Once he shook his head and sighed. "Something's happening here, but I don't know what it is, do you?"
In the center of the building was a huge atrium, with patched and broken skylights, and balconies ringing it at every level. Here they had a chance to snatch a breath and relax a moment. Most of the locals around them took the opportunity to smoke roll-ups, plucking them from pockets in their ragged furs and cupping them in their hands, like children breaking school rules.
"It's amazing," Rick said, glancing around to make sure nobody was close enough to overhear their conversation.
"Yeah. Figure we should be out and looking for the tools we want."
"Patience is the greatest of all virtues, Ryan, my friend. This is a once in a lifetime chance for me." He paused, continuing ruefully, "And you gotta remember I don't have all that much lifetime left."
"Is it just a way of keeping the old fires of hatred glowing?" Krysty asked. Ryan noticed that her sentient hair had curled in, tight and defensive, against her nape.
Rick sniffed. His face was pallid and there were dark rings around his eyes. "Yeah. The way they tell it, it was us that started the nuking. Sneak attack, like Pearl Harbor. Posters say that the whole of the North American continent was vaporized and sank without a trace, no survivors, hundred percent chill. Zero. Zilch. All gone."
"But if their barons claim that everyone got chilled, why bother with all this shit?" Ryan waved his hand around the echoing hall. "What's the point of it, Rick?"
"The Party says remember. Says to remember is never to make the same mistakes again."
"What mistakes?" Krysty asked.
"Posters say that they tried for friendship in the eighties and into the nineties."
"True?" Ryan asked.
"Sure. Called glasnost. But peace is a two-way street. We went along it, then the guys running the store on Mockba Boulevard began to get cold feet. Folks in equivalent positions in the Pentagon got to feeling the same way. All downhill from there. Wrongs on both sides. Men with the guns had the loudest voices. I marched and demonstrated and all that stuff. It didn't make a hoot or a holler of difference. Cold got colder. Shutters fell and frontiers closed. Hell, you guys know the story. I guess we could open a place like this in the ruins of Washington and tell the same twisted truths and torn lies."
It was one of the longest speeches they'd ever heard Richard Neal Ginsberg make.
Ryan noticed that a slender woman in a green uniform was looking at them, head on one side, as if something about them rang some kind of bell for her. It was enough.
"Let's go," he said quietly, hand dropping automatically to the butt of the SIG-Sauer blaster.
They trailed on into the depths of the vast, rambling building.
Outside, Zimyanin had left his wag and walked briskly through the watery spring sunshine, up the stairs to the entrance of the museum. He showed his sec pass to the woman on the doors and explained his mission to her. She switched on her lapel voice-trans and passed the message about the three outlanders the sec force was to look for.
"One-eyed man, red-haired woman, one other male. Orders from..." Zimyanin interrupted her, and she altered what she'd been about to say. "Do not apprehend. Notify main sec control at front entrance."
"How many other exits, Comrade Sister?" he asked her.
She pointed them out to him on a faded map, beneath a worn sheet of clear plastic. Zimyanin looked carefully at it and nodded, snapping out orders to have all the exits covered.
"It will take several minutes, Comrade Major-Commissar," she replied.
"Quick as you can. I do not think a few seconds one way or the other will make very much difference."
Which was one of the rare mistakes made by the stocky, pockmarked sec man.
About a hundred yards away, Ryan and the other two were staring disbelievingly at some glass cases in one of the halls.
Rick glanced around them, but nobody seemed very interested. Dust lay thick on the shelves, smudging the outlines of what was on them.
"Tools," Rick breathed. "Hell's bloody bells! Everything we could need."
"What's the notice say?" Krysty asked.
"Just that these were found in the imperialist's dacha in the country, and that they were used for purposes of espionage."
"Espionage?"
"Spying, Ryan. But they're mat-trans tools, just what we need to fix the doors. That movable wrench and those there, and that and that."
"Wouldn't like them all, would you?" Ryan whispered sarcastically.
"No. Just those five I pointed at."
"Attracting some attention, friends," Krysty whispered. "And I'm getting a bad feeling. Better move on. We could come back and lift this after dark. No sec locks anywhere."
"Who'd want to steal this old junk?" Rick asked, eyes wide with delight. "Just us."
They were near the end of the unguided tour, and they could actually taste fresh air after the humidity and stink of sweat and damp clothes. There seemed to be just one more room to visit. It had a large notice at its entrance, and they had become aware of a new liveliness among the Russians, all wearing smiles of anticipation.
"What's it say, Rick?" Ryan asked.
"Don't know."
"Guess?"
"It's something about a place where feelings can be shown, and patriotic anger demonstrated for the Party."
"Oh, Gaia!" Krysty breathed, first in line into the vast room, which displayed only a single glass case at its center.
The sides of the glass were slick with a torrent of human spittle, almost obscuring what rested inside the case — a tattered Stars and Stripes.
Chapter Twenty-One
The scene had no reality. Ryan recalled a dreadful nightmare that the Trader had once shared with him.
"When I was a knee-high brat, I was in this shack in some frontier pest-hole ville. Looked out the window and I saw myself. But I was a real old man, stooped over and bent. White hair. Lined face. Dribbling eyes. What was so bad was that I had this vision that one day I'd be an old man, just like that. And I'd be outside a house in some frontier pest-hole ville. I'd look at the shack and see someone at the window. A young kid's face, scared and horrified beyond any believing. And it'd be me."
Ryan had never forgotten that story, with its frightening and bitter flavor of unreality. That moment in the Moscow museum had that same appalling taste.
There was an armed guard at each corner of the case, watching each man and woman as they filed past. The line ran between faded crimson ropes that were hooked over metal stands, but it was moving fast and eager, jostling in the push and hurry to get to the front and have the moment.
One by one they would pause in front of the scorched and ragged flag, hawking up saliva as they got ready, then spitting it out so that it splattered against the filthy glass, hanging there before sliding toward the shallow metal trough that ran all around the case.
"No," Rick said quietly, looking around for some means of escape.
"Yes," Ryan hissed. "Us getting chilled won't help Old Glory."
"Can't," the freezie insisted.
The one-eyed man reached out and gripped him by the arm verycasually, fingers tightening like chromed steel clamps.
Rick whimpered, legs weakening, and he nearly fell. Only Ryan's hand held him upright. "Please," he begged.
"We go and we do it. Do it good. Then we get out. And we think of some way of getting back in here, Rick. Understand?"
"Yes, yes. Just let go of... Oh, that was real shitty."
"Saved three lives, friend. And one of them was mine."