Martin rumbled, "I understand your concern, Dannerman, but we can deal with what comes later later. The question is, what do we take with us when we leave? Food, of course; remember what Dopey said. He cannot eat our food, so we probably cannot eat anything we find there, either."
"How the hell are we going to carry all these things?" Jimmy Lin said, staring at the mound of food containers.
"Well, that I can answer for you," Dannerman said. "We can use the rods I brought back and the blankets from Starlab to make travoises."
Martin kicked at the rods contemptuously. "Most of those rods are too thick to fit through the blanket loops," he pointed out.
"So we use the others. Let's get on with it."
"Hey," said Patsy and Pat at once, and Patrice added, "It's not that easy. What did Dopey say, two kilometers? Rosaleen can't walk that far."
"Fine," Dannerman said. "She won't have to. We'll make a travois for her, too."
Martin said with disdain, "Using those toothpicks? The thing will come apart in ten minutes, and then you will drop the old lady on her ass. It's simpler for me to carry her."
CHAPTER THIRTY
Patsy
When they started on their trek to their new home, Patsy was filled with worries. What was waiting for them there? Would they be able to follow the Doc's hastily drawn map without getting lost? Would they be able to see where they were going at all, since Dopey had told them it was night outside? But when they reached the edge of the Beloved Leader base-cut as cleanly as with a knife, one moment surrounded by the hulking dead machinery, the next looking out on a sprawl of meadow and woods-at least one of those worries disappeared. They all stopped dead in their tracks, looking up. "Oh, my God," Patsy breathed. "Will you look at that sky?"
They all were looking. They couldn't help it. Overhead there were a zillion stars, far brighter than anything she had ever seen on Earth, and far more of them. There were red stars and blue ones, yellow ones, white ones. On Earth star colors were so muted that you had to stare at even, say, Betelgeuse to be sure that it was really ruddy instead of featureless white. Here there was no doubt. The colors were as unmistakable as traffic lights, and nearly as brilliant. There seemed to be at least a thousand stars up there that were brighter than Venus at its maximum from Earth. There were a dozen or more that seemed even brighter than the Moon. Patsy had heard of, but had never seen, starlight you could read a book by. This was starlight you could do brain surgery by.
Next to her Pat sighed. "You know what, friends?" she murmured. "We're definitely not in Kansas anymore."
Two kilometers wasn't much; Patsy had jogged more than that some mornings before breakfast, along the bridle path in the park… in the days when Patsy was still Dr. Pat Adcock, who not only jogged but worked out in the gym once a week-most weeks, anyway.
Those days were past. Confinement in that tiny cell had left them all out of shape, and a two-kilometer hike was now a lot. They took turns dragging the travoises that were loaded with most of their Starlab food, three of them at a time with Rosaleen limping painfully along when she could and riding on Martin's back when she couldn't, and the other two following behind to pick up whatever rations fell from a travois and toss them back onto the pile.
But there was so much to see! When she was dragging a travois Patsy's eyes were on the sky as much as on where she was going; when Jimmy Lin relieved her to drop back and do pickup she was glad to see who was there with her. "Patrice!" she hissed, trying to keep her voice low enough that the others might not hear. "Do you know what I think? I think we're in the middle of a globular cluster!"
Patrice bent to pick up a pair of soft-plastic packs and tossed them into Jimmy Lin's travois. "So does Pat," she whispered. "We were talking about it before. At first I thought maybe we were at the core of the galaxy, you know? The star density might be about the same. But we'd know that, all right, and-"
"Hey, back there!" Dannerman called. "Pay attention to what you're doing, we can't afford to lose any food." But he had stopped at the edge of a dark lake, setting down the handles of his own travois to consult over the map with Rosaleen and the general.
Patsy would have supposed that Jimmy Lin would be right up there to take part in the debate, but he lingered when everyone had stopped. "What were you guys saying about a globular cluster?"
Patrice frowned. "Sorry, we were trying to keep it quiet. What about it?"
"Well, to start with, what is it?"
"It's what it says it is. It's a tight cluster of thousands of stars, more or less shaped like a ball. But if that's what we're in, then we're really pretty far from home; most of them are in the galactic halo, none of them closer than several thousand light-years."
"Wherever they are, their stars are really jammed close together," Patsy added. "Thousands of them might fit into the space between Earth and Alpha Centauri… a lot like what you see up there."
Jimmy craned his neck, then had an objection. "So how do you know we're not in the core of our own galaxy? Christo Papathanassiou told me once-"
"That there were a lot of stars crowded together there, too? Sure there are. But there's something else at the core, and that's a hell of a big black hole. If we were anywhere near that we'd know, because we'd all be dead now from the radiation."
From up ahead, Dannerman was trying to get their attention. "Quiet!" he ordered. "Do you hear that?"
And as soon as they stopped talking, Patsy did. It was a thick slobbering noise, not quite a roar, definitely not friendly.
In a moment Patsy saw what it was. Something was crossing from a patch of shrubbery toward the lake, off to their right, no more than thirty or forty meters away. There were two somethings, one larger than the other. Patsy couldn't make out details, but the heads looked as huge-mouthed and wide-nostriled as a hippopotamus-though wearing something puzzlingly like a mustache. Not really a mustache, she corrected herself; the strands weren't hair; more like the tentacles of an octopus. The bodies, though, were streamlined as a seal's, and they flopped along the ground on their fins like any pinniped. As she watched, the smaller of the two slipped into the water; the other planted itself on the shore and gargled at them again before following the other.
"Christ," Pat breathed from up ahead. "Was I wrong, or were those things wearing some kind of collars?"
"Perhaps they are pets," Rosaleen said dryly. "I don't think I want to try to return them to their owners just now, though. Please, can we proceed?"
They did. They gave the lakeside a wide berth, all of them watching worriedly to see what might come up at them out of the water. But nothing did.
Once past the lake the distance was short. They crossed a meadow-delightfully speckled with patches of phosphorescent grasses, smelling peculiarly of mown wild onions and mint. Once or twice Patsy thought she heard a distant whickering from the woods, and Jimmy Lin startled everybody when he declared he'd seen something flying there. But then they crossed a little ridge, and there before them, laid out in the brilliant starshine, was a valley with a bright stream running through it, and some sort of structures beside the stream.
"They look like tents," Patrice said in awe.
"Yes," said Rosaleen, summoning up the strength to stand for die last little bit. "Dopey said there would be dwellings for us."
"Tents aren't 'dwellings,' " Jimmy Lin complained; and then, when they were closer: "My God, they aren't even tents! They're what you call 'yurts.' Like the things the Uighur ethnics live in, up in Xinjiang Province, you know? And they stink."
So they did; as soon as Patsy came within range she smelled it, a long-ago aroma of spice and decay. On the other hand, she was well aware that she herself was far from fragrant, and she eyed the stream water longingly.