Le Brun glanced at McClune, and then shrugged. "I guess so. What's your name?"
"Ella," she said briefly, starting to turn away.
"Nice to meet you, Ella," le Brun said politely. "This man is Reverend—"
Over her shoulder Ella said, "Who asked you? Let's get over to the car before those apes start hassling me."
The girl's "car" wasn't exactly a car. It was an antique, piston-engined vehicle, and, believe it or not, it burned hydrogen. There had still been a few old fuel-burners around when Orbis was a boy, mostly belonging to old farmers too poor to trade up. But now? He suspected it had been looted from some old car museum. Most of it was pale blue, accented with dents and rust spots, and one door was a bright yellow. The vehicle stood almost by itself in a nearly empty parking lot that was a longer hike from the terminal than either le Brun or McClune had planned on. They were both sweating by the time they got to it, and le Brun eyed their transportation with distaste. "Does this damn thing run?" she demanded.
"Get in and find out," Ella ordered, but le Brun hung back. She was looking at the girl behind the wheel, no more than a year or two older than Ella. "Oh, her," said Ella. "That's Judy. She's my driver."
"Cripes," said le Brun. "Judy, have you got a license to drive this thing?"
"I got better than a license, lady. I got a car. Are you getting in or not?"
Le Brun looked even more discontented, but, having no evident other choice, dumped her bag on the floor of the van and climbed in after it. McClune followed, slightly amused. It was apparent to him that this woman was used to all the comforts of an expense account. She wasn't taking the present discomforts easily. McClune, on the other hand, had long since subdued any temptations to ease and comfort, so he followed her to the car door without reluctance.
Then she stopped cold, blocking the entrance, and he saw that she was looking toward the third seat that was in the rear of the vehicle. "Hey, you, Ella," she said, turning angrily on the guide. "What's going on? You didn't say anything about sharing the ride."
Ella shoved her in. "You think you're the only people want to go to Bars tow?"
"Yeah, but what about the microwave radiation from those things? What if it screws up my machine mind?"
"It doesn't do that. Try it yourself," Ella ordered. Orbis McClune tried to peer past her but the doorway was too narrow. But it was only a moment longer before le Brun muttered a grudging assent and went in.
Afterward it seemed to McClune that the talk about microwaves should have tipped him off, but it didn't. The sight of the other passengers was a wholly unwelcome surprise.
There were two of them, hideous-looking creatures, like stomped-on skeletons of human people, sitting uncomfortably on the bottom of their spines so that the pouches they carried between their legs could hang over the side of the ragged plastic seats. They wore smocks of some drab fabric. They rested their feet on hexagonal metal boxes that glowed with a bluish light. Their eyes gazed out at him from wrinkly, squared-off faces. And they smelled faintly of ancient piss.
They were Heechee.
III
The Barstow road took them to the edge of Waveland itself.
That road wasn't where the full force of the tsunami had hit. In the places where it had, now flat and empty under the setting sun, there was nothing left that a person could recognize. On the slopes of the hills at least there was wreckage. Quite a lot of it, actually. Some piles of it could be recognized as the remains of a building. More often it was a scree of Tinker-toy junk that seemed to have parts of two, three or a dozen structures jumbled together. On the hillsides above the freeway men and machines were carefully sorting through the ruins of homes—looking for survivors, perhaps, or for something worth the trouble of carrying away. It appeared to McClune that many of the houses had been ripped from their foundations and then had skidded down the hillside until—crushed, battered, sometimes burned—at last they were caught and held on the shelf formed by the freeway. That was to say, by what was left of the freeway. That wasn't always very much. The lower reaches of the road were pitted and twisted; in some places the paving was scrubbed completely away. More than once little Judy, muttering very grown-up obscenities to herself as she fought the wheel, had to creep off the paved road onto muddy shoulders, none of them level, so that the old van tilted worrisomely before they got back onto the flat. And, oh, yes, there was traffic to worry about, too. There was lots of traffic, mostly induction-driven cars, but a few antiques like their own, and all competing for the same space on the freeway. Sometimes, as their ancient vehicle came to a particularly squeezed stretch of the road, there just wasn't enough space to go around. In those places the traffic stagnated into a jam forty or fifty cars long, as the vehicles crept in single file through the bottleneck.
Reverend McClune took note of all those things, but they were not what was foremost in his mind. That was taken up by the identity of his unexpected fellow passengers.
Orbis McClune's whole life had been spent in the knowledge that he was surrounded by lascivious sin and unGodly corruption. He understood that that was the way of the world. McClune detested that world with all his heart, but in his mind it had one redemptive quality. It was rotten with wickedness, but it was human wickedness. It was in fact nothing more or less than the simple Original Sin that God Himself had invented for the purpose of keeping the people of His world from getting too uppity.
McClune had been dealing with that kind of sin all his life. The Heechee, however, were something else entirely.
Souls were Orbis McClune's job, and he knew all there was to know about them. Well, almost all. As he scowled at the reflection of those unwanted fellow passengers in the windshield, he realized that there was one question concerning souls to which he did not have the answer. That was, did the Heechee have any?
It was an interesting theological point. The beasts of the field had no souls, Scripture was clear on that. However, the beasts of the field didn't speak in human tongues, or wear clothing, or invent spaceships. McClune had no answer, but he had one fervent prayer: Lord, if they have souls that need saving, let that cup pass to someone other than me.
The thing was, Orbis was certain that it was no part of God's design that had put those abominable creatures on the Earth. They were intruders. They came from outside. They did not belong on the world that God Himself had specifically decreed—it was all written out there in black and white, in His very own Book—was dedicated to the exclusive use of the human race. There was nothing there to give domain to any bizarre creatures from other worlds. So to McClune the Heechee were unblessed by God and thus incarnate evil. If there was one single embodiment of concentrated sin that stood out above all others in his mind, that was the Heechee.
The catalogue of their wickedness was plain. It was because of the Heechee that so many human beings had abandoned God's world to flit around in space. It was because of the Heechee that soulless machine minds had come to play so large a part in human affairs. It was because of the Heechee that countless sinners on the point of death had chosen to be reborn as immortal electronic abstractions, instead of rotting beneficially away in God's own soil as they waited for the final call. This last wickedness was particularly repellent to McClune because of the circumstances that ended his former marriage. But worst of all, it was due to the Heechee that those excellent spurs to decent behavior, want and fear, had so nearly disappeared from the world.