“Well, nobody else lives out that way.” He hesitated. “Hey, there’s something I’d like to ask.”
“Sure. Like what?”
“Well, them people pretty much keep themselves to themselves, I don’t mean they’re stuck-up or anything, but-well, I’ve always wondered. Where they from? One of them overrun countries in Europe? They’re foreigners, ain’t they? And seems like most of what Europe exports any more is DP’s. Are them people some?”
“Well, yes, you might call them that. Why?”
“Well, they talk just as good as anybody and it must have been a war a long time ago because they’ve been around since my Dad’s time, but they just-feel different.” He caught his upper lip between his teeth reflectively. “Good different. Real nice different.” He grinned again. “Wouldn’t mind shining up to some of them gals myself. Don’t get no encouragement, though.
“Anyway, keep on this road. It’s easy. No other road going that way. Jackass Flat will beat the tar outa your tires, but you’ll probably make it, less’n comes up a heavy rain. Then you’ll skate over half the county and most likely end up in a ditch. Slickest mud in the world. Colder’n hell-beg pardon, lady-out there on the flat when the wind starts blowing. Better bundle up.”
“Thanks, fella,” I said. “Thanks a lot. Think we’ll make it before dark?”
“Oh, sure. ‘Tain’t so awful far but the road’s lousy. Oughta make it in two-three hours, less’n like I said, comes up a heavy rain.”
We knew when we hit Jackass Flat. It was like dropping off the edge. If we had thought the road to Kerry Canyon was bad we revised our opinions, but fast. In the first place it was choose your own ruts. Then the tracks were deep sunk in heavy clay generously mixed with sharp splintery shale and rocks as big as your two fists that were like a gigantic gravel as far as we could see across the lifeless expanse of the flat.
But to make it worse, the ruts I chose kept ending abruptly as though the cars that had made them had either backed away from the job or jumped over. Jumped over! I drove, in and out of ruts, so wrapped up in surmises that I hardly noticed the tough going until a cry from Bethie aroused me.
“Stop the car!” she cried. “Oh, Peter! Stop the car!”
I braked so fast that the pickup swerved wildly, mounted the side of a rut, lurched and settled sickeningly down on the back tire which sighed itself flatly into the rising wind.
“What on earth!” I yelped, as near to being mad at Bethie as I’d ever been in my life. “What was that for?”
Bethie, white-faced, was emerging from the army blanket she had huddled in against the cold. “It just came to me. Peter, supposing they don’t want us?”
“Don’t want us? What do you mean?” I growled, wondering if that lace doily I called my spare tire would be worth the trouble of putting it on.
“We never thought. It didn’t even occur to us. Peter, we-we don’t belong. We won’t be like them. We’re partly of Earth-as much as we are of wherever else. Supposing they reject us? Supposing they think we’re undesirable-?” Bethie turned her face away. “Maybe we don’t belong anywhere, Peter, not anywhere at all.”
I felt a chill sweep over me that was not of the weather. We had assumed so blithely that we would be welcome. But how did we know? Maybe they wouldn’t want us. We weren’t of the People. We weren’t of Earth. Maybe we didn’t belong-not anywhere.
“Sure they’ll want us,” I forced out heartily. Then my eyes wavered away from Bethie’s and I said defensively, “Mother said they would help us. She said we were woven of the same fabric-“
“But maybe the warp will only accept genuine woof. Mother couldn’t know. There weren’t any-half-breeds-when she was separated from them. Maybe our Earth blood will mark us-“
“There’s nothing wrong with Earth blood,” I said defiantly.
“Besides, like you said, what would there be for you if we went back?”
She pressed her clenched fists against her cheeks, her eyes wide and vacant. “Maybe,” she muttered, “‘maybe if I’d just go on and go completely insane it wouldn’t hurt so terribly much. It might even feel good.”
“Bethie!” my voice jerked her physically. “Cut out that talk right now! We’re going on. The only way we can judge the People is by Mother. She would never reject us or any others like us. And that fellow back there said they were good people.”
I opened the door. “You better try to get some kinks out of your legs while I change the tire. By the looks of the sky we’ll be doing some skating before we get to Cougar Canyon.”
But for all my brave words it wasn’t just for the tire that I knelt beside the car, and it wasn’t only the sound of the lug wrench that the wind carried up into the darkening sky.
I squinted through the streaming windshield, trying to make out the road through the downpour that fought our windshield wiper to a standstill. What few glimpses I caught of the road showed a deceptively smooth-looking chocolate river, but we alternately shook like a giant maraca, pushed out sheets of water like a speedboat, or slithered aimlessly and terrifyingly across sudden mud flats that often left us yards off the road. Then we’d creep cautiously back until the soggy squelch of our tires told us we were in the flooded ruts again.
Then all at once it wasn’t there. The road, I mean. It stretched a few yards ahead of us and then just flowed over the edge, into the rain, into nothingness.
“It couldn’t go there,” Bethie murmured incredulously. “It can’t just drop off like that.”
“Well, I’m certainly not dropping off with it, sight unseen,” I said, huddling deeper into my army blanket. My jacket was packed in back and I hadn’t bothered to dig it out. I hunched my shoulders to bring the blanket up over my head. “I’m going to take a look first.”
I slid out into the solid wall of rain that hissed and splashed around me on the flooded flat. I was soaked to the knees and mud-coated to the shins before I slithered to the drop-off. The trail-call that a road?-tipped over the edge of the canyon and turned abruptly to the right, then lost itself along a shrub-grown ledge that sloped downward even as it paralleled the rim of the canyon. If I could get the pickup over the rim and onto the trail it wouldn’t be so bad. But-I peered over the drop-off at the turn. The bottom was lost in shadows and rain. I shuddered.
