“Turn back,” the idiot said, voicing his first inclination. He was afraid, and he wanted only to recapture the idyll of the last few hundred empty miles.
“Wait,” Belina said, studying the place.
He waited. He had confidence in her.
“Maybe he’s right,” the angel told Belina. “If he gets caught, they’ll put him away and uncreate us. It might be years before anyone buys the damn Furnace. Perhaps never.”
Bitty Belina had been watching the city intently, as if it were a mirage that would vanish under a steady gaze.
It was still there.
“Do you see any movement?” Belina asked.
The idiot and the angel turned to examine the city.
Snow sifted down. A gentle breeze whisked the white stuff in eddying currents over the ice pack.
Otherwise, all waa still and quiet.
“Nothing,” the angel said. “So what?”
“We’ve been on this road for weeks. In all that time, the only thing we passed was the cargo van with the gypsy driver.” She looked at Sebastian to see if he remembered the way he had handled her. She could still feel, or imagined that she could, the place where her spine had snapped in two, the pain that had fountained through her before the quick blackness of death.
Sebastian was oblivious to her accusing scowl. He still watched the dead city.
“I still don’t see why we shouldn’t get out of here before someone sees us. They can’t have many visitors. You’ve said so yourself.” The angel’s wings were open. They shivered, as if he would leap into flight, as they always did when he was frightened.
“Doesn’t it seem odd?” Belina asked. “No traffic on such a marvelous road, and now it ends here-as if they built this just to reach one city. There isn’t any bypass here like around other towns.”
“So what?” The angel grew more impatient.
“Think !” She was standing on the folded blankets now, leaning forward to look at the metropolis. “They built this highway to get here, spent a fortune on it. And now no one uses the thing.”
“And we look all the more conspicuous for that,” the angel insisted. “They’re probably sending the police out for us now.”
She sighed, shook her head, smiling ruefully. “What I’m trying to tell you is that I think the city’s empty. Understand? No one lives there any more, if anyone ever did. If it was occupied, this road would be in use:”
“A ghost city?”
“Exactly »
Sebastian looked on the place with more interest. Wind. Snow. Clouds shredding across the points of the towers.
Here and there, on the few large windows in the towers, the racing clouds were reflected. Nothing else moved. It somehow calmed his nerves.
“Why build a city and never use it?” the angel wanted to know.
“They probably intended to use it. They thought that when everyone came home from the stars, there would be need for places like this.”
“And no one came home,” the angel said.
“That’s right.”
“Pertos did,” Sebastian said.
They turned to look at him.
“Who?” Belina asked. She was tense, standing on her toes.
Sebastian looked at her, at her golden hair.
“I don’t remember,” he said.
“That’s better,” she said.
They watched the city a while longer, to be sure.
“Now what?” the angel asked.
“Drive ahead,” Belina told the idiot. “Let’s see what happens.”
Sebastian hesitated only a moment, put the truck in gear and drove down the last length of the highway which now seemed more like an avenue as the curbs rose on each side until they became walls higher than the truck itself.
The road gradually began to descend as they neared the walls of the city. Hidden detection circuits registered the pressure of the truck’s air cushion against the roadbed. Photoelectric circuits were interrupted by their passage, and this data was passed on to the city’s central traffic computer. The computer woke from the non-think that possessed it most of the time these days. When they were within a hundred yards of the blue stone facade, a section of wall rumbled open before them. Beyond, there was a well-lighted, wide avenue that bored away into the city itself.