I volunteered to pump, because I was still cold. This time I pulled at the front end, and watched the hills course away from us with the wind at my back. Once again I felt exuberant at the speed of our grinding flight over the land, and I laughed aloud.
“This kid swims and pumps like a good resistance man,” Jennings said. I didn’t know what he meant, but the other men on the car agreed with him, those who bothered to speak, anyway.
But when I warmed up I was tired. I was quickly relieved by the short man with the belly, who gave me a friendly slap on the shoulder and sent me to the rear of the platform. I sat down under my blanket, and after a while I drowsed off, still half aware of the train, the wind, the men’s low voices.
I woke when the car stopped. “We at the next river?”
“No,” Tom said quietly. “Look there.” He pointed out to sea.
A completely hidden moon was making the clouds glow a little, and under them the ocean’s surface was a patchy gray. I saw immediately what Tom was pointing at: a dim red light in the middle of a black lump. A ship. A big ship—a huge ship, so big that for a second I thought it was just offshore, when actually it was halfway between the cliffs and the cloud-fuzzed horizon. It was so difficult to reconcile its distance from us and its immense size that I felt I could be dreaming.
“Kill the lanterns,” Lee said.
The lanterns were put out. No one spoke. The giant ship ghosted north and its movement was as wrong as its size and position. It was fast, very fast, and soon it slipped below a hill we had come over, and out of sight.
“They don’t come so close to the land in inhabited areas,” Jennings told us in a voice filled with bravado. “That was a rare sighting.”
Presently we started up again, and passing another white flag by the trackbed, we came to the banks of another river. This one was wider than the first, but the pilings extended right up both banks, and there was a platform across most of it. The San Diegans went to work laying track over the rickety old-time platform, and Tom and I stayed on the car by the lanterns. It had gotten colder through the night, and we were tucked under blankets and breathing little plumes of frost. Eventually we got up to help carry equipment over, just to stay warm. When the cars were across the river, and the bridge pulled apart, I got between two stacks of rope, out of the wind, and fell asleep.
Intermittently rough spots in the track jarred and woke me, and I cursed myself for missing part of my trip. I would poke my head up to look around, but it was still dark, and I was still tired, and I would fall asleep again. The last time I woke it was getting light, and all the men were up to help pump us over a steep rise. I forced myself to get up, resolved to stay awake, and helped pump when a spot opened.
We were among ruins. Not ruins like in Orange County, where tangles of wood and concrete marked crushed buildings in the forest—rather there were blank foundations among the trees, and restored houses or larger buildings here and there. Cleaned up ruins. The short man pointed out the area where he lived and we passed inland of it. The bluffs we were traveling over alternated with marshes that opened onto the beach, so our tracks rose and fell regularly. We crossed the marshes on giant causeways, with tunnels under them to let the marsh’s rivers reach the sea. But then we came on a marsh that didn’t have a causeway. Or if it had, once upon a time, it was long gone. We were separated from the bluff to the south by a wide river, snaking through a flat expanse of reeds. It broke through the beach dunes to the sea in three places.
The San Diegans stopped the cars to look. “San Elijo,” Jennings said to Tom and me. The sun was poking through clouds, and in the dawn air, thick with salt, hundreds of birds were flapping out of the dull green reeds and skimming the brassy pools and bands of the meandering river. Their cries floated lazily over the sound of the surf breaking, out on the fringe of the broad tawny beach.
Tom said, “How do you cross it? Pretty long bridge to build, wouldn’t you say?”
Jennings chuckled. “We go around it. We’ve set rails on the roads permanently. Down here they”—thrusting a thumb skyward—“don’t seem to mind.”
So we rode the tracks around the north side of the marsh, and crossed the river back in the hills where it was no more than a deep creek, on a permanent bridge like ours back home.
“Have you been able to determine how far away from San Diego you can build without disturbing them?” Tom asked as we crossed this bridge.
Lee opened his mouth to reply, but Jennings got there first, and Lee squeezed his lips together with annoyance. “Lee here has a theory that there are very strict and regular limits to what we can do before they intervene—a matter of isolating each of the old counties, to the extent they can. Isn’t that what you said, Lee?”
With a roll of his eyes Lee nodded, grinning at Jennings despite himself.
“Me, I’m not so sure I don’t agree more with the Mayor,” Jennings went on, oblivious to Lee’s amusement. “The Mayor says there is no rhyme nor reason to what they do; madmen watch us from space, he says, and control what we can and can’t do. He really gets upset. We’re like flies to the gods, he says.”
“ ‘Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,’ ” Tom corrected.
“Exactly. Madmen, looking down on us.”
Lee shook his head. “There’s more to it than that. It’s a question of how much they see. But their reaction is governed by rules. I imagine it’s a charter from the United Nations or some such thing, telling the Japs out there what to do. In fact—” But there he stopped himself, frowning as if he felt he had gone on too long.
“Oh, no question they’ve got cameras that can image a man,” Jennings disagreed complacently. “So it’s not a question of how much they can see. The question is, how much they will notice. Now, we’ve made changes on that rail line north that can’t be hid. The bridges are the same, but we’ve cleared some brush off the tracks, for instance. So hiding the bridge work may be a waste of time. We’re not invisible, like I told the Mayor, though I’m not sure he listened. We’re just unobtrusive. Now the watchers may pore over every photograph they take, or they may have machines scanning for major changes, we don’t know. This line north should be a good test of their attention, if you ask me.”
We were rolling through a thick forest of torrey pine. The sun split the shadows and sparked the dew. The air warmed and I felt drowsy again, despite my fascination with the new country we were passing through. Among the trees were groups of houses from the old time, many of them restored and occupied; smoke rose from many a chimney. When I saw this I nudged Tom, powerfully disturbed. These San Diegans were nothing else but scavengers! Tom saw what I meant, but he just shook his head briefly at me. It wasn’t the time to discuss it, that was sure. But it made me uneasy.
The tracks led to a village somewhat like ours, except there were more houses, and they were placed closer together, and many of them had been built in the old time. The screech of our brakes sent chickens cackling and dogs howling. Several men and women emerged from a big house across the clearing from the tracks. The San Diegans jumped off the cars and greeted the locals. In the light of day they looked filthy and red-eyed and whiskery, but no one seemed to mind.
“Welcome to San Diego!” Jennings said to us as he helped Tom off the car. “Or to University City, to be more exact. Care to join us for breakfast?”
We agreed heartily to that, and I realized I was as hungry as I was tired, or even more so. We were introduced to the group who had come from the big house to greet us, and we followed them into it.