Mary Beth gave him an embarrassed smile.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Honey," she said, "you got nothin at all to be sorry about. Nothin at all."
A careening, high-speed ride in the open back of a pickup truck got Brian past Omaha and well into Nebraska farm land, where he bogged down. There was a little confusion between the energy of the wind roaring around him and his own roaring energy, but he decided it was the food and the sleep. There was no sitar music, no psychedelic colors. A lot of road and a lot of harvested cornfields, but no surprising warps or wrinkles.
There was the pointilism though. He remembered the word from art class. The sky and the fields seemed to be made of millions of little separate dots of all different shades. Maybe it was the time of day, the purple dusk, or maybe there was pollen in the air. But field stayed field and sky stayed sky and the horizon line between them held steady. He felt the same, tired and dirty and impatient with the thinning traffic. It was twilight, more purple than he remembered, and he didn't feel like hitching anymore. He decided to bag it for the night.
There was a rise to the left of the road up ahead, he started for it planning to be well sheltered from the road's view. The field had been closely mown within the last day or so, it was jagged with stubble. Every few steps another field creature would unfreeze. Albino toads, tiny mice, snakes like shoestrings, dry-rasping grasshoppers, all scattering ahead of his path. They were a luminous violet in the twilight, they seemed confused by their recent uncovering. Brian skated his feet forward and went slowly. He eased down the far slope of the rise till he came to a patch of well-kept grass.
Green grass in the middle of a cornfield.
It was a level rectangle about the size of a large house foundation, cropped short as a putting green. It was a little strange but Brian was glad for a flat spot to lie.
He paused at the edge of the plot to watch what looked like a cross between a toad and a doormat hop away. Its back was scabbed from mower blades and half of one of its hind legs was missing. When it hopped it flew sideward and almost tipped on impact. It was trying to get away from Brian but could only flop in ever-widening circles around him. He was fascinated by the thing. Had never seen anything like it. He could watch it forever. The toad struggled through three revolutions before it became too dark to see and Brian moved to set up on the grass. He sat and unlaced his sneakers.
"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?"
A voice, deep and hollow, booming up out of the ground. Brian rolled into a crouch and strained to see which way he should take off.
"DON'T YOU PLAY GAMES WITH ME, YOUNG LADY."
Oh shit, thought Brian. It's taking hold. Taking hold with a vengeance.
"DERRY? IS THAT YOU? WHO IS THAT?"
A bank of light flicked on at ground level to his rear, soft blue lights like they used for outdoor Nativity scenes. Brian whirled to face them but could see nothing beyond.
"SPEAK TO THE LIGHT."
"What do you want me to say?" He felt a little ridiculous, talking alone in the middle of nowhere. "Listen, I'll leave if I'm trespassing or something."
"WHAT DO YOU WANT?"
"Nothing." He began to back off the grass, kicking his duffel bag behind him. "I don't want a thing."
"FREEZEI"
Brian froze.
"COME TO THE LIGHT."
Things were getting a little too Biblical for his comfort. There was no mistaking the authority behind the Voice, it meant business. He slowly approached the bank of blue lighting.
"WHAT IS YOUR NAME?"
"Brian McNeil."
"SPEAK DOWN."
"What?"
"SPEAK DOWN. INTO THE LIGHT."
"Brian McNeil."
"DO I KNOW YOU?"
"Jesus, I hope not." He could feel vibrations through his feet when the Voice spoke.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?"
"I was hitchhiking. This looked like a good flat place to sleep out. I'll go somewhere else. I'm sorry, whoever you are."
It was silent for a while and Brian heard a faint crackling, like static. Bugs had discovered the lighting and were swarming around him.
"DO YOU LIKE CHINESE FOOD?'
Oh yes, it had taken hold all right. Brian had talked with more than a few acid dabblers and none had mentioned sound-and-light Christmas spectaculars. "Sure," he said, "but I haven't had any in a while."
"TAKE TWO STEPS FORWARD."
He stepped.
"NOW ONE TO THE LEFT."
Do the Hokey-Pokey, he thought. What is this?
"SEE THE ROPE"
A short length of rope seemed to grow out of the ground.
`PULL IT."
Brian yanked and a yard-square flap of turf came up, the covering to a manhole shaft. A string of blue Christmas-tree bulbs lit the way down a bolted ladder. Brian couldn't see bottom.
to PULL THE LID BACK SHUT WHEN YOU COME DOWN," said the Voice, "AND TRY NOT TO LET ALL THE BUGS IN."
Brian considered a moment until the same feeling he'd had often on the road before swept him, the oh-well-what-the-hell feeling of being too tired and too bummed out to resist much of anything. He tied his laces and started down, thunking the cover over his head.
He heard metal sliding and a little more light filtered up the shaft. Several rungs down he saw that an airlock had opened and the hole widened into a small cement-walled room. There was nothing in the room but a steel vault-door beyond which Brian could hear an electrical cricketing. A bolt shot and the door pushed open. A hand clamped around Brian's arm.
"C'moan in."
The hand and the Voice's lack of volume startled him.
"Don't be skittish, I don't bite. I retreat."
' What?"
"Name's Ira Treat." Brian was pulled inside by a short man who looked to be around fifty. The man held his nose up in the air like a dog searching for a scent on the wind. He aimed his head at Brian when he spoke but it was clear that he couldn't see. "Welcome to the safest residential structure in the entire U.S. of A."
Everything inside seemed to be of shiny, metal. Banks of fluorescent lights buzzed overhead and Brian had to shield his eyes.
"It's a bomb shelter?"
"It's my home, son. Where you headed?"
"California."
"Got people there?"
"Nope."
"You might want to reconsider. The Baja isn't so bad, and up toward Oregon, but the rest you're a sitting duck. They got that Vandenburg A.F.B. there and Fort Ord and the Presidio. Nope, California will go in the opening rounds. You hungry?"
Treat's eyeballs were barely visible under thick folds of flesh, as if they had burrowed deep to avoid the light. He wrinkled his nose when he spoke.
"A little," said Brian.
"Well you come right in and make yourself comfortable. This here is about as cozy as you're ever likely to get." He cocked an ear to the beeping and whining of the instruments farther into the room, frowning to concentrate. Didn't see a little girl up there dawdlin around the road, did you? My Derry is sposed to be back about now."
"Didn't see anyone."
"Choir practice or some such. Girl has got one sort of nonsense or the other keepin her at school all hours just about every night of the week. Sits down to dinner, grunts hello and she's off to bed. I just wave to her in passing. You go to school?"
"I used to."
"Drifter, huh? Sound pretty young, what are you, seventeen, eighteen? Good age to be a drifter, long as you stay clear of the primary strike areas."
Brian smiled at the word. "Drifter" was something they used to say on Gunsmoke on TV.
"You'll be staying for the night then. Gonna get cold."
"Oh. Uh, I left my bag and all up there. And if it's — "
"No trouble, no trouble. Not gonna rain, just get cold. Your bags are fine. C'moan, have a seat."
The room was a long tube, everything built in flush to the wall. All of it was gleaming metal, coppers and silvers and bronzes and golds, one entire wall of chrome-knobbed drawers opposite a wall of dials and instruments. Each instrument gave off its own steady sound reading. There was an electric-blue carpet and tubular frame furniture, each piece bolted to the floor. Treat sat Brian down on one of the couches.