There was a flurry of movement below as five figures in black stepped from the front of a predark structure on the left. They spread out and began to work on the upraised derrick. In a few seconds, they had lowered it, soundlessly, to a horizontal position. For what purpose, Ryan couldn’t guess.
Krysty was the first to speak. “So the scrounger wasn’t lying about them after all,” she said. “Do you think he was telling the truth about Moonboy’s norms, too? That they’ve all been chilled?”
“Either that or they ran away,” Ryan answered, knowing the latter wasn’t very likely.
“Sure don’t look like muties to me,” J.B. said, adjusting the focus ring on his binocs. “Look like norms in full battle armor. Remember that Hideyoshi and the other samurai warriors we come across a while back?”
“Yeah, but this gear is different,” Mildred said.
“There’s no horns on these helmets. The overlapping armor plates appear to be the same material as the helicopterthe same oily blackbut look at the way those guys are moving around. The stuff isn’t stiff. It flexes with them like a second skin.”
“What do you think, Doc?” Ryan asked. “Does it look like any of the whitecoat ultrasecret tech you’ve seen?”
Doc didn’t reply.
Ryan saw the blank stare, the quivering lips, and realized at once that the old man was slipping away from reality. Doc had no power to control the fits of complete disorientation, which were the result of posttraumatic shock from the time leaps he had been forced to take. Leaps that had fractured his mind and broken his heart. In a second or two, he would either be talking aloud to his wife, Emily, and his beloved children, Rachel and Jolyon, at their dinner table, or arguing some unintelligible philosophy with a long-turned-to-dust academic crony.
“Come on, Doc,” Ryan prodded.
The lights went back on behind Doc’s eyes. He groaned, then shook his head to clear it.
Ryan repeated the question after the man had recovered his bearings. “The black armor, did you see it when you were captive to the whitecoats before skydark?”
The answer was disappointing.
“Sorry, Ryan, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“The way they’re totally encased, helmets to boots,” Mildred said, “it reminds me of the suits the NASA astronauts used to wear. They were pressurized for life support in space. Had their own, self-contained air and water supply, and sophisticated biometry and communication systems.”
“Why would they be wearing something like that in Moonboy?” Krysty asked. “Nothing’s wrong with the air around here.”
“They’d be wearing it if they couldn’t breathe our air or drink our water,” Mildred said.
“We’ve never seen any people like that,” Dean said.
“Never heard of anyone like that, either,” J.B. added.
“Mildred, are you saying they might not be from Earth?” Ryan asked in astonishment.
“It is a possible explanation, however remote,” the physician replied. “They could be extraterrestrials.”
Fully recovered, Doc held up his hands. “My friends, I beg you to take a closer look. Whatever else they may be, these wayfarers are neither little nor green. And at this moment in time their point of origin, whether earthly or not, should be of less a concern to us than the potential threat they present. Have they weapons we cannot defeat?”
The one-eyed man smiled and nodded. “Our cannies might have their hands full trying to make dinner out these pilgrims.”
“Can’t count on the folks in armor doing the job for us,” J.B. said. “What if the cannie bastards wait until dark to attack and then just get driven off? There’s a whole lot of desert out there. We could lose them, Ryan.”
“They’re not going to wait.”
“How do you know that?”
He pointed toward the entry road that led up from Highway 15. “I count four cannies, coming on the run.”
As the companions watched, low-moving figures slipped around and through the rubble piles on the outskirts of the ville. The cannies split up, working themselves into position to attack Main Street. They crouched in plain view from the ridge top, their stationary heads and shoulders completely exposed to down-angled blasterfire.
They were challenging but not impossible targets.
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