“You know I’d rather be off playing with you.”
The artificial woman nodded abstractly. She seemed to be drifting off into some distant realm before his eyes.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Quietly she said, “I’m not sure. There’s something been bothering me, and it happened again last night.”
“Tell me.”
“Don’t laugh. I’ve been having funny dreams, Ed.”
“Dreams?”
She hesitated. “I think I’m seeing other worlds. One’s all green, with a green sky and green clouds, and the people look like they’re made out of glass. Do you ever have dreams like that?”
“I don’t remember any of my dreams,” he said quietly. “They pick them out of me, first thing in the morning. You dreamed of another world, did you? How come you remember that, if you’ve been picked this morning?”
“A couple of them. The green world was one. My dreams seem to stay with me, you know? I suppose because I’m a synthetic. Maybe the pick doesn’t always work right on me. There’s another world I’ve seen once or twice, with two suns in the sky.”
Ferguson caught his breath sharply.
She said, “One’s red, and the other one—”
“—is blue?”
“Blue, yes!” she said. “You’ve seen it too?”
He felt the chills starting to run down his back. This is crazy, he thought. “And there was a big golden thing with horns, standing on a block of white stone?”
“You have seen it! You have!”
“Jesus suffering Christ,” Ferguson said.
5
It was the third day since Charley had managed to get the ground-effect van started up. They were down out of the foothills now, into the sweltering eastern side of the San Joaquin Valley. So far, so good, Tom thought. Maybe they’d let him travel with them all the way to San Francisco.
“Look at this godforsaken crappy place,” Charley said. “My grandfather came from around here. He was a goddamned rich man, my grandfather. Cotton, wheat, corn, I don’t know what. He had eighty men working for him, you know?”
It was hard to believe that this had been farming country only thirty or forty years back. For sure, nobody was farming much here any more. The land was starting to go back to desert, the way it had been four hundred years ago, before the irrigation canals. Under the summer heat everything was brown and twisted and dead.
“What’s that town off there?” Buffalo asked.
“I don’t think anybody remembers,” Charley said.
“It’s Fresno,” said the man named Tamale, who was full of information, all of it wrong.
“Shit,” Charley said. “Fresno’s way down in the south, don’t you know that? And don’t tell me Sacramento, neither. Sacto’s out this way. Anyhow, those are cities. This thing’s just a town, and nobody remembers its name, I bet.”
Buffalo said, “They got towns in Egypt ten thousand years old, everybody remembers their name. This place, you leave it alone thirty years, who the hell knows anything?”
“Let’s go over there,” Charley said. “Maybe there’s something useful still lying around. Let’s go scratch some.”
“Scratch scratch,” said the little Latino one they called Mujer, and all of them laughed.
Tom had traveled with scratchers before. He preferred that to traveling with bandidos. It was safer in a lot of ways. Sooner or later bandidos did something so dumb that they wound up getting wiped out. Scratchers were better at looking after their own skins. On the average they weren’t as wild as bandidos, and maybe a little smarter. What scratchers did was a mix of scavenging and banditry, whatever worked, whatever they had to do to stay alive as they moved around the outskirts of the cities. Sometimes they killed, but only when they had to, never just for the fun of it. Tom felt easy falling in with this bunch. He hoped he could stay with them at least as far as San Francisco. If not, well, that was okay too. Whatever happened was okay. There was no other way to live, was there, but to accept whatever happened? But he preferred to keep on traveling with Charley and his scratchers. They would look after him. This was rough country out here. It was rough country everywhere, but this was rougher than most.
And he figured he was safe with them. He had become a sort of mascot for them, a good-luck charm.
It wasn’t the first time he had played that role. Tom knew that to a certain kind of person, someone like him was desirable to have around. They regarded him as crazy but not particularly dangerous or unpleasant—crazy in a nice way—and somebody like that had some appeal for men of that sort. You needed all the luck you could get, and a crazy like Tom had to be lucky to have lived as long as he had, wandering around on the edge of the world. So now he was their pet. They all liked him, Buffalo and Tamale and Mujer, Rupe and Choke and Nicholas, and especially Charley, of course. All but Stidge. Stidge still hated him, probably always would, because he had gotten beaten up on Tom’s account. But Stidge didn’t dare lay a hand on him, out of fear of Charley, or maybe just because he thought it would bring bad luck. Whatever. Tom didn’t care what reason, so long as Stidge kept away from him.
“Look at that place,” Charley kept saying. ” Look at it!”
It was dismal, all right. Broken streets, slabs of asphalt rising at steep tilts everywhere, the shells of houses, dry grass poking up through shattered pavement. Sand creeping in from the fields. A couple of dead cars lying on their sides, everything stripped.
“They must have had one mean war here,” Mujer said.
“Not here,” said Choke, the skeleton-looking one with the crisscross scars on his forehead. “Weren’t no war here. The war was back east of here, dummy—Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, where they dropped the dust.”
“Anyhow,” said Buffalo, “dust don’t smash a town up like this. Dust just garbage it all with hard stuff, so you burn when you touch anything.”
“So what did this?” Mujer wanted to know.
“The people moving away, that’s what did it,” Charley said in a very quiet voice. “You think these towns repair themselves? The people left because there wasn’t any more farming here, maybe too much dust in the air bringing hard stuff from the dead states, or maybe it was because the canal broke somewhere up north and nobody knew how to fix it. I don’t know. But they move on, off to Frisco or down south, and then the pipes rust and you get an earthquake or two and nobody’s here to fix anything and it all gets worse and worse, and then the scratchers move in to grab what’s left. You don’t need no bombs to destroy a place. You don’t need anything. Let it be, and it just falls apart. They didn’t build these places to last, like they built Egypt, hey, Buffalo? They built them for thirty, forty years, and the thirty-forty years, they used up.”
“Shit,” Mujer said. “What a world we got!”
“We’ll go to San Francisco,” said Charley. “It’s not so bad there. Spend the summer. At least it’s cool there, the fog, the breeze.”
“What a screwed-up world,” said Mujer.
Tom, standing a little way apart from them, said, “For the indignation of the Lord is upon all the nations, and His fury upon all their armies: He hath utterly destroyed them, He hath delivered them to the slaughter.”
“What’s the looney saying now?” Stidge asked.
“It’s the Bible,” said Buffalo. “Don’t you know the Bible?”
“And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.”