"How much juice does he take?" Beta RAM asked. He was crouching in the doorway, hands braced on his knees.
The leader of the Salvion movement glanced around at the huge number of car batteries arranged around the supine form of Elizu Roote. "I'm not sure," Arthur admitted. "I saw him drained once before, but never this bad." Crawling on his knees, he gently lifted Roote's head with one hand. Squeezing open another of the jumper cable claws, he found the metal patch on the Army private's spine. Carefully he clamped the hook onto the nub.
Beta RAM and Arthur Ford actually heard the hum from the battery. It was a rapid powering-down noise.
Once Ford removed the clamp from the battery, Beta used a tester to confirm their suspicions. Both were right. The battery had been drained of all its juice.
There was no reaction from Roote. He continued to lie there, eyes closed, breathing shallow. Not so much as a solitary muscle spasm disturbed his slender frame.
"His power must be really low," Ford commented.
Leaving the far end of the cables hooked to Roote's neck, he moved over to the next battery, latching on to another terminal with one of the free claws.
The results were the same as before. A loud hum, followed by a total lack of any reaction from Elizu Roote.
"This is going to take forever," Beta RAM complained.
Arthur wasn't paying attention. Sliding on his knees through the dirt, he had already moved over to the next battery. He hooked into Roote's system once more.
"We're going to need more batteries," Ford commented as he worked.
"You've got a couple hundred already," Beta RAM said. "We'd have to go all the way to Las Cruces for more."
"We need more," Ford insisted. "He's sucking down juice like there's no tomorrow."
Beta RAM sighed. "If he's working for the Squiltas, there might not be a tomorrow," he muttered. Shaking his head, he added, "I'll see what I can do."
The leader of Camp Earth ducked back out the door of the small shack, leaving Arthur Ford to his work of reviving a man more dangerous than any of the creatures of Beta RAM's fertile imagination.
BY THE TIME Remo and Chiun arrived at the Truth or Consequences House Warehouse store, it was a little after three in the afternoon.
"Why are we here?" the Master of Sinanju asked as they walked through the huge airconditioned building. Shoppers filled the aisles.
"Camp Earth is one of the few alien-chasing wacko groups without its own Web site," Remo explained. "Smith doesn't know exactly where it is."
"And he believes someone here knows?" Chiun asked. He appeared to be extremely doubtful that any of the people they were passing could know anything. The men all looked as if they had just stepped in from the bowling alley next door, and the women seemed to be practicing for the Olympic gum-snapping-and-halter-top-wearing competition.
"Maybe," Remo said. "Someone from there bought a ton of batteries here and at other stores in town. It's possible the locals know where they were bringing them."
"Knowledge is no doubt scarcer than hen's teeth in this toilet-seat emporium," the Master of Sinanju sniffed. Tucking his hands inside the sleeves of his silver kimono, he trailed Remo reluctantly up the aisle.
They found the manager of the automotive department at the rear of the building. The man expressed sympathy for their situation, but explained with a sad smile that he had no more automobile batteries in stock.
"Gee, I'm really sorry," he said, "but a couple guys came in this morning and cleaned me out."
"I heard," Remo said. "We were hoping you knew who they were. Maybe where we could find them."
The man shook his head in apology. "Sorry," he said. "Didn't really know them. If you really need a battery that bad, I've got another batch coming in on Tuesday."
Remo shook his head. "Thanks. We'll check somewhere else."
As they turned to go, the manager called to them.
"Good luck," he said with an apologetic shrug. "The whole town's cleaned out. In fact, I just heard from our sister store down in Las Cruces. Someone already put all their supply on reserve. Maybe if you hurry you can sneak in and get one before they pick them up."
Remo spun back around. "How long ago did you talk to them?" he demanded.
The man's face clouded. "Five minutes," he said. "Customer made a cell call to make sure the store held on to all the batteries. Told the manager down there to check with me when he asked if they were on the level." He shook his head. "Why's there such a big run on batteries?"
The manager found that the last words he had spoken were to himself.
The two men he had been speaking to were suddenly nowhere near him. When he craned his neck over the crowd of shoppers, he was just able to spy them as they raced around the corner of the long aisle at the distant front of the store. A moment later he could barely distinguish the bright silver flash of the old Asian's kimono in the parking lot as the pair raced past the long windows beyond the line of cash registers.
"Have fun driving to Las Cruces without a battery," the manager muttered, annoyed at their rudeness.
Glancing down, he returned to work.
Chapter 21
The old rusted Dodge truck that Beta RAM drove down into Las Cruces was so battered it almost looked as if someone had stuck four bald tires on one of the Camp Earth shanties and pushed it down the hill.
The sun was sinking lower in his rearview mirror as the Prophet of Salvion steered the rattling pile of metal down the sticky black streets.
Beta was not a happy Camp Earth camper.
For several years now his followers in the Salvion movement had been willing to do anything and everything he asked of them. Even though they were all dancing on the precipice of Armageddon, in a strange way it had truly been a golden age for Beta RAM. In just a few short hours, Arthur Ford had changed all that.
The people were no longer talking about Salvion and the Squiltas threat, they were discussing creatures called the Power Players of Andromeda.
It took some arm-twisting to find out that they were talking about the race from which the companion of Ford's had apparently come.
Ford had described the creature's amazing abilities to the people of Camp Earth. How he could channel and launch electricity with his fingers. How he killed only when he was threatened. How he was being stalked by government agents.
Slowly those at Camp Earth were beginning to believe their ultimate salvation, as well as the hope of all mankind, lay in the hands of this E.T.-come-lately.
Beta RAM knew what would come next. His followers would denounce Salvion. They would disregard the Squiltas threat. They would toss out Beta himself as part of the old orthodoxy.
The prophet of Salvion would be without his beloved followers. Perhaps when the celestial ark finally did come, he would be forced to bring along pigs after all, assuming the more attractive females in the movement went with Arthur Ford.
It was all utterly ghastly. On a cosmic scale. These things weighed heavily on the mind of Beta as he drove his rickety red truck into the big parking lot of the House Warehouse store in Las Cruces.
After parking the truck near the front of the lot, he walked toward the store.
Car batteries were pretty heavy, he thought as he approached the large building. He had helped move a few of the many that had been brought back to Camp Earth earlier that day and had had a difficult time lugging them.
Hmm...