Impossible Places by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online Page B

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    Ahead the road stretched north to Townsville, the next community of any real size and the beginnings of the true tropics. Behind lay Rockhampton, an undistinguished, extraordinarily humid community built on cattle and commerce.
    Harbison had three crews going: one south near Caboolture, one working down from Cairns, and this one, in the center. He’d chosen to spend most of his time here, where it would be easiest to deal with all three crews and any problems they might encounter. He watched the men work; good-natured, broad-shouldered, muscular. As competent as any road crew back home, but slow. It puzzled him. They seemed capable enough, but there was no enthusiasm, no desire. They shuffled through their work; the asphalt spreaders, the men on the heavy equipment, all of them.
    The only time they showed any spirit was during their regular breaks, which were inevitably accompanied by the opening of coolers full of the ubiquitous, high-alcohol beer. He’d remonstrated with them personally about drinking so heavily on the job but to no avail. The breaks, and the beer, were sacrosanct.
    He’d tried putting his foot down with the northern crew, only to have them go out on strike. When he threatened to fire the lot of them, they simply smiled and shrugged, as though it didn’t matter if he did or not. Any new men he hired would act exactly the same.
    The road stretched northward, a black arrow piercing the baked landscape. The National Highway. He snorted. Back home it wouldn’t pass muster as a farm road. Two narrow lanes full of potholes, with no shoulders, crumbling into dust at the edges. How eighteen-wheelers and cross-country buses managed to navigate the disintegrating course without smashing into one another was nothing short of a miracle. Back home the entire thousand miles would’ve stood a good chance of being condemned.
    It made no sense. Sure the conditions were harsh, but no more so than in Arizona or Florida. He’d ordered repeated checks of the materials, had the bitumen exhaustively analyzed. Standard paving asphalt. The road base had been properly prepared, packed and leveled. It ought not to be crumbling this fast. After several months of work he was beginning to think there might be something in the ground rather than in the asphalt that was failing.
    So he’d had the earth itself analyzed, to no avail. It was neither unusually acidic nor alkaline. It should be holding up far better than it was. Kent had shown him stretches that had been repaved only the year before. Already the edges were cracking, breaking off in big chunks, turning to gravel and dirt.
    He removed his wide-brimmed hat and wiped sweat from his forehead. Someone in the crew, sitting in the shade with his mates, waved a beer in his direction. Irritably he shook his head and looked away. Kent had been right. The beer wasn’t the problem. There was something else going on here, something he couldn’t put a finger on. But he would. It was what he was getting paid to do.
    He looked sharply to his right. There were several aborigines on the road crew. They sat with their white mates, race relations having progressed farther out in the country than in the city. One of them was clapping a pair of sticks together, beating time to an ancient unknown rhythm. His companion was playing that long tube, what was it called? A didgeridoo. Except it wasn’t an actual didgeridoo he was playing. He was cycle-breathing on a four-foot-long section of plastic PVC pipe. Remarkably, the sound was the same as that produced by the traditional wooden native instrument.
    The music hung like a fog above and around the gum trees, as if some massive fantastical creature lay sleeping just beneath the surface. Sometimes Harbison found himself hearing it at night, which bothered him. It did not sound quite like anything else he’d ever heard. It tickled his brain.
    When he’d asked Kent about it, the foreman had smiled and explained that some of the men on