James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

On it was a crumpled silk scarf. Ryan picked it up and unfolded it, revealing a pattern of crimson flowers.

“Chrysanthemums,” Krysty said. “That’s beautiful.”

“Looks oddly Oriental.” Doc took the scarf and held it to the overhead lights. “Hand-printed design, I believe. What a lovely thing to leave in a gateway.”

“Table doesn’t look American, either,” Mildred observed. “That looks maybe Japanese or Chinese.”

A small seed of suspicion was growing fast at the back of Ryan’s mind, growing and bursting into flower, an idea that might make a lot of sense of many of the things that had been happening in the previous weeks.

“You feel anything, lover?” he asked Krysty.

“I can’t feel anyone close. But” She looked at him in the eye. “You got the same idea as me, Ryan. I can see it in your face.”

The others stared at them in bewilderment. “Can we all share this?” J.B. asked.

“If we’re right, then we’ll soon know it,” Ryan replied.

Chapter Three

The control room to the matter-transfer unit was more or less similar in its design to the others they’d seen, although it was markedly smaller.

Ryan paused, looking at the rows of desks with their flickering comp screens and ever-changing data, the display panels of dancing colored lights and coded digital readouts.

The ceiling was lower than in most redoubts, and the lighting was different.

“Some of the neon strips have been replaced,” J.B. said. “You can see that some of them are a different design. Never seen that before.”

“Does that mean that someone’s been down here and using the gateway since skydark?” Mildred asked.

“Lot more recent than that,” Ryan replied, running his finger across a light film of dust on the clear plastic tops of the consoles.

Doc had walked on past him, stopping at the nearest desk. “Look at this! Someone’s stuck paper labels on a few of the screens.”

“So what?” Jak asked.

“So they’re in Japanese.”

It was what both Ryan and Krysty had begun to suspect. The fact that the redoubt showed signs of having been used, combined with the beautiful scarf and the design of the table, pointed in only one directionto Japan.

Months ago they had begun to hear rumors of occasional small bands of Oriental warriors, armed with bows and swords, raiding and then vanishing silently into the backcountry wilderness.

Then, they had encountered a pair of these mysterious samurai killers themselves. One of them had been chilled by Ryan, and the other had fled, wounded, when Mildred broke his longbow with a brilliant shot from her revolver.

It had become obvious that they had found a way of using the gateways, perhaps even understood something of how they worked.

But for all that to be happening, one of two things had occurred. A party of the Japanese had to have made their way north, perhaps to the Kamchatka peninsula in the extreme northwest of old Russia, crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska, then jumped from a redoubt up there.

Or what seemed slightly more likely, the Americans had managed, in those perilous, predark days, to build a gateway somewhere in Japan.

They’d done it successfully on the outskirts of Moscow. Ryan and some of the others had been there, so they knew about that. So why not in Japan?

The sec door at the far side of the comp-control room was smaller than usual, but it was obviously made of the usual armored vanadium steel.

The green lever was in the down, closed position.

Everyone looked at it in a deep, meditative silence, which was broken finally by J.B. “If we’re really in Japan, then there could be thousands of screaming slant-eyes waiting behind that door.”

“I’m not sure that ‘slant-eyes’ is a very politically correct, as we used to say, phrase to use, John. Though, in the world of Deathlands, it may be perfectly acceptable.”

“Used to call them Johnny Chinamen in my day,” Doc offered. “They all used to go along with big pigtails and little black caps, and the women had tiny bound feet and shuffled everywhere. Never made much of a distinction between Chinese and Japanese back when I was a stripling.”