Then the evening star dropped like a stone over the western horizon, and it didn’t come back no matter how hard Finn blinked. As if it had been a meteor. Just a shooting star, Finn thought. But fear rustled through him like the wind, and he got up and walked quickly back over the old abandoned road. Something had happened…
From the hill he could see the back of Dateland. The parking lot was empty. Finn cursed out loud. He had missed the bus! Sitting out there thinking about his mess of a life he had missed his bus. He hurried down the hill, cursing still. He would have to wait in that café for the next bus, and call ahead to get the Greyhound people to recover his suitcase. Damn it! Hadn’t the bus driver counted his passengers? Had no one noticed his absence?
But when he got to the building, he forgot his anger.
Dateland was empty. Boarded up, faded, sand-drifted, empty.
The sun had been down for a while now, and Finn found himself shivering. Absently he walked over to look at the thermometer by the curio-shop door; it was broken. He turned the doorknob and pushed the door in; a gust of wind pulled it out of his hand, and it hit the counter inside with a wooden thwack. Finn stuck his head in the door and looked around, afraid to enter. Everything in the curio shop was the same, except dustier. A handful of Jackalope postcards tumbled to the floor, caught by the wind, and Finn jumped back with his heart racing.
It took all his courage to open the door to the café. It too was deserted. Parts of it had been removed: the jukeboxes, the kitchen fixtures, the drink machines. The vinyl booth seats were cracked like dried mud. Overcome by sudden terror, Finn rushed out of the café to the safety of the gravel parking lot. But it was getting dark; the vast network of stars revealed itself; Dateland stood behind him dark and empty, like a house in a child’s nightmare. He shivered uncontrollably. The dry wind made little noises against the building. A loose plank somewhere slapped woodenly a few times. He was afraid. “What’s going on here?” he cried out miserably. No answer but wind.
He ran up the road to the freeway onramp. The spare concrete of Interstate 8 was tremendously reassuring. Nothing there had changed. The highway was empty in both directions, but that was not unusual. He walked up the onramp until he was out on the westbound lanes, ready to stop the next car that came by. He could just see Dateland over the shoulder of the eastbound lanes, a dark mass in the starlit desert sand.
Hours passed, and no cars drove by. He was frightened again. It got colder, and he sat on the blacktop edging the white concrete of the lanes, where it was still warm with the day’s heat.
Then to the east he saw headlights approaching, and he jumped up stiffly, adrenaline pumping up his heartbeat, “Now stop,” he muttered, “please stop, please stop, please stop….”
Just before they would have reached him the lights slowed, turned on the big circular offramp leading down to Dateland. It was a Greyhound bus.
He ran down the onramp and along the road back to Dateland. Another bus! His pass was still in his pocket…
The bus was pulling back out of the parking lot when he ran up. “Wait,” he screamed, the word torn out of him like no other had ever been in his life. The headlights caught him for a moment, the bus stopped, the door at the front whooshed open.
He jumped onto the first step, grabbed the chrome handrail and pulled himself up the steps to the main aisle. There was only one passenger on the bus, an old woman sitting in the seat behind the driver. The driver looked up at him. “Sit down,” he said. “Can’t go until you sit down.”
Finn sat in the front seat, across from the old woman and the driver. He felt his bus pass in his pocket; but the driver was turning onto the onramp, oblivious to him. He sat back, happy to be leaving Dateland. Yet he was afraid to ask the two people across from him what they knew of it.
“So you found a new doctor, eh?” the driver said when they were on the freeway and up to speed. He was looking in his mirror at the old woman.
“Yes, I did,” she replied. “The best you can find, these days anyway. A Jack Mathewson, from Gila Bend. Trained by Westinghouse. He says he’ll replace the pivot in my lower back with a new part made by GE.”
“That might work,” the driver said. “Got a G.E. pivot myself.”
Tom Finn, pressed back against his window, stared at the two people across from him. The old woman… her eyes were glass. The bus passed under a tight over the freeway, and he saw that her skin was some kind of plastic. He tried to control his breathing…
“The plain fact is,” the old woman-thing said, “it’s hell to grow old. Nothing to be done about it.”
“Nope,” the driver agreed.
“Forty-seven years as a librarian, and me with a bad back. Sometimes you wonder why we were designed to feel pain at all.”
“Keeps us alive.”
“I think it was because people didn’t want us to have any advantages,” she said, looking for an instant at Finn, “Ah, well. All of my typemates dead and gone for years now. And Westinghouse has no more parts for my type, they say.”
“G.E. pans are just as good. But I know what you mean. All my typemates are gone too. Last century was the good one for simulacra.”
“Don’t you know it!”
Tom Finn got up unsteadily and walked down the aisle to the back of the bus, thinking that he might throw up in the toilet. But when he got to the door, he couldn’t bring himself to open it; he imagined looking into the coppery mirror and seeing his reflection grin at him with steel teeth—imagined unzipping, and finding only smooth metal. Had he always been a machine, and only dreamed, out there in the desert, of being something else? For a long time he stood there swaying with the bus. A part of his mind noticed that the bus’s engine didn’t sound like the old piston-driven ones used to. The old piston-driven ones? Furtively he looked up the bus at the two figures, still talking in low tones. Something had happened, back there at Dateland… he couldn’t bear to look down at himself. After a while he forced himself (for the sake of appearances! he thought) to return to the front of the bus. He watched the simulacra talking to each other, and listened to their words for a long time, wondering how to ask what year it was. Finally exhaustion overcame him and he was lulled to sleep by their voices and the hum of the bus.
He was awakened by the sound of the bus downshifting. They were on the curve of another offramp. He jerked up and looked around. They were still in the desert; it was light, just before sunrise. Just off the freeway was their destination, another little isolated café. Finn saw the sign on the building and felt faint; DATELAND RESTAURANT, POST OFFICE. AND CURIO SHOP.
“Isn’t this where I got on?” he croaked, his mouth dry with sleep and fear. They were the first words he had spoken since getting on the bus.
The driver turned his plastic head (it was obvious in the dawn) to glance at him, and laugh. “You think I drive this bus in circles? We’re west of Yuma now. There’s lots of places that look like that in this desert.”
The old woman was asleep, or turned off, still upright in her seat across from Finn. Finn felt his own pump hammering the fluids through him, and all of a sudden it was too much. He gave in to it.
Without thinking he got off the bus when it stopped. Walked over to the door of the curio shop. Without surprise he registered the fact that the bus was driving off, back to the freeway. The thermometer by the door was still broken, the paint on the tin almost gone. It still read 104. He opened the door and walked inside the curio shop. All the goods were still there, safe and untouched, covered with dust. Finn swallowed hard. There was something about the place, something he had sensed when he first entered it so many years ago…