"I appreciate your honesty, Mr. Cawdor. Truly I do. When they confirmed the diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS they called it, I'd known something was wrong. My coordination had been off for some weeks. I'd stumble, or I'd drop something. Spill food. I'd played baseball, like Gehrig, and suddenly I started to miss the pitches. Fumble it when I was out in right field. Lots of silly things. I felt tired. Weak. Wanted to lie down and rest a lot. They did all the tests on me."
He stopped and put his glasses back on. The others still stood around him, listening to his story, crowding the small cubicle.
He carried on. "They tried everything. Digitalis. Didn't help. Androstenolone. Same. I was getting steadily weaker."
"Did they know what caused this sickness," Krysty asked.
"Nerve cells in my brain and in my spine were just sort of giving up the ghost. Degeneration is the name. No cure. No hope. Fetch the coolant and pop the boy in the freezer. Thaw him out in a thousand years when we can save him."
The bitterness reached the front of his voice, and he buried his face in his hands. "That string of operations and tests and then the actual freezing. Having to say goodbye to all my friends. My parents. All of them. Like I was an astronaut going boldly off to brave the new frontiers. Now I come around and I'm in some military base with a half-dozen people who I don't know."
Lori sat on the bed and patted Ginsberg on the arm. "Could be badder," she said. "You can be dead and it's badder."
"You think so? You get what I got, young lady, and you sometimes think death is going to come in with a blessing."
"Disease like that goes into remission, doesn't it?" Doc asked.
"Sure. That's the irony. When I got frozen I was feeling better than I had for months."
The freezie still hadn't asked the question that Ryan and the others were dreading. But all of them were waiting for it.
Ginsberg sighed. "Mind if I snatch some sleep, folks? I feel kind of drained with all this waking up."
"Sure. We want to think about moving outside this redoubt sometime today," Ryan said.
"Yeah." Jak grinned. "Find out where fuck we are."
Ginsberg smiled. "Sure. I understand that you..." He looked suddenly puzzled. "How d'you mean? Did I hear you right? So you can find out whereyou are? How come you don't... don't know?"
Nobody spoke and everyone tried to avoid catching the eye of the bemused freezie, looking everywhere except at him.
"Hey, come on, Mr. Cawdor! What's going down here? What? And..."
Here it comes, Ryan thought.
"I want to know where we are. What's going on? What year is this? And..." his voice broke like a lost child's "...what in the name of God Almighty is happening?"
Chapter Eleven
The six companions stood by the subsidiary exits from the redoubt, on its northern flank. Richard Ginsberg leaned against the wall, breathing hard.
Walking was difficult for him, and the others had taken turns helping to support him. His muscles were painfully weak and wasted. Ryan noticed that the freezie's way of walking was slightly peculiar, each foot lifted rigidly then set down with an unusual firmness. Ginsberg also kept clenching and unclenching his fingers, as though they were stiff and sore.
Ryan had, as gently as he could, given him a spotty version of history from the October morning when Richard Neal Ginsberg had last seen the light of day, up to the present morning, one hundred eternal years later. The freezie had taken the news fairly well in spite of Doc's concern for his sanity.
Ryan sketched in what he knew of the end of civilization, the long winters, the barren wastes and frothing hot spots; the changes in the land and in the climate and the changes in the people.
Ginsberg had asked surprisingly few questions.
"When I saw you all, sporting guns, I guessed something was... bad. Had to be. Course, when I went under, the war talk was louder. Same old faces and voices. Hatred. I was born and raised on growing hatred in... once that... can't remember his name, the Russian leader who talked peace. Once he was toppled — word was the CIA brought him down — it all went downhill."
He'd cautiously asked how many had died in the first waves of missiles. Ryan told him that nobody knew the answer to that. All records were gone, and the months immediately following the devastation were known as "the lost days."
Rick's parents had lived in a neat apartment in a brownstone on the Lower East Side of New York. All that Ryan, helped by Doc and Krysty, could tell was that every city had been hit hard and often. There was a ten-tenth's death rate in all major metropolises, and for people within the heat core, death would come like the snuffing of a light.
"A single microsecond of surprise, and then an infinite merging with the cosmos," Doc had told him.
"What's kind of hard," Rick eventually said, "is the sure knowledge that every person I ever met in my entire life is now dead. Most died within a few miserable weeks of my being frozen. Now I'm here and I'm all on my fucking own! I'm still dying and... and what's the point of it all, huh? What's the point?"
Despite urging particularly from J.B., Rick steadfastly refused to carry a blaster.
"Sorry, John," he insisted. "I'm a little of a peacenik in my own way. I abhor violence. From what you've been telling me, I guess I might have to get used to a mighty different world from the one I knew. Maybe in some ways, I might like it better. But tote a pistol? Thanks, but no thanks."
What was odd was that he hadn't shown much interest in precisely who Ryan and the others actually were or how they'd gotten into the triple-secure redoubt or how they moved around the Deathlands.
At Doc's suggestion Ryan hadn't pestered Rick about what he'd done back before the megachill. The fact that it had been highly classified meant it could be an area of his life that might provoke a strong and upsetting reaction.
The outside doors of the redoubt swung open on the familiar 3-5-2 code. Jak led the way into the fresh air, the other six following him. Rick leaned on Krysty's arm, bringing up the rear.
"Oh, to see the sun and taste the breeze..." the freezie said, clearly on the edge of tears. "Whatever happens, I've seen this once more." He hesitated. "Why is the sky that strange purplish color?"
"Strange?" Ryan echoed. "It's nearly always that color."
Doc smiled sadly. "It wasn't always so, Ryan. What our new companion says is correct. The skies were always blue when I was a lad. Yellow sun. White clouds. Not the hideous hues of the chem clouds and the dark nuke sky that haunts us all."
"How come you remember that, Doc?" Rick asked. "Nobody's that old."
"It is a tale told by an idiot, Richard. Told by me. Too difficult to comprehend or even to believe. One day, when you are somewhat recovered, I will tell you."
"Speaking of believing," Rick continued. "In your travels, you never came across — maybe in one of these redoubts — anything called a... a gateway, did you?"
Before anyone could stop her, Lori leaped in with both feet.
"Course, stupe! That's how we always are getting around Deathlands. Jump and jump in gateways."
Once again nobody looked at the freezie. Ryan stared across a narrow blacktop that vanished steeply over the brink of the hillside. Beyond it was a sweep of valley, disappearing into some thick forest. There was no sign of a ville anywhere.
"Just a damned m-m-m-minute," Rick stammered. "Did I hear you right, Lori?"