed entirely in white stood there, holding some pistol-like weapon in a gloved hand.

“What are you—” Chumley started to say as he instinctively raised his hands, but the weapon fired, and the next thing Chumley knew, he was sitting in a beach chair wearing only what nature had given him while several handsome people waited on him hand and foot, and since he knew his luck would never allow that to happen in the real world, he knew he had to be dreaming, which also meant he was probably not dead, so at least he had that going for him.