"Well, you may be here a while."
"That's slavery," Bob pointed out without any real surprise.
Hobie affected a look of astonishment. "Why, so it is, sonny!" He leaned forward confidentially and added, "You want we should go tell the Boss? Maybe he'll stop it oncet he knows how illegal it all is. Heh."
Bob's face sagged. He turned to Sherrine and put his arm around her. "I'm sorry I got you mixed up in this," he said. "I truly am."
Sherrine leaned against him. "I'm a big girl. I make my own decisions. But come Monday when I don't show up for work…"
"What?"
She shrugged. "They'll probably start looking for me; but who would ever think to look here?"
Gordon said, "I would like to sit down."
"Ain't too much sitting down here, sonny," Hobie told him. "Lots of bending and squatting though. Heh." Fang and Steve helped Gordon hobble over to the rude desk that was apparently Hobie's business office. Gordon sat against it, taking the weight off his legs. "Hey!" Hobie called, "you a farmer, too?"
Gordon's head hung down on his chest. He shook it wearily from side to side. "No. No, I'm not a farmer. I was, a hydroponic tech for a week; and I screwed that up, too."
"If you ain't a farmer," Hobie insisted, "why'd they lame you?"
"What?"
Hobie stooped and made a slitting motion with the blade of his hand against the back of his leg "These city boys don't know from soil and growin' things. They're much better at burning stuff down. So any farmers they catch they hamstring so we don't try to run away." The telephone on the desk rang and, as if to demonstrate his last remark, Hobie went to answer it. He walked with a curious shuffling gait, almost dragging his left foot. Sherrine shoved her fist in her mouth and even Fang looked ill. Hobie picked up the receiver. He looked at the group.
"Ah, don't look so sad. It don't bother me no more. They just cut the one leg. They don't want us to be cripples."
The milk of human kindness, thought Alex. Great Ghu, he had just begun to gain the use of his legs. Was this barbaric chieftain going to take them away again?
"Yes, Edna?" Hobie spoke into the receiver. He lowered himself into an old swivel chair. The padding was old and ragged and the ticking stuck out from ripped seams. "Okay, put 'er through… Hey, Terri, you old bug stomper, what's up? Yeah. Yeah, they're here; they just got here. You need to what? Well, that's a new one on me. Naw, they don't look lousy to me; but if you say so, I'll send 'em right over." He hooked the phone and stared at it, pulling his lip. "Terri says you gotta come over by her place for delousing. Says she heard tell of the typhus over by Greenfield and West Allis. Your truck come through that way, so she's gotta check you out. The drivers have already been dusted. Now it's your turn."
And so back into the wagon. Go here; no, go there. Autocrats usually gave "efficiency" as the reason for centralizing the decision making. Good ol' Lonny sure enough did; and Alex was sure that Alderman Strauss did, too. But why did the underlings always have to cut and paste to make things work?
Terri Whitehead ran a pest control operation from a building alongside the Milwaukee River. As the guard said driving them over, you could wave to the guard on the Juneautown side and they could count how many fingers you used. The guard let the horse go at a walk. "You ain't in no hurry to start weeding, are you?" he asked. He wasn't in any hurry, either. He had pulled an easy duty and saw no reason not to relax while he had the chance.
Alex lay on his back in the wagon and stared up at the brown smudge of a sky. Bob, squatting beside him, followed his gaze.
"Filthy, isn't it?" he said. "All that soot and carbon from the fires. This may be the only city in North America with a smog problem, worse luck."
"Worse luck? Why?"
"Because if everybody was lighting fires and putting carbon dioxide into the air it would be a damn sight warmer. Like it used to be before they cleaned up the atmosphere."
Bob gestured with his head. "Take a look around you," he whispered. "Wisconsin has been devastated by the Ice more than any other state, except maybe Michigan. Yet Milwaukee is almost a tropic oasis. Why? Because, whether they admit it to themselves or not, the locals are trying to restore the Greenhouse Effect. They threw another log on the fire."
Steve had been listening quietly to Bob's whispered lecture. He leaned over to Alex an said sotto voce: Burn a log and see it through, with heat and soot and CO2!"
"We're here," announced Sherrine. "And--" She stopped abruptly.
"And what?" Bob asked, twisting to his feet. He stood silently for a moment, swallowing laughter.
Alex grabbed the side of the buckboard and pulled himself to his knees. They were hitched before a wide storefront with double-paned plate glass windows. A wooden sign nailed above the entrance was painted in bright red and gold letters:
YNGVI'S DE-LOUSING AND PEST CONTROL CENTER
The guard finished hitching the horse to the rail and scowled at them. "All right, why's everyone grinning?"
My question exactly, thought Alex.
Terri Whitehead was a short, muscular woman with long, black hair and owlish glasses. She wore jeans and a man's dress shirt with rolled up sleeves, and elbow-length gloves. When she spoke, it was in a husky contralto.
She took care of the guard first. "Because you may have picked up lice from being around the new temps. She made him take off all his clothing and dusted it with malathion powder. Searched through his underwear, and recoiled in horror.
"What?" he demanded.
She held up forceps. "Louse, aina? I'll have to see if it's carrying anything." There was a microscope by the window. She put the insect on a slide and studied it. "You're lucky. This one's healthy. Get back to barracks and take a hot shower. Here's a prescription. Tell 'em I said hot water. Use this stuff." She handed him a small bottle of green liquid. "Use it good, all the hairy parts of your body. Scrub like hell. You'll be all right."
"Uh, Doc--"
"Typhus," she said. "Dehydration. Babbling. High fever. After a while you dry up and die. You won't like it."
"Jesus, Doc--"
"You'll be all right. One thing, if you itch, don't scratch. Don't crush lice. That's really bad. Just wash them off. Then powder yourself. As for your clothes, change clothes. Take your old ones where they're doing a fire and get 'em good and hot, then smoke them good. Real good.
"Yeah, I will, but, Doc--"
"You're all right now. I can tell. You don't have it. Get going before you do."
"What about them?"
She laughed and was suddenly holding a pistol, quite casually. "No problem. Now get going."
"Yes, ma'am."
By this time Alex could feel tiny life forms crawling over his body looking for blood to drink. He kept his hands rigidly by his side. Life under Lonny Hopkins had its drawbacks; but at least lice wasn't one of them.
When Terri faced them, she was laughing. "Yngvi is a louse," she said.
"FIAWOL," Bob replied.
"FIJAGH," she responded. Then she and Sherrine and Bob and the other fans joined in a happy embrace.
Sherrine said, "A sensitive fannish face! I knew--"
"There isn't time," Terri told them. "We have maybe an hour before they send another guard. Follow me." She led them to the back of the building and out the rear door. "Don't worry about the typhus, she said. "That was just to get you over here. It's a good thing you have that transponder, Bob. The Ghost knew right were you were." She paused and looked at them. "You guys must be awfully important." No one said anything and she shrugged. "None of my business, right? Come on, this way."
A path led across the ragged yard to the river bank, where a small sailboat bobbed at a decaying, wooden wharf. "Seamus will take you from here. Seamus deBaol. You may remember him. He used to publish a line of SF books in the old days. 'Books by deBaol'? He'll take you down the river as soon as he ties me up back in the shop."