They had filled their bellies with fruit in the forest outside Sarash-Zillish. There Corbell had used the head of the broken spear to shave his face and his chest and four inches of his scalp around a topknot. Gording had cut away his long white hair. Gording had shaved too, for all the good that would do; there were white-haired albino Boys, but they didn't move like their joints hurt.
Laughing, joking Boys spilled out of a probable department store. Corbell turned a corner to avoid them, just like a loner would, maybe. At a distance he should pass as a loner. Close up, no chance. Dikta immortality be damned, he was no twelve-year-old. He wished Gording were beside him; but that would have torn it. Two was just the wrong number to pass.
The brush clogging the street thickened. Corbell waded into it. Here were tangled vines rising almost vertically to a wall. Corbell turned along its length.
The wall, he found, had a gentle curve to it. Probably it formed a circle or an ellipse. Here there was a break, and near the break the shrubbery thickened and grew taller, as if the park spilled out through the opening. Corbell passed it and kept going. There were park sounds: tree limbs rustling in the breeze, small birds whistling, a sudden loud squawk followed by (Corbell jumped) a burst of laughter. Boys! Boys on the other side of the wall. And the wall opened ahead of him.
Beyond the opening, a twelve-foot Christmas ornament floated above knee-deep vines.
Corbell thought it through. Then, within sight of the car, he began searching for a straight sapling. Most of the bushes were of the wrong kind, but he found one that would do, even if it was a bit short. He hacked at the base with the truncated spear until he could break it loose. He sat down cross-legged...
What was keeping Gording?
Gording was well behind him, tracking him. If anyone noticed, two loners happened to be moving in the same direction, their target a reasonable one: the park.
Squatting cross-legged, Corbell disengaged the spearhead from the broken haft and used it to shave the sapling. He barely glanced up as Boys came wading through the tangle in what had been a park gate: two, five, ten Boys with a giant turkey carcass slung on poles. Where were they going with that? A kitchen in a nearby building? Effete, that was. He heard a louder voice followed by a pause, and, judging that he had been hailed, he glanced up, held a grinning Boy's eye for a moment, then deliberately went back to his work. Couldn't they see he was alone? A loner would damn well make the first overtures, as and when he felt like it, maybe.
The new halt was shaping nicely. He tried the end against the spearhead. A bit too big. He'd shave it down a little and carve a notch and wedge it in. The rushing of the Boys diminished, moving across the street, but two quiet, puzzled voices were speaking too near him. He glanced up under lowered brows.
They were near, and looking at him as they talked. The car was- Gording was crouched behind the car!
How had he gotten there? Corbell hadn't heard a sound. He must have spotted the car, gone over the wall, circled inside the park and gone over the wall again. Now he crouched, immobile, but looking guilty as hell if anyone should see him.
The tall Boy with hair like a black puffball hailed Corbell again. "Perfunctory apologies because we interrupt. May we examine your work?"
Corbell unfolded his legs and slowly stood up, then sprinted for the car.
The door was open as he had left it. By that much did the Boys fail to intercept him. Gording was ahead of him, sliding in the other door. Corbell slammed his door and clung to the handle, leaning back to hold it shut, while Gording jabbed at the keyboard.
The black-haired Boy ran alongside, pulling at the door, for longer than Corbell would have believed possible. Finally he dropped away.
"You said four of anything," said Gording. "I pushed that." Crossed commas.
"I don't know where that takes us. Let's see if we can change it." He jabbed four times at the crooked pi. "I don't even know if there is a subway terminal here. There's no giant cube. Everywhere else it was a giant cube."
"Rest. If we don't find the subway we still have a tchiple. Dial at random."
"I lost my spear."
"I still have the thread."
"That's not what I meant. I thought I was repairing it right. But the way those Boys acted, I must have messed it up somehow. Skip it."
On their crooked run through the city they saw only one other Boy. On the wreck of a skyscraper near the city's center, a lean and ragged loner was mountain-climbing three stories up. As the tchiple zipped beneath him his sunken eyes locked on Corbel's and held them until the tchiple turned a corner.
With the big dark still an Olde Earth year away, one loner and the two bands near the park might well be the total population of Sarash-Zillish. It would be nice to think so... but stupid. Sarash-Zillish had to be on that pattern of close-spaced "phone booths." It was too important not to be. Corbell said, "Some of Krayhayft's tribe probably got here ahead of us."
"They won't know where we're going, will they?"
"They don't know why we want to get to Cape Horn. I'd hate to underestimate them."
The car slowed and settled, bending shrubbery, and stopped. They got out. Gording asked, "Where are we?"
The sparse greenery in the street thickened to jungle as it climbed the slope to their right. Corbell sprang to the rounded top of the tchiple. The patch of citrus jungle was unnaturally flat and rectangular. Some of the trees looked very old.
"I don't know."
"But why did the tchiple bring us here? Where is the subway?"
"It'd be towering over our heads. Every city I've seen, the subway building was a tremendous cube."
Gording joined him on the car. Together they surveyed the rectangle of jungle.
"But a subway is below ground," Gording said. "Why would it need to be so high?"
"I never found out what was in the upper stories. Maybe places of government." Or offices for rent. No way to say that in Boyish.
"Maybe they made a subway and left off the subway building."
The patch of jungle was about as wide as the great cubes in One City and Four City. Corbell said, "Could be. They put a park on it instead. Then the ice cap thawed and a lot of dead dust fell all over everything." Where did they put the entrances, though? Escalators in the center? No, the trees grew thickest there.
Where the ground sloped up from the street, there in mid-slope was a dip. Water pooled there, forming a small, dirty, weed-grown pond. Corbell expressed himself under his breath.
"I don't know those words," said Gording.
Corbell pointed. "Under the weeds and the water and the scum and the mud, that's where we'll find steps leading down to the doors. After we dig it out. After we find shovels and dig all that stuff out of there. Then we get to find out if anything still works under all that."
"No?"
"They won't let us." Gording pointed.
The sharp-faced loner was trotting toward them from across the wide street. He carried an oddly curved broad-bladed sword. Well behind him, other Boys spilled out of a building.
"Do you think you can take him with your rocks?"
"No," said Gording. "He's ready. He knows we're dangerous. He'll catch the thread on his blade."
"Into the car, then." They clambered down and in. In frustration Corbell demanded, "-How did they get here so fast?"
"Not by car. Are there prilatsil in Sarash-Zillish'!"
"Oh, sure, that's how they did it."
"Can we use prilatsil?"
"Yeah. Yeah! We won't have to dig! Assuming the damn things still work. The subway hasn't been maintained."