The six companions took turns keeping a sec watch. It would have been utterly absurd to think about the freezie keeping guard. Ryan was already having serious reservations about Rick Ginsberg, a weak, enfeebled and miserable depressive whose mind was fragile. The only thing that was in his favor was the news that he had once worked in some capacity on the gateways. That alone justified the trouble of keeping him with them.
But only for the time being. The night passed by peacefully.
Chapter Twelve
After a sparse breakfast from self-heats and ring-pulls of water, everyone sat around for a few minutes, resting, preparing to move on. Ryan was next to Rick, and he realized the freezie was muttering to himself, something about "tomorrow."
He listened more carefully.
"All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to a dusty death. Life's a tale told by an idiot, filled with sound and fury and signifying..." Ginsberg stopped.
"Signifying what?" the one-eyed man asked curiously.
"Nothing, Ryan," Rick replied with a deadly bitterness. "Absolutely nothing."
Lori's good nature had returned, and she led the group, dancing, light-footed, between the gnarled trunks of the mature live oaks. The bells on her spurs jingled merrily, and she sang as she ran, an old hymn that Ryan had heard in some of the fundamentalist Christian villes.
"Watch your step, precious," Doc called, but the girl ignored him, blond hair flying behind her.
Rick seemed in better health and spirits, walking without the aid of a walking staff that Ryan had cut for him with his panga.
"I used to like hiking," he said. "Until I got ill. It became harder going then."
"How d'you feel?" J.B. asked.
"Better." He grinned. "A whole lot better. You know, the air tastes cleaner. Perhaps I'm imagining it, but it does. Fresher. I suppose all the industry being blasted in the war helps that. No more sulfur, acid rain and holes in the ozone layer that used to worry everyone in the... in the old days."
"Your muscles feel stronger?" Krysty asked, brushing an errant crimson curl back from her eyes.
"Yeah. I think so. You know, I can't remember. Funny. I think a century of freezing's addled my brain. There are things I can remember vividly and some that have gone. I can't visualize my mother's face. Silly, isn't it?"
Ryan shook his head. "Doc has the same kind of trouble, Rick. Tell me something you remember well. Anything?"
"Moments in never," he replied. "I can... when I was about fourteen, going to New York with my father. We'd gotten tickets to see the Giants play the Forty-Niners. And we had a day in Manhattan. We went to an art gallery, which had lots of glass and open spaces. Wonderful paintings by Georgia O'Keefe, Hopper, Wyeth and... so many. All nuked. What a... But it wasn't that. It was a warm October day and we wanted something to eat. We were around Fifth and Fiftieth, by the old Saint Patrick's Cathedral."
"Reaching the edge of the tree part!" Lori called from some distance ahead of them.
The others were entranced by Rick Ginsberg's story. He was like a living time machine, painting a picture of a long-ago scene that none of them, except Doc, could imagine with any kind of reality.
"We decided to get some fast food. There were lots of burger stalls and fries. But there was an old Chinese guy who had a stall with pictures on the side — whatever he was selling. I can still see it, and almost smell how good it was — fried shrimp, crab and fish with some rice and a soda. We sat on the steps and watched New York flow by us. I felt real close to my dad at that moment. I don't think I'll ever forget it. Even if I live to be a hundred."
Jak sniggered. "You're more hundred now, freezie. Lot more."
Rick didn't rise to the bait. He simply nodded at the boy. "True enough. So don't be so rude to your elders!"
The albino threw him the finger and darted off to join Lori at the fringe of the desert brush.
Now they were at a lower level, and it was possible to look back up the mountain slope. They could see the scar of the scree-fall, but no trace of the hidden redoubt tucked under the lip of the peak above.
"Think there's a ville over there," Krysty said, pointing across the expanse of orange-gray sand. "And I can smell... not sure what."
Ryan stopped, still just within the shade of the forest, and took several deep breaths. There was something. Very faint but...
"Gas!" he exclaimed. "It's gasoline! Fireblast! If we can smell it such a long way off, then it must be a big field. Or a store so big that... If there's gas, then there's wags. Am I right, J.B., or am I right?"
"Could be. Sure is strong. This gas country, Doc? California?"
"Never used to be, but I suppose that the shifting of the great plates of the earth could push oil-bearing strata for hundreds of miles."
"If you got jack, you're fine," Ryan said, "but if you got gas, then you're even better."
Ginsberg sighed. "What's transport like? If gas is that rare and difficult?"
"There's some. Most villes have stocks. There was a huge store that the Trader found, about two hundred miles north of where Boston used to be. But it got blown. Now there's wags. Transport and war wags. Kind of rough."
"Trains?" the freezie asked.
J.B. answered him. "Sure. Often get trains of wags rolling together. Safer that way. Hold off the muties."
"No. I mean trains, like Amtrak. On rails." Seeing the blank looks, he said, "No, I guess there aren't any. How about planes?" Again, he answered his own question. "Stupid. If there's no trains and there aren't many cars, there sure as little green apples aren't going to be any airplanes."
"Wrong," Ryan replied. "I've never seen any flying wags, but the Trader saw one, once. Out East, he said."
"Flying?" Rick asked.
"Crashing," the Armorer said with a short, dry laugh.
"That's what Trader said. Got hauled out some old shed. Already gassed up. Baron's oldest son said he'd try it. Up, up and... down again. Body finished in one field. Head in another. Never found the legs, way I recall it."
Though the land had looked fairly even from high above, it was actually seamed with innumerable narrow ravines and dry riverbeds. Doc surmised that this was all a result of the unimaginably catastrophic forces that had shifted the land a hundred years earlier. Since the old Golden State had always been a place of earthquakes and landslides, it wasn't surprising to see the flat desert ripped and patched.
Krysty's feeling that there might be a ville on the far side made them cautious about approaching carelessly. Also, there were sinister tracks in the soft red dust.
"Sidewinder," Jak suggested, pointing to an odd swirling pattern in the sand. There were also peculiar marks, as though large wag tires had been rolled ceaselessly around.
The light breeze through the shoulder-high scrub produced a constant dry rustling that would cover the approach of any creature. Ryan felt the short hairs raising on his nape.
"Bad place," he muttered, almost to himself.
But Krysty, at his side, heard him and nodded. "I got that feeling, too. Best we get across it as fast as we can."
"Not easy, towing the freezie. The way he looks, a half mile'll put him down and out."
"Could go back, lover?"
"Yeah. Nobody ever gets anywhere by going back, do they? Let's go on."
Once they had plunged into the sagebrush, dotted with elegant saguaros, it became difficult to see more than ten paces ahead. The switchbacking terrain was exhausting, even for the hardier members of the group. For Rick Ginsberg, the effect was devastating. After less than twenty minutes he collapsed, eyes rolling up into their sockets, a thin froth dribbling from his cracked lips.