the steps by the wagon seat, and entered the vehicle from its front. Following her, Jeebee stepped into an area dimly lit by the bulb in an old-fashioned auto headlight, glowing with what, to Jeebee’s astonishment, had to be electricity. Merry pointed briefly at it.
“Car battery,” she said briefly, “generator-driven by the wheels.”
The place was crammed and packed to the arching roof with boxes, tightly filled bags of all sizes, and what looked like ranks of tall wooden chests filled vertically with wide, narrow drawers. The room had a mild, pleasant, health-food-store aroma about it.
“Don’t come in here,” Merry told him, “unless Dad, Nick, or myself has said you can.”
There was a narrow aisle down through the center of the close-stacked contents of the place, and she led the way along it to another door. Staying close behind her, Jeebee stepped through into a second, crammed-full area that was barely long enough to allow two net hammocks to hang at full length against its walls, under the arching roof overhead. Both hammocks hung on their further hook at the moment, neatly rolled up.
Down below the roof now, a short, deeply tanned old man with a triangular face sat in a straight, wooden chair behind one of two large firearms, across the room from each other, which Jeebee recognized as heavy, air- cooled machine guns. The guns faced apertures in the steel beyond which was again what looked like white canvas. Something like a periscope tube angled up from the base of the wall to end in a wide, oval lens just above the breech of the machine guns.
A number of other weapons hung on the walls and filled the room, including four tubes that Jeebee was pleased to discover he could identify as rocket launchers. The ammunition for the rocket launchers was stacked beside them, and the launch tubes were clipped upright to a pole that rose to the center of the arch of roof overhead.
“You can put your rifles with the others in that rack on the side there.” Merry’s voice woke him out of his study of the room. She turned to the old man, who seemed not to have moved, but now held a revolver, loosely. “Nick, this is… ” Merry turned again to Jeebee. “What did you say your name was?”
“Jeeris Belamy Walthar,” Jeebee answered. “Call me Jeebee. Everybody does.”
“Nick Gage,” said the old man. He put the revolver casually away again under the seat of his chair, where it disappeared, apparently supported there somehow.
Jeebee extended his hand to the other, whose blunt, dry fingers closed around it, and who shook it a couple of times formally before letting go, without getting up from his seat at the machine gun.
“I had you in the sights on this from the moment you left the woods,” Nick said, patting the breech of the machine gun.
“Nick can do anything,” Merry said. “He’ll teach you all about the weapons. I’ll get you to riding, eventually, so you can take your shift of riding herd on the spare stock. I don’t suppose you can cook?”
“Not really… ” said Jeebee, embarrassed once more.
“Well, both Nick and I’ll have to teach you about that then, too.”
Merry turned to Nick.
“Dad says we’re going to take him on to replace Willie.”
“Willie knew a few things,” said Nick. His voice had a matter-of-factness that made everything he said come out almost as a monotone. “But maybe we can make even more of this one. Leave him to me.”
“Merry!” came Sanderson’s voice from the front of the wagon. “Can we get under way now?”
“Have you got anything else to pick up?” Merry asked Jeebee. Jeebee shook his head. He had his two rifles, even if they were in the rack some feet from him, and in the backpack he was wearing was everything else he owned.
“All right, Dad!” Merry called back. “We’re all set. I’ll be right out!”
She turned and went, leaving Jeebee alone with Nick Gage.
There was a moment of silence as they looked at each other.
“Did she or Paul tell you much?” said Nick.
“No,” said Jeebee, suddenly thoughtful.
“Thought not. That’s right, too,” said Nick. “It’s my job to tell you. Take a good look at me.”
Jeebee had of course been looking at him all this time. He kept on looking. He did not see anything he had not seen before.
“You see a little old man, right?” said Nick.
“If you want to call yourself that,” said Jeebee. It was a strange conversation and he felt awkward about how to handle it. “I guess I’d have to say you’re right.”
“Right,” said Nick. He held out his left hand, palm up. The skin of the palm was remarkably pink, contrasted to the leathery brownness of the back of the hand and all the rest of the skin surface of Nick that was visible. It was not so much a broad hand as a hand that seemed to have been stretched wide. There were large gaps at the base of the fingers between them. A hand that looked stubby and strong, not overly callused, but used.
“What do you see?” Nick asked.
“Your hand,” Jeebee answered.
“Right,” Nick said again. He closed his hand and magically it now held a knife with about a six-inch blade pointing right at Jeebee. “Now what do you see?”
Jeebee drew in his breath. His stomach muscles had tightened, and he found he was standing closer to Nick than he had thought. The knife point was less than its own length from those same stomach muscles.
“A knife,” he said after a moment, keeping his voice level.
“And that’s right,” said Nick. He put the knife back into one of the capacious pockets of the leather vest he wore over a red shirt and jeans, very like those worn by Merry and her father. “Figure it out if you can and tell me how it was done. When you do, we’ll talk about knives some.”
“I don’t know how you did it,” said Jeebee. “But it had to come from some place. The only place that could be is up your sleeve.”
“Good guess,” said Nick. “We’ll talk about knives then, but not today. Today I’ve got to show you around. Meanwhile… ”
He unbuttoned his left sleeve and pulled it up. A harness with what looked like a leather tube was attached to his forearm.
“That’s what did it,” said Nick. “Take a good look at that. That’s a rig. It’s also damn useless; all rigs are. Rigs will be just what you need one in a thousand times, but one in ten times they’ll get in the way of what you’re doing and get you killed.”
He reached up, unbuttoned something, and the whole contraption slid off his arm. He put it on a tablelike surface hinged to the wall next to his chair. “Meanwhile, remember that’s a trick. I know lots more besides that. Since I know tricks you don’t know, I’m not old and I’m not little. I’m bigger than you are. So you do what I say and I do what Paul says. All right?”
“All right,” said Jeebee, “for the moment, anyway.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Nick said as he got to his feet. “Come on with me now and I’ll begin to teach you what you’ve got to know about everything to do with the wagon here and what you’ll have to do.”
Nick reached into a drawer under the table surface beside his chair and brought out a typed list about three pages long. He handed this to Jeebee.
“This is a checklist of things you’re to do, or check on,” he said. “You’ll go clear through the list every twenty-four hours. The part of the list under Quiet Room is this room here. We call this the Quiet Room so we can mention it with other people around and not advertise we’re armed. After a while you’ll know the list by heart and be able to do the things automatically. Whenever one of us doesn’t have you doing something else like washing dishes or changing a tire or anything at all, fetching and carrying, you go to the next thing on the list and check that out. Now come along with me.”
He led Jeebee all through, around, and underneath the wagon. Jeebee learned that the vehicle was heavily armored inside, everywhere—though Jeebee was not taken everywhere. The two areas into which Nick did not take him were the bedrooms of Paul Sanderson and Merry. Otherwise, Jeebee was introduced to weapons, innumerable storage places, the equipment of the wagon itself, and everything about it.
There was one odd little room with all its inner surfaces covered with metal. It held an anvil on a sturdy support and a large black-metal dish on a tripod of three spread legs. The dish held what looked like the remnants of black chunks surrounded by gray ashes.
