Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) by Julian May Read Free Book Online Page B

his ticket on the premium-class superluminal transport had eaten up nearly all of his remaining personal credit-card allowance. When the starship docked at Ka Lei, Marc discovered that he couldn’t afford to travel the rest of the way home from Hawaii via express eggliner and taxi. For emergencies, he carried the family corporation credit card, with its unlimited rating; but since he was legally a minor for three more years, no matter how extraordinary his metapsychic quotient, using the card would require parental authorization and thereby alert his father. And the damned premonitionseemed to urge that he not let anyone—most particularly not Paul—know that he had returned.
    So Marc took the cheapie local shuttle, which took twice as long as the express to fly from Ka Lei to the North American spaceport on Anticosti Island. It was from there that he had embarked for the planet Okanagon the previous June, leaving his BMW T99RT turbocycle in the long-term parking facility. He considered but rejected the idea of sneaking his wheels out without paying. The garage exit was fully automated against that very contingency, and its computer notably sneetchproof, even to the likes of him, and if he blew it and got nailed, he might as well have stayed on Okanagon. There was nothing to do but play it straight. Unhocking the turbocycle reduced the credit on his personal plass to just about zero; but fortunately the BMW was fully j-fueled and ready to roll, and the tolls would be automatically debited to the family account.
    Marc removed the cycle leathers from the machine’s boot and put them on. He checked the charge and ran an internal test of the circuitry in the cerebroenergetic guidance helmet, then clapped it on, effectively plugging his brain into the bike the moment the hard-hat electrodes came alive at his imperative thought and pricked his scalp. The BMW’s instrumentation became part of his own senses, and its operating controls belonged to his voluntary nervous system, answering to his mental commands. There was nothing unique about the cerebroenergetic system except the fact that it was designed to operate a mere turbocycle instead of a starship or another highly sophisticated piece of apparatus. And instead of being manufactured by IBM or Datasys or Toshiba, it had been built by Marc himself.
    Ordinarily, he drove his overpowered BMW in a scrupulously law-abiding manner except when he was on a racecourse; but now, in the emergency, he’d crank the bike flat out in the maxcel lanes of the autoroutes and screw the scofflaw monitors with his metacreativity. If a living police officer spotted him, he’d just have to risk brainwiping the cop.
    The mind-controlled two-wheeler with the boy aboard rolled out of the spaceport parking garage, adhering to the speed limit all through the Jacques Cartier Tunnel leading to the Labrador Autoroute on the north shore of the Saint-Laurent. Once it reached the maxcel lanes of the majorgroundway, the boy hung out the spoilers and commanded maximum throttle. Luckily, no human traffic police eyeballed him en route, and no busybody civilian drivers happened to be alert enough to note his tag number as he scorched past. He reached Hanover, New Hampshire, shortly after noon, having achieved an average velocity of 282.2 kilometers per hour.
    The beautiful old college town was swathed in a summer heat wave and seemed nearly deserted. Marc drove the bike in quietly and decided that it would be a good idea to scan things out at close range before going to the house.
    He went to the empty parking area of the Catholic Church on Sanborn Road, just around the corner from his home. It was so hot that the birds had quit singing and the tarmac that paved the lot was semiliquid between the bits of gravel. When he unzipped the environmentally controlled leather suit from left shoulder to right ankle and stepped out of it, he felt as if he had stepped into a sauna.
    He was able to mentally adjust his body