He carried on along the side of the stone wall, with its single line of poetry that stretched the entire length. One day he was going to read it from start to finish. The Ables Motors garage, which was his franchise, was situated a couple of streets away from the eastern end of the promenade. He got to it well before quarter to nine. Randtown, for all it was the only real town for eight hundred kilometers, wasn’t particularly large. Without the tourists and youthful transients, the population was only just over five thousand people. You could walk from one end to the other in less than a quarter of an hour.
There were an equal number of people living out in the valleys and lowlands to the north and west where the farms and vineyards were spreading. To travel about on the district’s dirt-track roads they needed decent four-wheel drive transport. That was what Ables Motors specialized in; it was a division of Farndale that produced vehicles for harsh terrain. It had seemed like the perfect solution to Mark when they were searching for a new home and career. He was good with machines, so he could do most of the light repairs himself; and trading both new and second-hand models would add considerably to that income. Unfortunately, Ables Motors was a relatively new venture for Farndale, an unproven brand, while the old familiar Mercedes, Ford, Range Rover, and Telmar products took the lion’s share of the market. Nor did it help that the Ables garage was only a couple of years old. He perhaps should have realized that when he took it on along with the outstanding mortgage. Sales were slow, and given the tiny number of Ables vehicles in the area, maintenance work was equally sparse.
It had taken Mark less than a fortnight to realize that the four-wheel drive business wasn’t going to bring in anything like a decent income for the family. When he started looking around for extra work, he swiftly found that people in town and on the farms had a lot of broken-down hardware that could be fixed by anyone with rudimentary mechanical aptitude. Mark had damn good mechanical, and electrical, aptitude; on top of which he had a fully equipped workshop. At the start of the third week he brought a few items back to the shop: a couple of janitorbots, an air conditioner, the sonar out of a dive operator’s catamaran, cookers, solar heat exchangers.
Randtown was a tight-knit community, people got to hear about anyone with that kind of talent. Pretty soon he was deluged with appliances and equipment that needed to be patched up. Most of it was done for cash. They’d been paying off the mortgage on the vineyard faster than they’d originally planned.
That morning had three autopickers waiting for him in the workshop. Each unit was the size of a car, with enough electromuscle appendages to fit a Raiel with prosthetics. They belonged to Yuri Conant, who owned three vineyards in Ulon Valley, and was now a good friend and neighbor. One of Yuri’s kids was the same age as Barry.
Mark pulled on his overalls, and started running diagnostics on the first machine. Its magnetic drive bearings were shot to hell. He was still underneath examining the superconductor linkages when his garage sales assistant, Olivia, came in.
“Have you heard?” she asked excitedly.
Mark propelled his flat trolley out from under the mud-caked autopicker and gave her a wounded look. “Wolfram finally asked if he could come in for a coffee last night?” It was a saga of frustrated romance that had been playing out for two weeks now; Mark usually got the latest installment each morning.
“No! The Second Chance is back. They came out of hyperspace above Anshun about forty minutes ago.”
“Goddamn! Really?” Mark couldn’t possibly pretend lack of interest in that. If he hadn’t been married with family responsibilities he would have applied to go on the voyage himself. It was all part of the more interesting universe that existed away from Augusta. As it was he’d hunted down a lot of information on the project until he was able to bore plenty of people with all the statistics and trivial factoids. His e-butler was supposed to alert him on all new developments connected with the flight, but while he was driving into town that morning he’d put a blocker on his e-butler’s access to the cybersphere to avoid any more emergency calls like that from Tea For Two. Family could get through, but no one else. He’d forgotten to take it off when he reached the garage. “What did they find?” he asked as he hurriedly removed the blocker.
“It’s gone, or something.”
“What has?” The data began to line up inside his virtual vision.
“The barrier. It vanished when they started to examine it.”
