‘Should we dump the car and go on on foot?’
‘No, we’ll drive till it disintegrates. You’d better turn on your porta-pac.’
The road became increasingly dotted with pits of nothing. The surrounding plain virtually disappeared. Soon they were driving on an incomplete road surrounded by the nothings. The Minstrel Boy kept throwing the car into screaming swerves to avoid touching any of the holes in the stable matter of the road. He managed to maintain this kind of erratic progress for quite a while. Then the offside front set of wheels hit a circular pit in the road, about a metre across. They smoked, disintegrated and vanished. The front of the car hit the road with a scream of metal on stone.
The Minstrel Boy lost all control. The ground car slid along the road for about fifty metres, then it hit an even larger space of disorganized matter. A good third of its bodywork simply disappeared. What was left of it fell apart. Billy found himself skimming down the road on a section of the chassis. He crossed another disrupted pit and that too ceased to exist. Billy hit the surface of the road. He was bruised, but otherwise complete inside the field of his porta-pac.
He painfully picked himself up and looked around. The Minstrel Boy was sprawled a short distance ahead of him. As Billy walked towards him, he got up. He too seemed to have escaped any serious injury. He stared gloomily at the few remnants of the ground car.
‘I guess that’s the end of that.’
‘So now we walk?’
‘Unless you got a better idea.’
‘We’ve got no food, no water and no money. We might as well give up right now.’
Despite his pessimism the Minstrel Boy had started walking. Billy fell in beside him. Already he was beginning to feel the sad desolation he always experienced when he was out in the nothings. His sense of time was starting to go. He tried to maintain his grasp on reality by keeping a conversation going. It wasn’t an easy task. The Minstrel Boy was depressed and unwilling to talk.
‘How long do you figure we’ll be on this road?’
The Minstrel Boy grunted,
‘Till we get to the end.’
‘What’s at the other end?’
‘Another road, I hope. If I’m right, it should be the main one into Litz.’
‘How far’s that?’
The Minstrel Boy looked at Billy scornfully.
‘Don’t you know by now that in the nothings distance and time don’t mean shit?
‘But I …’
‘But what?’
‘Nothing. I don’t know. I don’t understand these roads.’
‘Who’s asking you to?’
‘I mean, they’re straight, they seem to go from one place to another. They ought to have some length that a man could figure out.’
‘Who says?’
‘It stands to reason.’
‘What’s reason got to do with it?’
‘I guess I thought …’
The Minstrel Boy stared at him bleakly.
‘Has it ever occurred to you that you think too damn much?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘So don’t understand. Just accept. Don’t always try to define everything. It only gets you confused.’
Billy tipped back his hat and scratched his head.
‘These roads sure look straight to me.’
The Minstrel Boy sniffed.
‘Things ain’t always what they seem, particularly in the nothings.’
‘Yeah, but …’
The Minstrel Boy took a deep breath.
‘Just walk, will you.’
After that, there seemed to be nothing else to say. They walked in silence, each one enclosed in his own thoughts. Billy’s perception of time slipped away altogether. He found it impossible to judge how long he’d been on the road. Sometimes it felt like a matter of minutes. At other times it seemed like days.
His ideas of distance also started to play tricks. One moment the Minstrel Boy would be right beside him, the next, the two of them would be separated by a wide expanse of road.
For a while it seemed that the simplest thing to do was to stare at the ground and trudge on. Even that, however, had its drawbacks. Billy found it acutely disturbing to look down into the pits of nothing that broke the road like pock marks. When he stepped on one, the field of his porta-pac provided a solid, if invisible support for his foot where the road should have been. Billy began to hate the depressing journey.
Just as Billy was about to decide that they were trapped in a warp that would keep them on the barren, disintegrating road for ever, the Minstrel Boy clapped him on the shoulder.
‘We’ve got somewhere.’
Billy looked up. Another, wider, more complete highway was crossing theirs up ahead. It swept past at right angles like a vast bridge, some thirty metres above the level of their road. There appeared to be no supports holding it up anywhere. Billy stared dully at the Minstrel Boy.
‘It’s just another road. Even if it is up in the air.’
‘Yeah, but see what’s on it.’
Billy looked again. A sluggish tide of humanity was moving slowly along the strange elevated highway for as far as the eye could see.
‘Who are they?’
‘Refugees I guess, making for Litz. At least they’re people.’
Billy still couldn’t raise any enthusiasm.
‘So?’
‘Where there are people, there’s a way to survive.’
Billy cast a dubious eye over the empty space between the two roads.
‘Can we get up there?’
The Minstrel Boy grinned. It was the first time he’d looked happy since they left Feld.
‘Sure. No problem.’
***
A.A. Catto moved around the deep underground bunker in a state of dangerous excitement. She wore a severely tailored black uniform, complete with a long skirt and polished riding boots. A combination of drugs and nervous energy kept her pacing the echoing corridors of her subterranean headquarters. Nancy and a procession of aides did their best to keep up with her tense, erratic progress. The Presley replica slouched along at the rear of the party, sullenly resplendent in a gold leather suit.
Nancy was a little surprised that the Presley replica was still around. Lately A.A. Catto had run through her custom built playthings at an alarming rate. They normally didn’t last a single night, and Nancy had become increasingly apprehensive of the time when she might become a victim of A.A. Catto’s homicidal concepts of pleasure.
In many ways, Nancy found the survival of the Presley replica very reassuring. As long as he was there, she felt that she was safe from becoming the principal in one of A.A. Catto’s ultimately sadistic love games.
For reasons known only to herself, A.A. Catto had adopted the Presley replica as a kind of pet. She treated him with an offhand benevolence, and had given him the run of virtually the whole bunker. For a couple of days he had wandered about, getting under the feet of the aides, and taking a retarded delight in playing with the gleaming technology, pressing buttons and watching things light up.
In the end, Nancy had taken upon herself to warn him that should he cause the slightest detail to go wrong in any of A.A. Catto’s elaborate battle plans by his childish meddling, she might no longer find him charming, and would have him painfully disposed of.
The Presley replica had accepted the warning with ill grace. He had, however, ceased to meddle with the war room control boards. He now just tagged along behind A.A. Catto and became increasingly surly. Nancy began to feel that maybe his days were numbered.
A.A. Catto not only paced, she also talked. She poured out a non stop stream of plans and ideas that the nervous aides struggled to record and add to the growing volume of strategic orders. Some of A.A. Catto’s newest schemes filled Nancy with a sense of foreboding. She had become inured to A.A. Catto’s general savagery and megalomania, but some of the latest ideas had the ring of terminal madness.