"Doubt it. Why should I?"
"I gave you everything I had when I escaped from Cloak House."
"True. But what you done for me recently?"
"Same old Skip."
"Hey, be reasonable. Nobody gets another job 'til they done hot service. Not Pyle, not Gormish, not Bonvissuto. They done theirs, I done mine, you do yours."
"How about after that, then? You must know where the good jobs are."
"Well, what sort of thing you want to do? What you good at?"
There was a dreadful temptation to say biology, and hope that would lead to Hanna Kronberg, but the first question from an expert would show that Job knew hardly more science than Skip Tolson.
"You know what I'm good at, Skip. Languages, same as always. With people coming here from all over the country, there must be a need for somebody who can talk to all of them."
"I'll see what I can do. Don't get your hopes up. An' I'm getting out of here now—too hot for my taste." Tolson was turning away when he had another thought. "Hey, I met an old buddy of yours when I first come here."
"Alan Singh?"
"Never heard of him. I meant Father Bonifant."
Job found himself unable to breathe. "Mister Bones is alive—here in Xanadu?"
"Nah. Not any more. He died a few years back."
The new bright warmth in Job's heart faded. "How did he die?"
"Went near the hot spots once too often. Helping recruits."
"Yes. He would have. That was Mister Bones." But Job spoke under his breath.
Tolson nodded. "I'm goin'. This place got too much burn in it for me."
He strode away. Job watched him out of sight, and was smiling by the time that Tolson vanished behind a ridge of trash. Skip hadn't changed. The ultimate pragmatist, but you couldn't dislike him for that. It was good to see him again. And he was quite right; Job had nothing to trade.
* * *
For the next forty-eight hours Job thought about Skip in every spare moment. How had he survived at Cloak House? How was he surviving now? One thing was guaranteed, if there were a safe burrow in Xanadu old Skip would have found it and crawled inside. The Tandy might be a death sentence, but it was a slow one. Ormond and Skip and Paley had lived here for years; Father Bonifant had survived for over a decade, and he had surely not taken good care of himself. He never did.
Job relived his years at Cloak House under the benign rule of Mister Bones and felt curiously comforted, until the third morning after Tolson's visit brought a major airdrop and the threat of a winter blizzard. Then there was no time for reminiscence.
The temperature across the Nebraska Tandy had been dropping steadily as the New Year approached. While long-time residents could batten down against the cold and go outside as little as possible, for the new recruits there was no such relief. The airdrops would go on in any clear weather and the cleanup work had to begin at once, before rain or snow turned the dropped materials into a coalesced mass, impossible to work with and hopelessly contaminated. Job and his companions were sent out in all weathers, until the cold became so intense that lubricants in the Tandymen congealed to a viscous solid, and the gears of the giant robots froze into place. Then the Tandymen could not make their first sorting of the most dangerous dropped materials, and all work halted.
Ormond had been watching today's weather closely. "Cold, but still clear," she said from the driver's seat of the truck. "They'll make the drop. The schedulers outside don't give a damn what happens here afterwards. The Tandymen will have time to take their cut, too. Then it gets tricky. You'll have to move fast. There's a winter storm sweeping down through Canada and Montana, and it's a bugger. Gale-force winds, foot or more of snow by tonight."
The recruits, bundled in multiple layers of warm clothing, waited tensely. There was already six inches of snow over Tandy Center. That would make the darker mass of the new drop easy to distinguish from the rest, but harder to handle and move around.
At noon half a dozen of the great pilotless drone aircraft came winging from the east through a sky of deep and flawless blue. The drop was made to perfection, masses of dark material falling to stain the snowy ridges of Tandy Center. A score of Tandymen went rumbling by the truck where the recruits were waiting, raising every pulse rate until the giant robots were safely inside Tandy Center and the danger of a wild Tandyman was past.
And then it was another agonizing wait, while the sky slowly clouded over and a north wind began to pick up strength. No one would risk going into Tandy Center before the Tandymen had done their work and left, but at the same time everyone dreaded the idea of scaling the snow-crusted and treacherous ridges of compacted trash in high winds and poor light. With just two days to go to winter solstice, dusk would arrive by five o'clock. Most of the training course casualties had made their fatal mistakes in failing light, at the very end of the shift when fatigue affected judgment and concentration.
At three o'clock the first tentative snowflakes drifted down. The wind began to gust more strongly. Ormond swore, and spoke into the van's two-way radio. "Just a few more minutes," she said at last. "Then they promise the Tandymen will be out and we can go in. You'll have two hours. Better be ready to hop."
It was more like half an hour before the last Tandyman beelined away across the flat plain of Xanadu. The workers jumped down from the truck and hurried into the wilderness of Tandy Center. It was familiar ground now, and they had well-defined tasks. The group of three that Job was assigned to advanced along a series of broad, cleared corridors that had been swept through the mountains of trash. They held their monitors and counters before them as they went. All the prisoners had become old hands at the job, and they swapped information and snap judgments as they went: ". . . real scorcher here, iodine-130." "No problem, half-life is only twelve hours. Leave it, and we'll handle it next time when it's not so hot. . . ." "This box has a high beryllium content, and it's leaking." "Poisonous as hell! Grab it now."
The snow was falling faster, driving along close to horizontal in the rising wind. The moving air produced eerie screams and howls as it passed through struts and open-ended boxes at the summit of the garbage mounds, interfering with conversation and slowing progress. It was clear that there would not be time for half the job that Ormond was demanding. She must have known it, too, because instead of sitting in the truck as she usually did she was walking through Tandy Center and urging the teams on to greater effort.
"You can't afford to leave that up there!" She stood splay-legged at the foot of one of the giant heaps of trash, while Job and his two companions perched precariously halfway up the side of it. They had been pulling futilely at a huge cylindrical container, slightly cracked along one side, and had just agreed that with the icy condition of the steep slope there was no way to obtain the necessary leverage. The cylinder seemed to be stuck immovably, buried deep by the force of its fall from the drones. They started to slide back down towards Ormond.
"Look at the sign on the side of it!" She was shouting through cupped hands, but the wind snatched her words away. "You could poison half a square mile if that got loose. Get back up there, and go above it, for God's sake. Push it down!"
Job and the other two hesitated. Ormond did not know it from where she was standing, but there was a second hazard on the mound. Farther up, close to the summit, lay another item from the recent drop. It was a great tangled bundle of thin metal tubes, probably cans from reactor fuel rods, and the counters showed that it was highly radioactive. If the team ascended to a point where they could shove at the big container of toxins, they would be dangerously close to the bundle of radioactive tubes. And at every gust of wind that bundle lifted and turned, as though ready to tumble and roll down the side of the ridge.
While they hesitated, Ormond started to scramble up the heap towards them. The wind had become so strong that she assumed they could not hear her. "Higher!" She was waving her arms as she shouted. "Go higher."
She was halfway to them, crabbing al
ong the side of the mound to avoid slipping, and when she was still five yards away the wind struck the heap with new violence, Job heard a warning shout from one of his companions and turned to see the whole top of the ridge, lifted by the wind, rolling in an avalanche of trash down towards them. It was too late to run. Job and his two companions did the only thing they could do. They dived for the shelter of the big cylinder, hoping that it was so firmly planted in the side of the ridge that it would not move. The dislodged top of the mountain rolled and crumbled past them in a mix of old trash and new loose snow. Job, head down, felt small fragments fall harmlessly on his thickly dressed body. He heard a cry from Ormond. When he was sure that the wave had passed he looked out cautiously from the shelter of the container. The whole side of the mound where Ormond had been standing was swept clear. At its foot stood a jumbled heap of snow and rubbish, but of Ormond there was no sign.
"Come on." Job shouted to his team and started down. As he left the protection of the great cylinder the wind tugged at him, almost knocking him over.
He went wallowing into the new, soft heap before he realized that no one had followed. They were still standing by the cylinder, pointing past Job. Ten feet away from him the tangle of lethal fuel cans was visible half-buried in snow. Midway between that and where he stood was the sole of a booted human foot.
He had left his pick and lever up on the side of the mound. He dived for the exposed foot and began to push snow and garbage out of the way with his bare hands. In a few seconds he could see the waist and the trousered thighs. He began to pull, desperately, repressing the warnings and the urge to run that bubbled up in his terrified mind.
His thoughts became totally focused. Radioactive dose is proportional to time of exposure. Speed was the thing, the main thing, the only thing. She had been in for only a couple of minutes. If he was quick enough, he could save Ormond.
The legs were free and feebly waving, but still there was something holding her. Job burrowed deeper, head down in a tangle of metal, plastic, and fabric. He pushed a tow-bar from some wrecked vehicle out of the way, and felt Ormond's whole body move when he lifted. He cursed his own feeble frame and weakness, cursed Ormond, and finally toppled over backwards as her body came free and tumbled with him down the last few feet of the mountain of trash.
She was out of the pile, alive but unconscious. But Job could do no more. She probably outweighed him by thirty pounds. He turned and screamed at the other two standing halfway up the mound. "Come and help. You stupid assholes, she's not dangerous now! You know you can't get a bad dose, just from a person who got one. Get down here!"
With the howling wind it was unlikely that they heard a word, but they were coming, scrambling down the slope and over to Job. Other teams must have seen the top of the trash mountain blow over, for people were appearing around the end of the ridge. Job could hardly move or speak. He pointed to Ormond, and then back towards the truck. The others lifted her and he followed, bowing low to lessen the murderous force of the wind and staggering as he went. The icy blast cut through to the very bottom of his aching lungs.
Ormond was dropped into the back of the truck. While the rest of the group stood wondering what came next, Job climbed into the driver's seat, turned the key, and was off without another word.
"Hey!" The answer came faintly from behind. Two people were chasing, floundering through deepening snow. "Stop. How will we get home? Come back!"
Job heard, but he did not comprehend or care. All his energy had to go to driving the truck, something he had observed many times but never done. While the wind howled outside and struck at the side of the vehicle like an angry elemental, he steered a veering, drunken path south across the open plain of Xanadu. In that direction, according to everything that he had heard and conjectured, lay Headquarters, and within Headquarters was the only place that could help Ormond: Decon Center.
He tried the two-way radio, but either he was using it wrong or no one was listening at the other end. It remained dead. The snow fell harder, reducing visibility to a few yards. The road itself was vanishing, forcing Job to drive blind and across country. As the world closed in and became nothing but swirling white, he finally allowed the thought that he had vetoed when he was pulling the supervisor free: Radiation does not distinguish between rescuer and rescued. Job's actions had placed him in as much danger as Ormond.
He pressed harder on the accelerator. The world was darkening, the windshield wipers had given up the effort, and the window in front of him had become a snowy mirror. Reflected in the glass Job saw the ghost of Skip Tolson. "Idiot," it said. "Didn't you ever learn anything from me? Ormond got herself in trouble, you don't have to lift one finger to save her. It's a dog-eat-dog world. You're getting yourself eaten."
Skip was right. Job could feel the truth of that, burning in every cell of his body. But behind Skip, diminished by distance, stood the frail specter of Father Bonifant.
Job pressed the accelerator to the floor and drove into the storm.
Chapter Sixteen
I am a brother to dragons,
and a companion to owls.
My skin is black upon me,
and my bones are burned with heat.
— The Book of Job, Chapter 30, Verses 28 and 29
Except for a brief spell of groaning wakefulness in the truck, Ormond remained unconscious. Job stayed awake throughout. By the end of the first night in the Decon Center he was convinced that she had the better deal.
His knowledge of the location of Headquarters had been all hearsay. Go south, said the rumors, as far as you can travel in Xanadu, to the place where the radiation is lowest, the water is purest, and you are farthest from the approach paths of airborne toxic drops. There you will find Headquarters, the operations centerfor the Nebraska Tandy.
And there you would also, according to training center rumors, find Decon Center. Untermeyer and others like him had been given no treatment, but that was only because they were already sentenced to death. Xanadu had as much experience as any place in the world at radiative and toxic decontamination.
Job had no choice but to rely on hearsay. He drove south. Normally the road would have guided him, but he was driving blind and in heavy snow. He plowed on across the slow-rolling, featureless plains of the Tandy. There were no landmarks, no signposts to guide his path.
Two things saved him, from fire and then from ice. He ran into a five-foot drift of snow which stalled the truck's engine just a few hundred yards short of the Tandy's outer boundary. One more minute of forward progress and the guardian ring of power lasers would have vaporized the vehicle. Clogged with snow, the truck's engine then refused to start. The heater was useless. With the outside temperature dipping below zero, Job began to shiver. He prepared to leave the truck for a surely doomed trek on foot. But the truck's blundering run south had intersected the eastern edge of a guarding ring of watchdog sensors around Xanadu Headquarters. The presence of an unauthorized vehicle had been noted. Alarms sounded. Security forces set out through the driving snow and reached the stalled intruder within twenty minutes.
They dragged Job out and flattened him face-up in the snow, guns ready to shoot him at the first sign of resistance. Who was he, and why had he violated the secured perimeter?
Job was past worrying about details. He ignored the guns, sat up, and pointed to the truck. "In there. Ormond. Training course supervisor. Radiation overdose. Pretty bad."
How bad?
Job shrugged. "Don't know." When he had last looked at her monitor it showed three hundred rads; borderline for a lethal dose.
No one asked if Job had been affected too. He was swept into a security snowmobile and whisked away. Within five minutes they were inside Decon Center. Four gray-suited technicians stripped him and Ormond without a word, pushed them into a sealed bath that squirted and scrubbed hot water and detergent over every square millimeter of body skin, and then submitted Job to an exquisitely painful and lengthy process of deep lavage. They irrig
ated his alimentary canal from both ends, penetrating deeper and deeper until he was convinced that the enema tubes and stomach pump were going to meet in the middle. They simultaneously catheterized his penis and flushed his bladder, inserted tubes up his nose to wash out his sinuses, and did the same for his ears.
That was the beginning. While one technician hooked the pair of patients to intravenous nutrient drips, another was systematically shaving every hair from their bodies.
"You're going to lose it anyway," she said, at Job's feeble protest. It was the only words spoken to him until a grinning ape of a technician approached with a syringe big enough to knock out a horse and injected the whole thing into Job's left buttock. "There," he said. "You'll piss green for a week, but it's all in a good cause."
The technicians left. Job had assumed that the last injection was some sort of sedative. He was wrong. It was a strong sudorific, designed to make him perspire. Within two minutes the sweat was pouring off him, his head swam, and he wanted to vomit but could not—he had nothing in his stomach. He shivered and writhed on the hard bed, sure he was dying, wondering how long it would take, wondering why they had even bothered to treat him.
The night was the longest that he had ever endured. On the next bed, Ormond sweated and tossed and turned just as hard, but she slept through until dawn; that was when Job, staring out of the window at snow that seemed determined to fall forever, finally lapsed into exhausted sleep.
When he awoke a gray-garbed figure stood at his bedside. Job was cringing away from it, ready to fight off more giant syringes, when he realized that the man cramped into the suit a couple of sizes too small for him was Skip Tolson.
Skip frowned down at him. "Thought you were never going to wake up."
"Am I dying, Skip?" Job automatically glanced across to the other bed, and found it empty. Ormond's disappearance filled him with alarm.
"Dying? Course you're not dying. You only got one-seventy, you'll just feel rotten for a while. Ormond's not dying, either." Tolson had seen Job's look. "She got twice what you did, but she'll recover."
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