"Jack? Are we okay?"
"Sure," Jack said, and opened his eyes to see whether he was telling the truth.
His first glance brought a terrifying idea: somehow, in his frantic need to get out of there, to get away before Morgan could arrive, he had not flipped them into the American Territories but pushed them somehow forward in time. This seemed to be the same place, but older, now abandoned, as if a century or two had gone by. The train still sat on the tracks, and the train looked just as it had. Nothing else did. The tracks, which crossed the weedy exercise yard they were standing in and went on to God knew where, were old and thick with rust. The crossties looked spongy and rotted. High weeds grew up between them.
He tightened his hold on Richard, who squirmed weakly in his grasp and opened his eyes.
"Where are we?" he asked Jack, looking around. There was a long Quonset hut with a rust-splotched corrugated-tin roof where the bunkhouse-style barracks had been. The roof was all either of them could see clearly; the rest was buried in rambling woods ivy and wild weeds. There were a couple of poles in front of it which had perhaps once supported a sign. If so, it was long gone now.
"I don't know," Jack said, and then, looking at where the obstacle course had been--it was now a barely glimpsed dirt rut overgrown with the remains of wild phlox and goldenrod--he brought out his worst fear: "I may have pushed us forward in time."
To his amazement, Richard laughed. "It's good to know nothing much is going to change in the future, then," he said, and pointed to a sheet of paper nailed to one of the posts standing in front of the Quonset/barracks. It was somewhat weather-faded but still perfectly readable:
NO TRESPASSING!
By Order of the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department
By Order of the California State Police
VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED!
2
"Well, if you knew where we were," Jack said, feeling simultaneously foolish and very relieved, "why did you ask?"
"I just saw it," Richard replied, and any urge Jack might have had to chaff Richard anymore over it blew away. Richard looked awful; he looked as if he had developed some weird tuberculosis which was working on his mind instead of on his lungs. Nor was it just his sanity-shaking round trip to the Territories and back--he had actually seemed to be adapting to that. But now he knew something else as well. It wasn't just a reality which was radically different from all of his carefully developed notions; that he might have been able to adapt to, if given world enough and time. But finding out that your dad is one of the guys in the black hats, Jack reflected, can hardly be one of life's groovier moments.
"Okay," he said, trying to sound cheerful--he actually did feel a little cheerful. Getting away from such a monstrosity as Reuel would have made even a kid dying of terminal cancer feel a little cheerful, he figured. "Up you go and up you get, Richie-boy. We've got promises we must keep, miles to go before we sleep, and you are still an utter creep."
Richard winced. "Whoever gave you the idea you had a sense of humor should be shot, chum."
"Bitez mon crank, mon ami."
"Where are we going?"
"I don't know," Jack said, "but it's somewhere around here. I can feel it. It's like a fishhook in my mind."
"Point Venuti?"
Jack turned his head and looked at Richard for a long time. Richard's tired eyes were unreadable.
"Why did you ask that, chum?"
"Is that where we're going?"
Jack shrugged. Maybe. Maybe not.
They began walking slowly across the weed-grown parade ground and Richard changed the subject. "Was all of that real?" They were approaching the rusty double gate. A lane of faded blue sky showed above the green. "Was any of it real?"
"We spent a couple of days on an electric train that ran at about twenty-five miles an hour, thirty tops," Jack said, "and somehow we got from Springfield, Illinois, into northern California, near the coast. Now you tell me if it was real."
"Yes . . . yes, but . . ."
Jack held out his arms. The wrists were covered with angry red weals that itched and smarted.
"Bites," Jack said. "From the worms. The worms that fell out of Reuel Gardener's head."
Richard turned away and was noisily sick.
Jack held him. Otherwise, he thought, Richard simply would have fallen sprawling. He was appalled at how thin Richard had become, at how hot his flesh felt through his preppy shirt.
"I'm sorry I said that," Jack said when Richard seemed a little better. "It was pretty crude."
"Yeah, it was. But I guess maybe it's the only thing that could have . . . you know . . ."
"Convinced you?"
"Yeah. Maybe." Richard looked at him with his naked, wounded eyes. There were now pimples all across his forehead. Sores surrounded his mouth. "Jack, I have to ask you something, and I want you to answer me . . . you know, straight. I want to ask you--"
Oh, I know what you want to ask me, Richie-boy.
"In a few minutes," Jack said. "We'll get to all the questions and as many of the answers as I know in a few minutes. But we've got a piece of business to take care of first."
"What business?"
Instead of answering, Jack went over to the little train. He stood there for a moment, looking at it: stubby engine, empty boxcar, flatcar. Had he somehow managed to flip this whole thing into northern California? He didn't think so. Flipping with Wolf had been a chore, dragging Richard into the Territories from the Thayer campus had nearly torn his arm out of its socket, and doing both had been a conscious effort on his part. So far as he could remember, he hadn't been thinking of the train at all when he flipped--only getting Richard out of the Wolfs' paramilitary training camp before he saw his old man. Everything else had taken a slightly different form when it went from one world into the other--the act of Migrating seemed to demand an act of translation, as well. Shirts might become jerkins; jeans might become woolen trousers; money might become jointed sticks. But this train looked exactly the same here as it had over there. Morgan had succeeded in creating something which lost nothing in the Migration.
Also, they were wearing blue jeans over there, Jack-O.
Yeah. And although Osmond had his trusty whip, he also had a machine-pistol.
Morgan's machine-pistol. Morgan's train.
Chilly gooseflesh rippled up his back. He heard Anders muttering, A bad business.
It was that, all right. A very bad business. Anders was right; it was devils all hurtled down together. Jack reached into the engine compartment, got one of the Uzis, slapped a fresh clip into it, and started back toward where Richard stood looking around with pallid, contemplative interest.
"This looks like an old survivalist camp," he said.
"You mean the kind of place where soldier-of-fortune types get ready for World War Three?"
"Yes, sort of. There are quite a few places like that in northern California . . . they spring up and thrive for a while, and then the people lose interest when World War Three doesn't start right away, or they get busted for illegal guns or dope, or something. My . . . my father told me that."
Jack said nothing.
"What are you going to do with the gun, Jack?"
"I'm going to try and get rid of that train. Any objections?"
Richard shuddered; his mouth pulled down in a grimace of distaste. "None whatever."
"Will the Uzi do it, do you think? If I shoot into that plastic junk?"
"One bullet wouldn't. A whole clip might."
"Let's see." Jack pushed off the safety.
Richard grabbed his arm. "It might be wise to remove ourselves to the fence before making the experiment," he said.
"Okay."
At the ivy-covered fence, Jack trained the Uzi on the flat and squashy packages of plastique. He pulled the trigger, and the Uzi bellowed the silence into rags. Fire hung mystically from the end of the barrel for a moment. The gunfire was shockingly loud in the chapellike silence of the deserted camp. B
irds squawked in surprised fear and headed out for quieter parts of the forest. Richard winced and pressed his palms against his ears. The tarpaulin flirted and danced. Then, although he was still pulling the trigger, the gun stopped firing. The clip was exhausted, and the train just sat there on the track.
"Well," Jack said, "that was great. Have you got any other i--"
The flatcar erupted in a sheet of blue fire and a bellowing roar. Jack saw the flatcar actually starting to rise from the track, as if it were taking off. He grabbed Richard around the neck, shoved him down.
The explosions went on for a long time. Metal whistled and flew overhead. It made a steady metallic rain-shower on the roof of the Quonset hut. Occasionally a larger piece made a sound like a Chinese gong, or a crunch as something really big just punched on through. Then something slammed through the fence just above Jack's head, leaving a hole bigger than both of his fists laced together, and Jack decided it was time to cut out. He grabbed Richard and started pulling him toward the gates.
"No!" Richard shouted. "The tracks!"
"What?"
"The tr--"
Something whickered over them and both boys ducked. Their heads knocked together.
"The tracks!" Richard shouted, rubbing his skull with one pale hand. "Not the road! Go for the tracks!"
"Gotcha!" Jack was mystified but unquestioning. They had to go somewhere.
The two boys began to crawl along the rusting chain-link fence like soldiers crossing no-man's-land. Richard was slightly ahead, leading them toward the hole in the fence where the tracks exited the far side of the compound.
Jack looked back over his shoulder as they went--he could see as much as he needed to, or wanted to, through the partially open gates. Most of the train seemed to have been simply vaporized. Twisted chunks of metal, some recognizable, most not, lay in a wide circle around the place where it had come back to America, where it had been built, bought, and paid for. That they had not been killed by flying shrapnel was amazing; that they had not been even so much as scratched seemed well-nigh impossible.
The worst was over now. They were outside the gate, standing up (but ready to duck and run if there were residual explosions).
"My father's not going to like it that you blew up his train, Jack," Richard said.
His voice was perfectly calm, but when Jack looked at him, he saw that Richard was weeping.
"Richard--"
"No, he won't like it at all," Richard said, as if answering himself.
3
A thick and luxuriant stripe of weeds, knee-high, grew up the center of the railroad tracks leading away from the camp, leading away in a direction Jack believed to be roughly south. The tracks themselves were rusty and long unused; in places they had twisted strangely--rippled.
Earthquakes did that, Jack thought with queasy awe.
Behind them, the plastic explosive continued to explode. Jack would think it was finally over, and then there would be another long, hoarse BREEE-APPP!--it was, he thought, the sound of a giant clearing its throat. Or breaking wind. He glanced back once and saw a black pall of smoke hanging in the sky. He listened for the thick, heavy crackle of fire--like anyone who has lived for any length of time on the California coast, he was afraid of fire--but heard none. Even the woods here seemed New Englandy, thick and heavy with moisture. Certainly it was the antithesis of the pale-brown country around Baja, with its clear, bone-dry air. The woods were almost smug with life; the railway itself was a slowly closing lane between the encroaching trees, shrubs, and ubiquitous ivy (poison ivy, I bet, Jack thought, scratching unconsciously at the bites on his hands), with the faded blue sky an almost matching lane overhead. Even the cinders on the railroad bed were mossy. This place seemed secret, a place for secrets.
He set a hard pace, and not only to get the two of them off his track before the cops or the firemen showed up. The pace also assured Richard's silence. He was toiling too hard to keep up to talk . . . or ask questions.
They had gone perhaps two miles and Jack was still congratulating himself on this conversion-strangling ploy when Richard called out in a tiny, whistling voice, "Hey Jack--"
Jack turned just in time to see Richard, who had fallen a bit behind, toppling forward. The blemishes stood out on his paper-white skin like birthmarks.
Jack caught him--barely. Richard seemed to weigh no more than a paper bag.
"Oh, Christ, Richard!"
"Felt okay until a second or two ago," Richard said in that same tiny, whistling voice. His respiration was very fast, very dry. His eyes were half-closed. Jack could only see whites and tiny arcs of blue irises. "Just got . . . faint. Sorry."
From behind them came another heavy, belching explosion, followed by the rattling sound of train-debris falling on the tin roof of the Quonset hut. Jack glanced that way, then anxiously up the tracks.
"Can you hang on to me? I'll piggyback you a ways." Shades of Wolf, he thought.
"I can hang on."
"If you can't, say so."
"Jack," Richard said with a heartening trace of that old fussy Richard-irritation, "if I couldn't hang on, I wouldn't say I could."
Jack set Richard on his feet. Richard stood there, swaying, looking as if someone could blow once in his face and topple him over backward. Jack turned and squatted, the soles of his sneakers on one of the old rotted ties. He made his arms into thigh-stirrups, and Richard put his own arms around Jack's neck. Jack got to his feet and started to shag along the crossties at a fast walk that was very nearly a jog. Carrying Richard seemed to be no problem at all, and not just because Richard had lost weight. Jack had been running kegs of beer, carrying cartons, picking apples. He had spent time picking rocks in Sunlight Gardener's Far Field, can you gimme hallelujah. It had toughened him, all of that. But the toughening went deeper into the fiber of his essential self than something as simple and mindless as physical exercise could go. Nor was all of it a simple function of flipping back and forth between the two worlds like an acrobat, or of that other world--gorgeous as it could be--rubbing off on him like wet paint. Jack recognized in a dim sort of way that he had been trying to do more than simply save his mother's life; from the very beginning he had been trying to do something greater than that. He had been trying to do a good work, and his dim realization now was that such mad enterprises must always be toughening.
He did begin to jog.
"If you make me seasick," Richard said, his voice jiggling in time with Jack's footfalls, "I'll just vomit on your head."
"I knew I could count on you, Richie-boy," Jack panted, grinning.
"I feel . . . extremely foolish up here. Like a human pogo stick."
"Probably just how you look, chum."
"Don't . . . call me chum," Richard whispered, and Jack's grin widened. He thought, Oh Richard, you bastard, live forever.
4
"I knew that man," Richard whispered from above Jack.
It startled him, as if out of a doze. He had picked Richard up ten minutes ago, they had covered another mile, and there was still no sign of civilization of any kind. Just the tracks, and that smell of salt in the air.
The tracks, Jack wondered. Do they go where I think they go?
"What man?"
"The man with the whip and the machine-pistol. I knew him. I used to see him around."
"When?" Jack panted.
"A long time ago. When I was a little kid." Richard then added with great reluctance, "Around the time that I had that . . . that funny dream in the closet." He paused. "Except I guess it wasn't a dream, was it?"
"No. I guess it wasn't."
"Yes. Was the man with the whip Reuel's dad?"
"What do you think?"
"It was," Richard said glumly. "Sure it was."
Jack stopped.
"Richard, where do these tracks go?"
"You know where they go," Richard said with a strange, empty serenity.
"Yeah--I think I do. But I want to hear you say it." Jack paused.
"I guess I need to hear you say it. Where do they go?"
"They go to a town called Point Venuti," Richard said, and he sounded near tears again. "There's a big hotel there. I don't know if it's the place you're looking for or not, but I think it probably is."
"So do I," Jack said. He set off once more, Richard's legs in his arms, a growing ache in his back, following the tracks that would take him--both of them--to the place where his mother's salvation might be found.
5
As they walked, Richard talked. He did not come on to the subject of his father's involvement in this mad business all at once, but began to circle slowly in toward it.
"I knew that man from before," Richard said. "I'm pretty sure I did. He came to the house. Always to the back of the house. He didn't ring the bell, or knock. He kind of . . . scratched on the door. It gave me the creeps. Scared me so bad I felt like peeing my pants. He was a tall man--oh, all grown men seem tall to little kids, but this guy was very tall--and he had white hair. He wore dark glasses most of the time. Or sometimes the kind of sunglasses that have the mirror lenses. When I saw that story on him they had on Sunday Report, I knew I'd seen him somewhere before. My father was upstairs doing some paperwork the night that show was on. I was sitting in front of the tube, and when my father came in and saw what was on, he almost dropped the drink he was holding. Then he changed the station to a Star Trek rerun.
"Only the guy wasn't calling himself Sunlight Gardener when he used to come and see my father. His name . . . I can't quite remember. But it was something like Banlon . . . or Orlon . . ."
"Osmond?"
Richard brightened. "That was it. I never heard his first name. But he used to come once every month or two. Sometimes more often. Once he came almost every other night, for a week, and then he was gone for almost half a year. I used to lock myself in my room when he came. I didn't like his smell. He wore some kind of scent . . . cologne, I suppose, but it really smelled stronger than that. Like perfume. Cheap dimestore perfume. But underneath it--"
"Underneath it he smelled like he hadn't had a bath for about ten years."
Richard looked at him, wide-eyed.
"I met him as Osmond, too," Jack explained. He had explained before--at least some of this--but Richard had not been listening then. He was listening now. "In the Territories version of New Hampshire, before I met him as Sunlight Gardener in Indiana."