“Hey, what kind of nut do we have here?” someone asked.
Tom barely heard. These ragged strangers hardly seemed real to him now. What was real was the lords and ladies of the green world, strolling in splendor through glades and mists. He gestured toward them. “That’s the Misilyne Triad, d’ye see? The three in the center, the tallest. And that’s Vuruun, who was ambassador to the Nine Suns under the old dynasty. And that one—oh, look there, toward the east! It’s the green aurora starting! Jesus, it’s like the sky’s on fire burning green, isn’t it? They see it too. They’re all pointing, staring—you see how excited they are? I’ve never seen them excited before. But something like this—”
“A nut, all right. A real case. You could tell, right away, first thing when he walked up.”
“Some of these crazies, they can get damn ugly when the fit’s on them. I heard stories. They bust loose, you can’t even tie them down, they’re so strong.”
“You think he’s that bad?”
“Who knows? You ever see anybody this crazy?”
“Hey, crazy man! Hey, you hear me?”
“Let him be, Stidge.”
“Hey, crazy man! Hey, nutso!”
Voices. Faint, far-off, blurred. Ghost-voices, buzzing and droning about him. What they were saying didn’t matter. Tom’s eyes were glowing. The green aurora whirled and blazed in the eastern sky. Lord Vuruun was worshipping it, holding his four translucent arms outstretched. The Triad was embracing. Music was coming from somewhere, now, a heavenly music resonating from world to world. The voices were only a tiny scratching sound lost somewhere within that great mantle of music.
Then someone hit him hard in the stomach, and he doubled over, gagging and gasping and coughing. The green world whirled wildly around him and the image began to break up. Stunned, Tom rocked back and forth, not knowing where he was.
“Stidge! Let him be!”
Another punch, even harder. It dizzied him. Tom dropped to his knees and stared with unfocused eyes at brown wisps of withered grass. A thin stream erupted from him. It felt like his guts ripping loose and spewing out of his mouth. It was a mistake to have let himself fall down, he knew. They were going to start kicking him now. Something like this had happened to him last year up in Idaho, and his ribs had been six weeks healing.
“Dumb—crazy—nut—”
“Stidge! Damn you, Stidge!”
Three kicks. Tom huddled low, fighting the pain. In some corner of his mind one last fragment of the vision remained, a sleek and gleaming crystalline shape, unrecognizable, vanishing. Then he heard shouts, curses, threats. He was aware that a fight was going on around him. He kept his eyes closed and drew his breath carefully, listening for the inner scrape of bone on bone. But nothing appeared to be broken.
“Can you stand up?” a quiet voice asked, a little while later. “Come on. Nobody’s going to hurt you now. Look at me. Hey, guy, look at me.”
Hesitantly Tom opened his eyes. A man whose face he did not know, a man with a short-cropped dense black beard and deep dark rings under his eyes—one of those who had been working inside the gearbox before, most likely—was crouching beside him. He looked just about as mean and rough as the others, but somehow there seemed to be something gentler about him. Tom nodded, and the man put his hands to Tom’s elbows and delicately lifted him.
“Are you all right?”
“I think so. Just shook, some. More than some.”
Tom glanced around. The red-haired man was slumped down by the side of the van, spitting up blood and glaring. The others were standing back in a loose semicircle, frowning uneasily.
“Who are you?” the black-bearded man asked.
“He’s just a fucking nut!” the red-haired one said.
“Shut up, Stidge.” To Tom the man said again, “What’s your name?”
“Tom.”
“Just Tom?”
Tom shrugged. “Just Tom, yeah.”
“Tom from where?”
“Idaho, last. Heading for California.”
“You’re in California,” the black-bearded man said. “You going toward San Francisco?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure. Doesn’t matter a whole lot, does it?”
“Get him out of here,” Stidge said. He was on his feet again. “God damn you, Charley, get that nut out of here before I—”
The black-bearded man turned. “Christ, Stidge, you’re asking for a whole lot of trouble.” He brought his right arm up across his chest and cocked it. There was a laser bracelet on his wrist, with the yellow “ready” light glowing. Stidge looked at it in astonishment.
“Jesus, Charley!”
“Just sit back down over there, man.”
“Jesus, he’s only a nut!”
“Well, he’s my nut now. Anybody hurt him, he’s gonna get hard light through his belly. Okay, Stidge?”
The red-haired man was silent.
Charley said to Tom, “You hungry?”
“You bet.”
“We’ll give you something. You can stay with us a few days, if you like. We’ll be going toward Frisco if we can ever get this van moving.” His dark-ringed eyes scanned Tom closely. “You carrying anything?”
Tom patted his backpack uncertainly. “Carrying?”
“Weapons. Knife, gun, spike, bracelet, anything?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Walking around unarmed out here? Stidge is right. You got to be crazy.” Charley flicked a finger toward the blue-eyed pitted-faced man. “Hey, Buffalo, lend Tom a spike or something, you hear? He needs to be carrying something.”
Buffalo held out a thin shining metal strip with a handle at one end and a teardrop-shaped point at the other. “You know how to use a spike?” he asked. Tom simply stared at it. “Go on,” Buffalo said. “Take it.”
“I don’t want it,” Tom said. “Someone wants to hurt me, I figure that’s his problem, not mine. Poor Tom doesn’t hurt people. Poor Tom doesn’t want any spike. But thanks. Thanks anyway.”
Charley studied him a long moment. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay,” Charley told him, shaking his head. “Okay. Whatever you say.”
“They don’t come no crazier, do they?” the little Latino asked. “We give him a spike, he smiles and says no thanks. Out of his head crazy. Out of his head.”
“There’s crazy and crazy,” said Charley. “Maybe he knows what he’s doing. You carry a spike, you likely to annoy somebody who’s got a bigger spike. You don’t carry any, maybe they let you pass. You see?” Charley grinned. He clapped his hand down on Tom’s bony shoulder, hard, and squeezed. “You’re my man, Tom. You and me, we going to learn a lot from each other, I bet. Anyone here touches you, you let me know, I’ll make him sorry.”
Buffalo said, “You want to finish on the van now, Charley?”
“To hell with it. Be too dark to work, another couple hours. Let’s get us some jackasses for dinner and we can do the van in the morning. You know how to build a fire, Tom?”
“Sure.”
“All right, build one. Don’t start no conflagration, though. We don’t want to call attention to ourselves.”
Charley began pointing, sending his men off in different directions. Plainly they were his men. Stidge was the last to go, limping off sullenly, pausing to glower at Tom as though telling him that the only thing keeping him alive was Charley’s protection, but that Charley wouldn’t always be there to protect him. Tom took no notice. The world was full of men like Stidge; so far Tom had managed to cope with them well enough.