No Small Bills Read online

  “Great! Won’t be long. See y’all there!” Benny nodded to the rest of us, grinned at Mary, and waddled back to his cab, spitting as he went. I shuddered and looked away quickly.

  “Okay,” I said once he’d pulled away. “So now what?”

  That got a frown from Mary. “Now we walk past the station and then wait, as we agreed.”

  “That won’t work,” I warned her. “We’ve got a schedule to keep, remember? And we’re already out of time. We can’t afford to wait the hours or days it’s gonna take for him to get his truck cleared.”

  “From the way he was talking, I figured it’d be less than an hour, myself,” Ned offered.

  “Not likely,” I told him. “How many times did he say it wouldn’t take long?” The three of them stopped to replay the conversation in their head. “I counted at least three times. And you know how that works.” Mary and Ned both gave me blank stares and I sighed. “Say it once and something that should have taken ten minutes will suddenly take you twenty. Say it twice and you’re looking at at least an hour. Three times? We could be sitting out there all day, maybe even several days! He might never come out at all!”

  Ned snorted. “That’s ridiculous!”

  Surprisingly, it was Tall who came to my rescue. “No, he’s right, actually.” The way he shook his head, I think he was as surprised by that sentence as I was. “I’ve seen it happen way too many times not to know it’s true.”

  “That every time you say something won’t take long it winds up taking longer?” Ned snorted again. “You’ve both been breathing in truck exhaust for way too long. You’ve gone loopy.”

  “Come on, you’ve never noticed this?” That surprised me. Mary was your typical egghead type, though admittedly way hotter than most and of course the whole alien-alteration thing, but it made perfect sense she didn’t know about something like this. Ned, though? He was a worldly guy. “Look, you’ve seen the sports announcer thing, right? He looked even more baffled. “You know, how they can change the results of a single toss or throw or kick by talking about how likely it is the player’ll make it? Every time a sportscaster says how the player on the free throw line never misses, the ball bounces off the rim. And every time they say he’s lousy at free throws he makes it, nothing but net.”

  Ned nodded. “Yeah, that one I know,” he admitted. “Damn sportscasters! It’s like they do it on purpose!”

  “Of course they do! What’d you think, it was an accident—every time? They control the outcome of a game by deciding when to talk up some poor kid’s throwing arm or laugh about some poor shmoe’s inability to pull off a safety. What, you didn’t know that?” I had to laugh. “Dude, where I grew up there was only one rule when betting on games. You can bet against a team’s record, or a coach’s history, or a player’s trophies. But never never NEVER bet against a sportscaster! You’ll lose every time.” I shook my head. “But anyway, this is like that. The more time you claim something’ll take, the less time it takes unless it’s important, in which case it really does take that long. And the more you say something’ll be easy the harder it becomes, while the more you say it’ll be quick the longer it takes.” That made me think of something, and I whirled to face Mary. “When you first told me what we needed to do, did you ever say it was easy? Did you?”

  She shook her head. “I do not remember,” she admitted. “I may have. Why?”

  But I was thinking. “Who else said it would be easy, and how many times?” I muttered to myself. “How many times? And did it matter that it was different people each time?” Because I was pretty sure she hadn’t been the only one—a lot of people had been encouraging me to accept this crazy mission, and it felt like all of them had comforted me by saying how easy it should be to get the thing done. Great. If it really had been as many people as I thought, I’d be lucky if I didn’t spontaneously implode right before reaching the darned thing.

  “We can discuss that later,” Mary urged, putting a hand on my shoulder. “For now, if we accept your . . . theory we may need to find an alternate method of travel. But regardless we will need to pass by the weigh station and find a strategic location at which to wait.” She gestured in that direction. “Shall we?”

  I couldn’t think of any reason why not, and plenty of reasons why, so I followed her. Closely. We trotted up a small rise—I asked Ned why there were hills and valleys and things if this wasn’t really a road or really ground or really solid. He only shrugged and said, “space is curved,” as if that explained everything—and paused at the top to get a better look at this weigh station.

  Wow.

  It was like looking at the Death Star, that was my first thought—the Death Star if it was merged with the Fisher-Price Weeble-Wobble Garage I’d had when I was a kid. It was big and bristly and covered in scanners and radar dishes and massive laser cannons. It was also cheery and brightly colored and had big colorful signs pointing out useful things like airlocks, docking bays, command center, and dead bodies. And there were bright shiny ramps everywhere, going every which way.

  “That,” I whispered, “is amazing! That’s what every Philips 66 and Shell and BP wants to be when it grows up—a massive angry station, loaded for bear, and with smiley-faces imbedded in the floor.”

  Ned, who was next to me, nodded. “They figured out a long time ago that there was no reason to make places like this grim and ugly,” he explained. “Better to make them happy and cheerful, to at least mask the pain and suffering within.”

  “Who’s they?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “The governments. The bureaucracy. You know, the men in charge.”

  I noticed Tall was taking notes. That didn’t bode well. Still, I had wondered earlier why the Feds didn’t use happy, cheerful cars for rounding up suspects. Maybe this would finally get that ball rolling.

  In the meantime, we had a Happy Funland O’ Misery to bypass.

  “So can we just walk past it?” I asked. We hadn’t moved from the top of the “hill” yet, and I took that as a bad sign.

  Sure enough, Mary shook her head. “The weigh station is equipped with sensors,” she told us. “It registers every vehicle that passes through the surrounding spacelanes, and will act to intercept any it feels must be weighed, catalogued, or otherwise inspected.”

  “But we’re not vehicles!” I argued. “We’re people!”

  “That’s the problem.” Ned sighed. “This is a major thoroughfare, the equivalent of your superhighways.” He gestured in either direction. “Look around. Whaddya see?”

  I looked. “Tons of those particles,” I answered after a second. “A few ships.” And there were a few, in a variety of sizes and shapes—I saw a classic-SF-movie flying saucer whiz past, and something that looked like a salad bar with tentacles sprouting out the bottom, and what I was sure was a World War II Sherman tank. I tried to forget about the middle one. I had a feeling I’d never be able to look at buffets the same way again, especially if they included both lettuce and calamari. Ugh.

  “And what don’t you see?”

  Tall was ahead of me again, as usual. It’s just ’cause he’s taller. “People,” he growled. “There aren’t any people. No pedestrians.”

  “Exactly. No pedestrians. They’re not allowed on or even in proximity to the superhighway. Too much risk of getting sucked into intakes or caught up in RAM scoops or otherwise mucking with the various ships’ engines. If the weigh station spots us, it’ll grab us and hold us, probably charge us with vagrancy and jaywalking and all sorts of other things. Then it’ll throw us in a small, wet cell somewhere and toss away the key.”

  He was talking like the station itself was alive, and given what we’d seen so far I couldn’t help thinking it wasn’t just a colorful turn of phrase. “So can we just detour?” I asked instead. “Give it a wide berth, so we won’t be within range of its sensors?”

  But Ned shook his head. “Two problems with that plan,” he explained. “First, that thing’s sensors are stellar—and I mean
that literally. It can read anything within a few light-years of it, no problem.”

  That sounded a bit farther than I was prepared to walk. “What’s the second problem?”

  He gestured at the superhighway again. “See how the particles thin out big-time once you get past the outer lanes?” I did, too. It really was like a highway, a broad ribbon gleaming in an otherwise empty expanse. “That’s because they concentrate them through here to make it easier for travel—and for control. We venture away from the lanes and we’re floating in space, nothing to grab onto.”

  “Got it—we stick to the road, or close by it, or we’re sunk.” I knew I was mixing my metaphors, but I figured what the hell. Mixed drinks were good, right? And mixed-match tennis? Why not mixed metaphors? As long as they weren’t mixed signals, we should be fine.

  Thinking about signals brought me back to the problem at hand, though, and I studied the place again, half expecting to see eyes and a big fanged grin this time. Nope, it still looked like Ronald McDonald’s idea of a truck stop.

  And that gave me an idea.

  “Listen,” I said. “I think I know a way we can sneak past it.”

  “This,” Tall said for probably the hundredth time, “is insane. Completely cracked. There’s no way this’ll work.”

  “Shut up,” I warned him. “And make vroom-vroom sounds.”

  He grumbled something else under his breath, but started putt-putting anyway. I nodded and glanced over at Ned. “You doin’ okay there?”

  Ned grinned back at me. It was, I’d already figured out, his favorite expression. “Absolutely! I’ve always worried about being a fifth wheel—now I’m the first one instead!”

  “Quiet, all of you,” Mary warned. “We are approaching scanning range!”

  We shut up. All except Tall, who kept making engine noises.

  We’d done this trick back in college, during my frat days. It’d be late at night and we’d all be hungry, jonesing for fast food, but after midnight most of the burger joints and taco joints and such shut their front doors.

  But they kept their drive-thrus open.

  The only problem was, none of us had had cars. Well, okay, a few of us did. But those kept getting wrecked, or impounded—something about driving under the influence. And about wrapping them around trees.

  But that wasn’t going to stop us. No sirree. We figured, “They’re open, and we’re paying customers. Why should we have to have a car just to pay them for food?”

  Some of them were stricter about it than others. Some you could literally walk up, place your order, walk around to the window, hand them your money, get your food, and leave. They might look at you funny, but they’d let you get away with it. Others were like “Hey, this is a drive-thru, not a walk-thru!” So we’d beep at them, make car noises, say things like “What, you don’t see my car? What’s wrong with you?” and “Sure, I’m in my car. It’s a cousin to Wonder Woman’s plane. You got a problem with that?”, and brazen our way through.

  Of course, none of those places had the kind of scanners and sensors this psychedelic Fort Knox did. That’s why we had to be a little more creative here.

  I was the front, of course. With my bill, I made a perfect hood. I was also the front left wheel. Ned was the front right wheel. Tall was the rear wheels, and the engine. Mary? Mary was both cockpit and driver. Car had to have a driver, right?

  We were moving pretty slowly—hard to move fast when you’re crawling on your hands and knees, and even harder when you’re four people trying to hold onto each other and stay in formation—but Ned and Mary had assured us that wouldn’t be a problem. “There are minimum speeds out here, sure,” Ned had said, “but you’re supposed to slow down when you’re passing the weigh station, in case it decides it needs to pull you in. So crawling past here is fine.”

  We even had a license plate, courtesy of Tall’s Sharpie and one of Ned’s little gizmos. It hung from the back of Tall’s belt. I’d resisted the urge to tell him he should make it his new badge afterward, but it had taken a lot of willpower. Judging by the glare he gave me, he’d known what I was thinking anyway.

  “Almost there,” Mary whispered. “It should be scanning us soon. Keep going!”

  I inched forward and so did Ned. Mary and Tall were right behind us. I’m sure we looked like one of the craziest cars ever—we had no roof, no doors, our “wheels” were hands and feet—but I figured out here that couldn’t make a lot of difference. And Ned had pulled some kind of little metallic square from his pocket, then opened it into a silvery tarp that he’d spread over the two of us, wrapped around Mary, and then spread over Tall as well. So you couldn’t actually see that we were just three guys and one hot chick pretending to be a car. Instead we looked like a weird, lumpy car with funny tires.

  I hoped.

  Something beeped near my head. “They’re scanning us!” Ned warned. The beeping continued, then stopped. Then started again.

  We kept going.

  Then I heard something else. A weird whooshing sound. And something like a scream, if blenders and saxophones could scream together. There was only one thing that noise could be, even out here.

  A siren.

  “Oh, great,” I whispered. “They’re onto us!”

  “Not necessarily,” Ned whispered back. “Stay cool! And don’t move out of position!”

  The siren drew closer, then alongside us.

  “Pull over!” A mechanical voice announced. I couldn’t peek but I felt like I was being chased by my neighborhood ATM.

  “Yes, officers!” Mary replied. “To the right,” she whispered. “Gradually.”

  Ned and I shuffled to the right, and I could feel the tarp tugging across me as Mary and Tall followed.

  “Slow down,” Mary whispered again. “And—stop!” We came to a halt, and I let out a little sigh of relief. The surface of the superhighway, whatever it was, was a bit springy and not too hard and surprisingly warm. It was like crawling across a water balloon if it weren’t slick and sticky—there were other comparisons springing to mind but I was steadfastly ignoring them. Even so, this car stuff was rough on the hands. And my knees were killing me.

  “Is there a problem, officers?” I heard Mary ask.

  “License and registration, please,” the mechanical voice replied. Great, the ATM had gotten out of its car. Or maybe it was the car. Who was I to point fingers?

  “License and registration,” Mary repeated. “Yes. I have it here somewhere. Hold on one moment while I find it.” Ned was frantically twiddling and clicking and adjusting some of his gizmos, and after a few seconds he shoved two little cubes back behind him. “Ah, here they are,” Mary announced, taking them from him. Part of me really loved the idea of a glove compartment that could hand you what you were looking for. The rest of me never wanted to put my hand in any sort of box or compartment or briefcase ever again.

  “I am unfamiliar with this make and model vehicle,” Officer ATM stated. “What is it, please, that I may update my database.”

  “Oh, it’s a Duckbill Nedthomas 450Z,” Mary replied smoothly. “It’s a prototype, actually.”

  “Fascinating. What manner of fuel does it use?” Was this thing a car enthusiast, or trying to hit on her? Either way, I hoped she could speed things up. I was starting to get a crick in my neck.

  “It runs on standard hydrocarbons,” Mary answered. “Plus certain base elements. And the occasionally insertion of biomatter.” Food, air, and water. Cute.

  “Impressive. You will need appropriate warning lights, however. I am writing you a warning citation, but due to its experimental nature I will not issue a full ticket.” I heard a sound like a bee buzzing, mixed with the clicking of an old electric typewriter and then the ratchet of what I’d swear was an early dot-matrix printer.

  “Thank you, officer. We will of course have the lights added before we go to production.”

  “Excellent.” Officer ATM paused a second. “I have included my name and badge number
at the bottom of the citation,” it informed her. “With those you can contact me easily. If you have a mailing list for this vehicle, please add me to it. I have a large collection of vehicles and would very much like to add one of these when they become commercially available.”

  “I certainly will, officer,” Mary told it. “Thank you again. You have a good day.”

  “You as well.” A minute later there was a whooshing sound again, and then I heard Mary give a big sigh of relief. I wish I could have seen it.

  “It’s gone,” she informed us quietly. “That was close.”

  “Too close,” Tall agreed from the rear.

  “Hey, look at the bright side,” I told them. “It scanned us and the only problem was our lack of headlights. So we should be in the clear.” I could feel the others nodding. “And besides,” I added, “you heard the officer. We’re a collectible!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Take me to Havana!

  Fifteen harrowing minutes later, we veered off the road once more and did our best imitation of rolling to a stop. I was soaked in sweat, my hands and knees were raw, I couldn’t move my neck, my back was a mass of pain, and my entire body was shaking. But we’d done it! We were safely out of scanning range from the weigh station, but now on its far side. We’d gotten through!

  And, in the process, we’d heard a wider variety of horns—and curses—than I’d even imagined possible. Who knew some races screamed by bursting into full symphonies? And harmonizing with themselves? Pretty impressive, and it certainly would make fights at the local bar a lot more pleasant.

  Ned crawled under the tarp and pulled it free, releasing us, and I sprawled backward on the grass. Okay, no grass—no ground at all, really, just a slightly different texture, color, and smell to the near-invisible surface beneath our feet—but I was too wrung out to be picky. The others collapsed beside me, though Mary actually sat cross-legged instead of lying down.