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larger than the can it had come out of. It was bigger than my head, and it was
coming directly at my face!
I had ugly visions of the blob fastening itself around my face, suffocating me.
Beer foam is a mixture of carbon dioxide gas and a liquid made up mainly of
water. Not the sort of thing you can breathe. A hell of a thing! Tom
Kolczyskrenski, drowning in a single can of Foster's Lager Beer!
I couldn't change the vector of the beer, and I couldn't move my head more than
a few inches. All that I could think of to do was to blow at it, and what with
the ball gag, I was limited to blowing through my nose. This was not an
efficient procedure, and the deadly glob of beer came closer and closer.
Gyroscopic action! If I could spin myself around and catch it on the back of the
head, I just might survive. While I normally don't use hair oils, this time my
bath girls had said that the slicked down look was right for the outfit I would
be wearing, and had greased me up. The hair oil, being non-polar and thus
hydrophobic, ought to repel the hydrophilic beer! I tried moving my head around,
to my left shoulder, then my chest, my right shoulder, back, and repeated the
procedure as rapidly as possible.
There was some gyroscopic reaction, but not nearly enough, and the beer blob was
still growing, turning from yellow to foamy white, and still coming at me.
I did some rapid mental calculations for a journey of ten years, and came up
with a subjective trip length of four minutes, assuming that the program was
using our usual temporal velocity, and assuming that Ian hadn't been lying about
sending me back for ten years. If both of these assumptions were true, I could
hold my breath if the blob covered my face, and probably stay conscious until
gravity returned to splatter the beer on the deck. But that was two too many
assumptions, when my only life was on the line!
By swiveling my legs rapidly around my hips, I was able to turn myself ninety
degrees or so, and from there I could bend over to let the dangerous beer slowly
cruise past my head.
Victory! Now I only had to worry about breaking my neck, falling from what could
be fourteen feet up when the gravity came back. I had to time it so that I was
at or near the deck when that happened.
The problem was that, because of the handcuffs, I couldn't see my watch, and
when I had been high enough above the boxes and crates to see the Nixie tubes on
the control panel, I was facing in the wrong direction.
I drifted back toward the air mattress, and tried to flex my body so that I
wouldn't bounce as hard next time. I was only partially successful. The next
time I got to the ceiling, I could see the orange numbers, telling me that I had
nine seconds to get down before I fell four yards to the floor. Squirming, I
bumped the ceiling as hard as I could, and got to within three feet of the floor
before gravity returned.
I missed the air mattress, and the fall knocked the wind out of me, but at least
I hadn't broken my neck. Moments later, a gallon and a half of beer foam hit the
deck, splattering my face and chest. Damn Ian, anyway!
I could see the keys to my handcuffs, and had started to wiggle my way toward
them, when I heard someone opening the big steel door on the canister. Some
rapidly chattering feminine voices echoed in the canister, and my first thought
was that Barbara and some of her friends were coming to my rescue!
"Great! It's a cargo canister!"
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"Yeah, but it's ancient. Can you handle the programing on one this old?"
"Are you kidding? I could reprogram Methuselah, if he had a keyboard!" They
spoke to each other very quickly, in something like an Australian accent, with
no time wasted between when one left off and another began.
"Then get on it, girl, before somebody comes by!"
I heard the doors being closed while the first voice said, "I'm working, I'm
working!"
These weren't friends of mine. These people were some sort of temporal
hijackers! Still, I tried to get their attention by mumbling past the damn ball
gag and bumping my feet on the deck, on the theory that once I was free, I could
deal with them somehow or another. The trouble was, they were making too much
noise to notice me.
Whoever she was, she must have known her stuff, because in a few minutes we were
in zero-G again, and presumably going farther into the past.
I drifted up to the ceiling once more, and got a look at my new set of
abductors. There were three of them, a blonde who was taking off her backpack, a
brunette sitting strapped to the chair at the keyboard, and a real redhead, with
freckles and everything. All three had their long hair pulled back into pony
tails. They were dressed for roughing it, in flannel shirts, blue jeans, and
hiking boots.
I could tell at a glance that they weren't Smoothies. The girls of Morrow were [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]