Stores was a cooled vault, lit by islands of fluorescents on the ceiling. In one of the pools of light there was a little crowd of slobs clustering around Possum's counter. For a while Dick couldn't even attract the old man's attention. He moved in closer, shouldering his way.
Possum's eyes were red-rimmed and irritable; with his veined beak and the sparse fuzz on his narrow head, he looked like an angry fledgling agape for worms. "Wot, wot?" he was saying. "One crissal cennerpiece with roses and wot? Lillies of the velley ... all right. And a hunnerd wot? Balloons? Wy dint you say so? Dont all holler by same time. Wait half a minute, can't you ... seventeen sconces, I got det. Shettup! You got to wait. You got to wait. I can't do every damn ting by same time ... "
"Possum!" Dick bellowed.
The old man's face only turned more sour. He listened unwillingly, fidgeting, while Dick gave his order; he scrawled symbols on his pad, then made as if to turn to the next impatient slob.
"Now, Possum," said Dick, moving closer. Reluctantly, the old man went shuffling back along the aisle, moving in a flickering pool of cold light that followed him as he went. He stopped under the hanging sign that said "Food." Like all the rest, the tall shelves of this section were divided into pigeonholes, each one just large enough to hold one small gnarled object. There were thousands of these, shelf after shelf all the way back into the big room. To look at them, they might have been oddly shaped pebbles, or dried-up bits of root.
Possum's gnarled forefinger rasped down the line of pigeonholes, stopped at one, flicked out the hard little lump into his palm. Grumbling half-audibly, he went into the Gismo Room. The massive door swung to behind him.
Dick fidgeted. The lump, he knew, was something called an "arrested prototype," or a "prote" for short. More to the point, it was his breakfast in unrecognizable miniature -- cooked perhaps twenty years ago and duped on the Gismo, but incompletely. The process had been stopped in the middle, so that what came out was not a plate of eggs and bacon, rapidly cooling, but a gnarled lump of quasi-matter that could be stored in a pigeonhole, and would keep forever. When Possum put it back on the primary side of the Gismo, and removed the inhibitor, an exact copy, not of the prote but of the original breakfast, would appear at the other terminal.
To Dick, the process was boringly familiar. If asked, he would have agreed half-heartedly that the Gismo was a marvel; actually, he took it for granted, like TV, or copters. He knew, too, that he owed his own existence and that of the world around him to the anonymous inventor of the Gismo, some seventy-odd years ago; but that was history. Just now he was more interested in finding out whether the prote Possum had chosen was the right one, or -more likely -- a slipshod approximation.
Here came the old man plodding in his circle of light. There was a steaming platter on his little cart. He paused to deposit the prote in its niche; then in a few moments he was lifting the platter onto the counter. Eggs, bacon, toast, milk, coffee. The golden yolks trembled, ready to spill.
Dick choked back a shout of pure exasperation. "Possum, I said eggs over ... Oh, hell, what's the use?" He caught the nearest slob's eye, motioned him to pick up the platter, and followed gloomily to one of the eating nooks that lined the near wall.
The day was quite definitely spoiled. There was nothing wrong nutritionally or in the taste of a duped meal, of course; it was just the principle of the thing. Only slobs, generally speaking, ate duped food; people had specially cooked meals. True, most of the ingredients were duped to begin with, so the distinction was not crucial; but it was there.
He ate hungrily but without satisfaction, pushed the remnants of the yellow-smeared whites around on his plate, crunched off another bite of toast, then gave up and threw the plate, silverware and all, into the waste chute.
All the same, having eaten made a difference. Feeling gloomy but less irritable, he went out, down the corridor past the kitchens with their tantalizing odor of roast fowl and pastry, and emerged from the hillside exit. The air was fresh and cool, flower-scented, with a tang of new-mown grass. The clear chunk, pause, chunk of an axe came from somewhere below. In spite of himself, Dick breathed joyfully deep. His feet were light on the path as he turned downhill.
Ten yards or so down, he paused to look back.
Looming over him in the cool sunlight, Buckhill was gray and knobby and huge. It looked as if the mineral kingdom had tried to create a behemoth of its own, there on the hillside, and had half succeeded. The unfinished monster slept, waiting for the second spasm of effort that would give it life.
The old inn, a C-shaped mass of fieldstone, part of it vaguely Alpine, part vaguely Spanish, had been built as a tourist hotel under the democracy, in those days when the Poconos had swarmed with vacationers from the kennels of New York and Philadelphia. The first Man of Buckhill had added the fortifications and the three hideous stone sentry towers. The second Man, and the first Jones (a nephew of the famous Nathan MacDonald, whose portrait hung in the Long Corridor), had built the landing field, and a lot of underground shelters and gun emplacements; but the third Man -- Dick's Great-Uncle John -- had only added a few tennis and squash courts and things of that kind. And except for upkeep and minor landscaping, Dick's father, the fourth Man, had done almost nothing.
That was all right with Dick. Buckhill was perfect as it was -- he would not change a stone of it when he was the Man. Let even the ugly towers stand in their places; let Dunleavy trundle out the same duped shrubs and flowers for transplanting, each in its turn, forever and ever. That, it seemed to Dick, was the way life should go.
But he was sixteen, and not yet the Man; and he had to go off to Colorado for four years.
Dick's, grandfather, as it happened, had taken and held Buckhill in the first place with the help of the MacDonald family, who were collateral ancestors of the present Boss in Colorado. As a consequence, Buckhill was still considered the leading house of the whole eastern seaboard above Charleston Manor, and Buckhill's heir automatically became a brigade officer in the Boss's army, to serve a four-year hitch at Eagles in Colorado. It was an honor, he was looking forward to it, and he couldn't get out of it even if he wanted to; so that was that.
Shadow closed over his head like water as he walked down into the gorge. The vines and mosses that covered the bank on his left were dripping; the air was full of mustiness. Just before the first bend, he came upon two garden slobs grubbing out a young maple that had fallen across the trail. The earth under the exposed roots was rich and moist; the fresh wood chips had a sharp tang of their own. The two slobs leaned silently on their axes and waited; in the dimness, their eyes gleamed bluish-white. Dick clambered over the fallen trunk and went on.
Farther down, the air was as still as if it had been poured in years ago, and left to settle. Passing, Dick reached out to the bank and idly brushed his hand over a fleshy-spined mat of club mosses, three species of them growing together within arm's reach. He had learned their names, painlessly, on many a walk down this trail with Padgett the tutor.
There was botany for you; yes, and here was petrology a little farther on, where the pages of the great stone book lay open: limestone, slate, red sandstone, marl.
Botany, ecology, forestry ... Dick paused beneath the slanting ten-foot bole of the William Penn Hemlock. After a moment he climbed the little slope to stand above it, and put his arms around the rough scaly bark. Looking up, he saw the enormous trunk swooping away into distance, so tilted and bare that it made him queasy to follow it: the tree seemed to be tilting not up, but everlastingly downward into a bottomless sea of green.