A smaller card said “This is the golden door that has a silver lining.”
The shelter was small and cramped, with a living space opening to a couple of bunks. There was a kitchen area and toilet and washbasin. Beyond that was another door that hid the controls, generator, air purifier, water recycler and stores.
Ryan saw the two corpses immediately.
Unlike those above ground, these hadn’t deteriorated into skeletons. They were mummified bodies, leathery lips peeled back off yellowed teeth. The skin had shrunk and tightened across the faces, showing the skulls that lay beneath.
The woman, with long black hair, lay on one of the bunks, looking as though she’d been laid out in a funeral home. The skeletal hands were folded neatly on her shrunken breasts. She wore pale blue dungarees, stained and filthy, with a black and white badge pinned to the shoulder strap. Both J.B. and Ryan recognized it from old books as the emblem of a society that opposed all forms of nuke growth.
“Didn’t do her no good,” said J.B., his voice flat and muffled in the cramped metal tomb.
The man’s body was in the John, huddled over the chemical toilet-bowl, almost as if he was at prayer.
“Looks like he died puking,” commented Ryan.
There was plenty of food in tins. J.B. switched on the water purifier and found it still functioned. Ryan sat down on a canvas chair, looked around the shelter and saw a primitive vid-machine, with a camera wired to it. He pressed the button marked Battery, and a faint red light glowed on the display, as if some tiny hibernating creature had just been awakened. “It works, J.B.it works.”
He wasn’t totally surprised. In some of the better-protected redoubts that they’d found during the years with the Trader, they’d quite often come across battery-operated machinery that still functioned. But generally the charge was only held for a few minutes, and then the equipment would grind to a halt forever.
“Press the On button on the telly there.”
J.B. hit the starter, and the screen lightened, revealing a jagged pattern of gray and white. Ryan had already noticed that there was a reel sitting in the vid-machine. He leaned forward and pressed the control to set it in motion.
“You don’t think there’s” The voice of the Armorer faded away into a stillness that verged on awe.
The jagged dashes and dots changed to colored splashes and streaks. The speaker crackled, and then they heard the sound of music.
“Testing, five and four and three. Coming through real good. Just turn off my new Pogues compact. There.” The music ceased.
Suddenly something appeared on the screen, a great blurred outline, like a football. It vanished, and then they saw the head and shoulders of a man who sat in the same chair where Ryan now sat. He looked to be around fifty years of age, with thinning black hair and a small neat mustache. He had plump, well-shaved cheeks and immaculate teeth. Teeth so good they couldn’t possibly have been genuine. He wore a bright shirt, decorated with garish bananas and pineapples. On his right hand was a ruby fraternity ring and on his wrist a platinum Rolex watch.
“Hi there to the future.” There was a sheepish grin on his face, and he seemed a little embarrassed at his own presentation. “My name’s Donald Haggard, and I’m an optometrist here in West Lowellton, part of the great city of Lafayette in the great state of Louisiana. Don’t know rightly why I’m telling you this, because I guess you’ll know all that. I’ve just broken off from Christmas brunch to tell you a little ’bout Guess I damned near forgot to tell you the date. It’s December 25, in the year 2000. Wanted to make this here vid as a kinda record, I guess, of what’s going on here right now.”
While Ryan and J.B. sat there, spellbound by this message from a dead man, Don Haggard went on to outline the political situation. The tensions between East and West, the problems in Libya, in South Africa, in the Philippines, in Cuba. In the northern cities of Great Britain and in Israel.