'When was we home?'
This time Doc shook his head. 'Alas, I have no really accurate chronometer, Miss Quint. But my memory, addled though it often is, recalls a transmission time of less than .0001 of a nanosecond. Of course, it seems longer because of the recovery time from the molecular scrambling and disassembly.'
In the few jumps he'd made, Ryan had wondered how long it took. On one he'd checked the chron on his left wrist, but it didn't seem to have moved at all from the beginning to the end of the journey. Doc's explanation hadn't made it any easier to understand. All he knew was that you got into one of the surviving gateways and closed the door. An infinity of scattered time later, you were in another gateway, perhaps three thousand miles away.
'So we was there and here at same time?' asked Lori, in her slow, almost tranquilized voice.
Doc smiled paternally at her, but the hand that squeezed the top of her thigh, where skirt nearly met boots, was far from paternal.
The old man turned his smile on Ryan Cawdor. But it was quickly replaced with a taut expression of horror. The eyes bulged wide at Ryan. Doc's grip on sanity gradually seemed to be returning, but it was still frail.
'The men of science, Ryan. Upon my soul, ladies and gentlemen, but they are such inhumane scum. They seek better and better ways of slaughter. Oh, the sights I saw when I was... oh, the horrors!' He closed his eyes, swaying like an aspen in a summer wind. 'A young man, a taxi driver from Minneapolis, a petty thief... nothing vicious in him. Seen him used as a guinea pig for one of their nerve toxins. Seen him trying to bite his hand off, gnawing to the bloody bone. Children, from Asia, experiments for the agency that... rubbing their own excrement in great ulcerated sores that they had torn in their own flesh. Oh...'
He began to weep. Lori put her arms around him, hugging his frail body as he sobbed uncontrollably.
For a moment, everyone avoided eye contact. It was Ryan who broke the silence.
'Best we move.'
'Yeah,' said J. B. Dix.
The door to the gateway opened smoothly. The anteroom was filled with chattering banks of computers and ranged equipment that hummed and whirred. Red and green and amber lights flickered. This was the cleanest and apparently best-preserved gateway control room that Ryan had seen.
Above the small panel of numbered and lettered buttons by the side of the chamber door, there was a notice that Ryan had seen before. Up in the Darks, where it had all begun for them.
'Entry Absolutely Forbidden to All but B12 Cleared Personnel. Mat-trans.'
This time there was no small room between the controls and the actual gateway. There was a massive door of vanadium-steel at the far side of the room.
'Blasters ready,' ordered Ryan, taking out the SIG-Sauer pistol, steadying it, his finger firm on the trigger.
Everyone drew rifles or pistols and ranged around Cawdor as he reached for the door. In the humid heat it felt cool to the touch. To the right was a green lever, pointing to the floor, with the word Closed printed on it. Ryan grasped it and tugged it upward, toward the Open position.
When the door was only a couple of inches ajar, Ryan eased the lever back to the neutral position, pressing his good eye to the slit and squinting both ways along the corridor that ran outside.
'Anything?' asked J. B. Dix.
'No. Pass the rad counter.'
The Armorer handed him a small device, like a pocket chron, that measured the radioactivity. It cheeped and muttered quietly, showing no more than a minor surface level. There were places scattered throughout the country where it would have howled out the danger. These hot spots were often near cities or towns where there had been either missile complexes or communication centers.
'Safe?'
'Yeah.'
Hennings was at his elbow as the door hissed open the rest of the way.
'Fucking hot, Ryan. Help sweat some of Finn's fat.'
'Careful the sun don't fucking burn you blacker, Henn,' replied the stout little man.
'Cut it, you two,' snapped Ryan. 'Come on. Keep tight and careful.'
Nobody needed telling where to go.
Ryan led the way, as always. Then came Krysty, light on her feet, two paces behind. Hennings was third in line. Doc, with an arm around Lori, was in the middle of the group. Finn was last but one, with J.B. bringing up the rear, about ten paces behind everyone, constantly turning to check that nobody was trying to come up behind to cold-cock them.
The corridors were a pale cream stone, seamless, curving slightly to the right. About four paces wide, and about twelve feet high. Lighting was contained in recessed strips. There were no doors on either side.
'This a redoubt, Doc?' Ryan asked.
'Perchance not, Mr. Cawdor. Not all of the gateways were built within the large storage redoubts.'
The corridor wound on. Ryan's guess was that it was going to come a full 360 degrees. Every now and then they passed beneath what were obviously defensive barriers, locked away in the ceiling. And every thirty or forty paces they walked under the cold gaze of small vid cameras, set in the angle between wall and curved roof.
'Nobody?' called J. B. Dix from the rear.
'Not a smell or sight of 'em,' Ryan replied.
'There's nobody,' said Krysty Wroth, voice utterly decisive.
'Sure?'
'Sure, lover,' she said.
In the century after the nuclear apocalypse many parts of what had been the United States were disastrously contaminated by all forms of nuclear poison. Chem clouds, bitter winter, acid rain and lethal doses of radiation had all combined to produce a multitude of genetic mutations. Muties came in all shapes, sizes and forms.
In many cases their names gave clues as to what they were like and how they acted.
Stickies had strangely developed hands and feet that enabled them to grip almost any surface. They were hard to kill.
Sensers were able to see into the future, mainly in a very limited and often inaccurate way.
Doomies could only feel when some disaster was going to happen. They could rarely be specific, but their premonitions were generally correct.
Crazies were... well, crazies were plain crazy.
Krysty was a kind of mutie. Ryan had found it difficult to handle when he first became aware of it. After they'd first made love. She had mixed talents. Her long hair was slightly sentient and seemed to move of its own volition. She could often sense trouble, in the way that a doomseer could. Also, she had unusually keen sight and hearing.
But her greatest attribute was generally hidden. Her late mother, Sonja, had always drilled into the girl the key phrase: Strive for Life. She had come from a settlement called Harmony, which had a reputation as a sanctuary, as peaceful hamlets were called. Krysty had been taught there by her mother, and by two good men, her uncle Tyas McNann and his friend Peter Maritza. They had taught her to respect the Earth Mother, Gaia, as she was called, after the Greek goddess of the earth.
Though it exhausted her, Krysty was capable of disciplining her mind and body to such an extent that she could unleash a terrifying physical strength.
It wasn't just humans that bred muties.
In his thirty or so years, Ryan had encountered just about every kind of genetic perversion that a diseased mind could imagine. Fish and fowl. Insects from the locked rooms of a dying nightmare. Animals and snakes and birds. All distorted into obscene parodies of their original forms.
Ryan believed that this odd circular redoubt was devoid of life. Krysty just confirmed his suspicions. The air tasted clean and untouched. Once you'd smelled death, you never forgot it. Not ever.
It was only about three minutes later that they reached what looked like the main doors. The corridor opened to a room about ten paces square. The walls showed faint shadow-shapes, squares and rectangles, where
