had appeared in the literature from around the world—from people like Piotr Arazavin, Noshiobi Hideki… and Jeeris Belamy Walthar, yours truly…
They had disagreed only on the degree of social entropy—chaos—required to trigger the leap to this new, savage expression of social organization. It was no one’s fault that the threshold turned out to be lower than any of them had suspected.
So cities became battlefields and stood now as silent, ravaged testaments to the dead left by riot and revolution. Isolated communities developed into small, primitive self-fortified territories. And the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were abroad once more—heraldic symbols of the new order.
So it had become a time of bloodletting, of a paring down and reshaping of the population—the pattern that QSD predicted would optimize the restoration of social order in those with the QSD patterns for survival under fang-and-claw conditions. A new medievalism was upon the globe. The iron years had come again; and those who were best fitted to the immediate task of survival were those to whom ethics, conscience, and anything else beyond the pure pragmatism of physical power, were excess baggage.
And so it would continue, the QSD models predicted, until a new, young order could emerge once more, binding the little village fortresses into alliances, the alliances into kingdoms, and the kingdoms into sovereign nations that could begin once more to treat with one another in systems. Fifty years, five hundred years, a thousand years—however long it would take.
And meanwhile, a small anachronism of the time now dead, a weak individual of the soft centuries struggled to cross the newly lawless country, carrying a precious child of the mind to where it might sleep in safety for as many centuries as necessary until reason and civilization should be born again—
Jeebee caught himself up at the brink of a bath in self-pity. Not that he was particularly ashamed of self-pity. Or, at least, he did not think he was particularly ashamed of it. But emotional navel-contemplating of any kind took his attention off his surroundings; and that could be dangerous. In fact, no sooner had he jerked himself out of his mood than his nostrils caught a faint but oily scent on the breeze.
In a moment he had killed the motor of the bike, was off it, and had dragged it with him into the cover of some nearby willow saplings. He lay there, silent and rigid, trying to identify what he had smelled.
The fact that he could not, did not make it any less alarming. Any unusual phenomena—noise, odor, or other—were potential warnings of the presence of other humans. And if there were other humans around, Jeebee wanted to look them over from a distance before he gave them a chance to see him.
In this case the scent was unknown, but, he could swear, not totally unfamiliar. Somewhere he had encountered it before. After lying some minutes hidden in the willows with ears and eyes straining for additional information, Jeebee cautiously got to his feet and, pushing the bike without starting the motor, began to try to track down the wind-borne odor to its source.
It was some little distance over two rises of land before the smell got noticeably stronger. But the moment came when, lying on his stomach with the bike ten feet back, he looked down a long slope at a milling mass of gray and black bodies. It was a large flock of Targhee sheep—the elusive memory of the smell of a sheep barn at a state fair twelve years before snapped back into his mind. With the flock below were three boys, riding bareback on small shaggy ponies. No dogs were in view.
The thought of dogs sent a twinge of alarm along his nerves. He was about to crawl back to his bike and start moving away when a ram burst suddenly from the flock with a sheep dog close behind it, a small brown-and- white collie breed that had been hidden by the milling dark backs and white faces about it. The sheep was headed directly up the slope where Jeebee lay hidden.
He lay holding his breath until the dog, nipping at the heels of the ram, turned it back into the mass of the flock. He breathed out in relief; but at that moment the dog, having seen the ram safely back among the other sheep, spun about and faced up in Jeebee’s direction, nose testing the wind.
The wind was from dog to Jeebee. There was no way the animal could smell him, he told himself; and yet the canine nose continued to test the air. After a second the dog began to bark, looking straight in the direction of where Jeebee lay hidden.
“What is it, Snappy?” cried one of the boys on horseback. He wheeled his mount around and cantered toward the dog, up the pitch of the slope.
Jeebee panicked. On hands and knees he scrambled backward, hearing a sudden high-pitched whoop from below as he became visible on the skyline, followed by the abrupt pounding of horses’ hooves in a gallop.
“Get him—
Knowing he was now fully in view, Jeebee leaped frantically on the electric bike and kicked on the motor. Mercifully, it started immediately, and he shot off without looking backward, paying no attention to the direction of his going except that it was away from those behind him and along a route as free of bumps and obstacles as he could find.
The rifle cracked again. He heard several voices now, yelping with excitement and the pleasure of the chase. There was a whistling near his head as a bullet passed close. The electric bike was slow to build up speed; and its softly whining motor did not cover the sound of the yells behind him. But he was headed downslope and slowly the bounding, oscillating needle of the speedometer was picking up space above the zero-miles-per-hour pin.
The rifle sounded again, somewhat farther behind him; and this time he heard no whistle of a passing slug. The shots had been infrequent enough to indicate that only one of the boys was armed; and the rifle used was probably an old single-shot, needing to be reloaded after firing—not an easy thing to do on the back of a galloping horse with no saddle leather or stirrups to cling to. He risked a glance over his shoulder.
The three had already given up the chase. He saw them on the crest of a rise behind him, sitting their horses, watching. They had given up almost too easily, he thought—and then he remembered the sheep. They would not want to go too far from the flock for which they were responsible.
He continued on, throttling back only a little on his speed. Now that they had seen him, he was anxious to get as far out of their area as possible, before they should pass the word to more adult riders on better horses and armed with better weapons. But he did begin, instinctively, to pay a little more attention to the dangers of rocks and holes in his way.
There was a new, gnawing uneasiness inside him. Dogs meant trouble for him, as one had just demonstrated. Other humans he could watch for and slip by unseen, but dogs had noses and ears to sense him in darkness or behind cover; and sheep-herders meant dogs—lots of them. He had expected cattle, but not sheep, out here. According to the road maps that were all he had to direct him, he should be no further west than a third of the way into South Dakota, by now.
A feeling of utter loneliness flooded through him. He was an outcast; and there was no one and no hope of anyone to stand by him. If he had even one companion to make this long hazardous journey with him, there might be a real chance of his reaching his brother’s place. As it was, what he feared most deeply was that in one of these moments of despair he would simply give up, would stop and turn, or wait to be shot down by armed riders like the ones just now following him. Or he would walk nakedly into some camp or town to be killed and robbed; just to get it all over with.
Now he fought the feeling of loneliness, the despair, forcing himself to think without emotion. What was the best thing for him to do under the circumstances? He would be safer apart from the electric bike; but without it he could not cover ground anywhere near so swiftly.
With luck, using the bike, he could be out of this sheep area in a day or so. With the solar blanket to charge its battery, he could cover ground at the low speed of eight miles an hour for some ten hours, before needing to recharge. Four hundred miles—it was like thinking of some incredible distance; but it was actually only fifty hours of such travel away. The bike would get him there, if he just trusted it. It was a case of simply pushing on through; and simply hoping to outrun trouble, as he just had, when he ran into more of it.
But he must go back to hiding out somewhere during the days and traveling nights only. This daytime travel was too dangerous. Starting right now—but even with a good moon he would have trouble spotting all the rocks and potholes in the path of the bike, off-road like this. And road travel increased his chances of being seen. But the yearning for even a rainy daytime like this one was too strong. No, he would make as much time as he could while the day lasted. When night came, he would decide then whether to ride on…
Thinking this, he topped the small rise he had been climbing and looked down at a river, a good two hundred yards across, flowing swiftly from north to south across his direct path west.
Jeebee stared at the river in dismay. Then, carefully, he rode down the slope before him until he halted the
