“Revenge from beyond the grave.” Ryan looked down at the mutie creature. “Melting away like butter in a heat wave.”
“Like they used to say up in the Yukon in the days of ’49,” Doc said. “We sell butter by the quart in summer and milk by the pound in winter.”
“Hey, that’s good,” Dean said. “But what’s a quart and what’s a pound? I’ve never been good at all those difficult measurements. Rona never got around to teaching me.”
The mention of the boy’s mother brought her image to Ryan’s mind. Remembering Sharona, Ryan wasn’t that surprised that she never got around to teaching the boy much.
But she’d taught him plenty about survival, and in Deathlands that was worth more than all the history, geography, math and science put together.
Even so, everyone agreed, including Dean, that it was long past time for the lad to get himself a proper education. After all, he was to be part of the future, and the future needed every chance it could get.
It was just a question of finding the right place.
Good schools weren’t all that common in Deathlands. In fact, schools of any kind were few and far between.
“SURE YOU FEEL all right, lover?”
Ryan nodded. His legs felt like wet string, and his throat was still crushed and painful. But he figured that this was likely to be about as good as he’d feel for a while. “Sure,” he said. “Time to move.”
Everyone drew their blasters, lining up behind Ryan, trying to avoid the small heap of festering liquid corruption that had once been Melmoth Cornelius.
“Triple red, people. Let’s go.”
He eased open the door of the gateway chamber.
THE ANTEROOM NEXT to the gateway was totally empty no furniture, nothing tacked to the plain white walls.
The door that led to the control section of the mat-trans complex was wide open. From where he stood, Ryan could see clear across the room to where the massive vanadium-steel sec door was solidly closed.
“Looks safe,” he stated.
They stepped into the comp-controlled room, with its rows of desks and comp consoles. Everything looked perfectly normal. All but one of the ceiling lights glowed brightly, and all the monitor screens seemed to be functioning.
They all walked around, mesmerized by the dancing display of colored panels and whirling comp disks, the endless rows of buttons, switches, dials and knobs, the roaming sec cameras, mounted near, the ceiling, their red eyes glowing fitfully, sending their images through the hidden conduits up to a control room elsewhere in the redoubt. The room probably hadn’t seen human life for nearly a hundred years.
“If only we knew what all this did,” Ryan said. “Then we could mebbe control our own jumps. Know where we were going and get there safely.”
Doc sat at one of the rotating stools, spinning himself slowly. “Sadly all of that went down forever into the dark when the missiles flew and the blitzkrieg raged. And I for one do not lament the passing of the Techno Age. Humanity was already doomed, before the final war began. The bombs merely speeded up the process of decay.”
“Cynical old bastard, aren’t you, Doc?” Mildred commented, her broad smile taking the sting from her words.
“You’re a mere chit of a girl,” he replied. “What are you? Not even 150 years old. Wait until you reach past the two-hundred mark, and you may find yourself becoming a trifle cynical, Doctor.”
“Enough,” Ryan said quietly. “We’ll go and take a look outside the sec door. No sign of anyone getting into here.”
“Can I do the door, Dad?”
“Sure. Usual rules, everyone. Get ready.”
He took his own place at the center of the dull metal door, kneeling, the SIG-Sauer cocked in his right hand. The others fanned out behind him, taking cover behind the desks. Dean went to the green lever at the side that was in the down, or “closed,” position.
“Go,” Ryan told him.
The boy threw the lever up, triggering the complicated system of gears that lifted the hundred-ton door off the concrete floor. There was the faint whine of buried machinery, then the door started to move slowly upward.