Elijah had been stunned to learn that his archivist had gone over the wall. It was like a slap in the face to him. He’d been sure if any damn mutie was ready to lick his baronial ass and beg for more, it was Zit. He blamed book learning for a lot of the trouble, which was why he never let his girls get any education. He didn’t want them getting any ideas he hadn’t planted. Zit had somehow managed to sneak off and teach himself to read better than almost anybody in Willie ville. The baron really had no way of telling whether Zit had got his dangerous notions about freedom from the Apo-calypticon or whether he already had them when he started to work on the collection. The rare books and secret papers had strange powers; after all. they had run the whole predark world.
Elijah had always been a hoarder, a pack rat. As a boy, he was always picking up bright, shiny objects he found during the family’s food-gathering expeditions. Now that he was rich, he freely indulged his compulsion. He had spent much time and treasure accumulating the trove of material. He had put out the word on the trader network that he would pay top jack for anything predark and in good shape. Of course, there were practical reasons for the expenditure, too. The mystery of the Apocalypticon added to his wealth and power because it furthered his legend as a master of the arcane and dark. It didn’t matter that the legend was a bald-faced lie. Elijah could read, but haltingly. And he certainly couldn’t make heads or tails of the acronym-littered technobabble that much of the documentation was written in.
“Where you goin*, Poppadaddy?” Roonie-Two asked, squinting over at him.
Elijah picked up his corduroy pants from the floor and started to pull them on.
“Come back to bed, now,” she moaned. “It’s too
early.”
“Got important work to do, gal,” he told her. He stepped into his shoes and left the bedroom.
At the far end of the penthouse suite, with a commanding view of the highway and valley to the north, was his operations room. The sec men and high-level toadies sitting around the long table jumped to their feet when he entered. All their eyes were red rimmed
and dark circled; the toadies’ faces looked even sal-lower than usual.
“I take it we had a quiet night,” he said as he rounded the head of the table.
Murchisson, his longtime sec chief, spoke up first “So quiet you might even call it dull, Baron. Except for a report of some possible blasterfire around 2:00 a.m.”
Elijah tipped the lid off a bucket of tipple on the floor and used a dipper to ladle himself a breakfast pint. “No one saw anything?” he asked, taking a deep draft of the high-octane ale.
“No, sir,” Murchisson answered. “Could’ve just been a string of thunderclaps. We had some chain lightning off to the east around that time.”
“I don’t suppose any of the runners are back yet,” Elijah said.
“No, sir. Don’t expect to see them until midday, if then.”
Elijah caught the wry look in the head sec man’s eye. “You don’t think Old Black heart Hutton and the other barons are going to send any men our way, do you?” he asked. “You think they’re more likely to sit back and hope we get eaten alive. Let the rad-blasted stickies do their dirty work for them. Then come by after the smoke clears and fight over the pickings.”
“My thoughts exactly, sir.”
“Well, you’re probably right. They know I’d do the same thing to them, if the opportunity ever came up.” Elijah refilled his dipper and sipped from it.
One of the assembled toadies cleared his throat. “Baron Elijah,” said Skeen, a short, wide man with heavy jowls, “I’d just like to say that in my opinion last night was a great victory for your leadership.” Skeen showed his lord the balding top of his head. “Victory? How so?” Elijah said. “Baron, if there were any stickies out there threatening us, you scared them off. They didn’t dare attack Willie ville. They knew they’d get ripped to pieces. The way you handled the situation demonstrated once again the depth of your wisdom and insight. I want you to know how grateful I am.”