“Sorry.”
He drew her to him and hugged her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”
“It’s all right,” she said.
“No, it’s not. You’re the only ray of light in all this darkness. You shouldn’t exist. I —”
She drew back from him. “What’s the matter?”
He turned away. “It’s starting.”
“InnerVoice?”
He nodded. “Nausea. There was a little on the bus but I was hoping it was just nervousness. Let’s keep walking.”
The woods were green and cool, alive with morning birdsong. They followed a deer path through thin maple trees and dense undergrowth: ferns, laurel, wild raspberry bushes, mayapple plants.
“What are you feeling?” she asked.
“Fear,” he said.
“Bad?”
“Yes, getting worse.”
She held his hand tightly. They came out of the woods and crossed a hayfield, entering the trees on the other side. A slope led down to the road, which had curved to the right and crossed in front of them.
“Let’s chance the road for a while,” he said.
They walked for about a quarter mile before encountering a garage with numerous official-looking vehicles parked in front of it. Most were trucks, but there were two cars, nondescript gray sedans. He led her across the parking lot to one of them. He tried the driver’s door — it was unlocked.
“Get in,” he said.
The interior was stripped down and functional, the dashboard made of unpainted metal with minimum instrumentation. The car had a standard transmission with a floor shift. As he suspected, the key was in the ignition.
He looked around a lot. No one was about. He depressed the clutch pedal and turned the key. The engine coughed, turned over, and started chugging and rattling.
He struggled with the gearshift.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
“Feel weak. The nausea. Can you drive?”
“No. I never learned.”
“Fine. I’ll be … fine.”
He got it into reverse and backed out of the parking slot. Jamming the lever into first gear, he started across the lot for the road.
A man in greasy overalls came out of the garage, stopping when he saw the car pulling out. He yelled something.
Gene floored the accelerator pedal, spinning tires on the gravel. He drove off the lot, swerving onto the road with only a cursory glance to see if traffic was coming. The engine howled but didn’t put out much power. He kept his foot to the floor, though, and the speedometer soon read eighty — miles or kilometers or something else, he didn’t know. He kept at that speed until it was apparent that they weren’t being chased.
He slowed down.
“Well,” Gene said, “the guy is sure to call the … the what? Would he call the army?”
“He might report the incident to the local Committee for the Investigation of Unsocial Behavior,” she said. “They might call Constant Struggle.”
“Does Constant Struggle always patrol the countryside?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s who picked me up. What were they doing out there? Do you have any idea?”
“No, Gene. I don’t.”
“There’s gotta be more to this.” He coughed. “Oh, God, I gotta throw up.” He swallowed bile.
“Stop,” she said.
“No, don’t want to take the chance. If I have to puke I’ll do it out the window. Hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind, Gene.”
“The thing is the anxiety, the fear. It’s not as powerful as it was that first day, but it’s getting to me.”
“I don’t understand, Gene. You shouldn’t have InnerVoice at all. You’re a maladapt.”
“Maybe this is psychological? Psychosomatic? I hope.”
“If you’re not a maladapt, maybe you have something that’s fighting InnerVoice.”
“I don’t know what it could be.”
“You must have something.”
The road went into a series of turns and the motion sickened him even more. He slowed down, swallowing the lubricating mucus that had worked its way up his esophagus, preparing the way for the return of his breakfast of near-rotten potatoes. Then the road straightened again, his stomach rumbled, and the breakfast stayed down. He belched.
“Excuse me. Alice, have the maladapts ever gotten together to do something?”
“Like what?”
“Like a revolution? Guerrilla activity?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Any attempt to bring down the system. To fight InnerVoice.”
“But how do you fight something that’s inside people?”
She had a point. He belched again, feeling a little better. The road went serpentine once more, climbing a grade. Woods were dense to either side, an occasional connecting dirt road the only break.
At the top of the hill the woods cleared and they passed through an abandoned hamlet, its weathered houses and stores boarded up and deserted. To Gene it looked familiar and he thought it might be a variant of one of the highway whistle-stops along Route 30. If so, they were getting closer to the site where the portal would be if it hadn’t vanished or shifted. There was still no calculating the chances of the portal still being in place. He put off thinking about what he would do if it wasn’t.
The nausea was making a comeback, rising in yet another wave. His heart fluttered like a wounded bird. The anxiety was something alive in him, scrabbling to get out, wanting to scream, to run away.
The road was blocked off ahead, a red wooden barrier across it. The sign said simply: Road Closed. There was no detour.
He smashed through the barrier. Shards of wood fell off the hood and windshield. It was too far to get out and walk just yet. It would be risky traveling an interdicted road, but he wasn’t ready to give up the car. Piece of junk though it was, it was something he could control. It obeyed his wishes, responded to the dictates of his body and will. It was power. He felt that if he let go of the steering wheel he would cave in and become some whimpering creature seeking only the alleviation of pain. He was afraid that he would give up and go back, do anything to make the hurt stop, even turn Alice in if it would help. The possibility of that scared him even more than the thought of being caught. He was feeling the lash right now. Would there be greater punishment if he was apprehended? Worse than this? He couldn’t imagine it.
He realized he had speeded up. The speedometer read eighty-five. The fuel tank was half full, so no worry there. There was no water temperature gauge, no battery charge meter, but he wasn’t particularly concerned with those readings. The car, clunky as it was, seemed to be in passable condition.
He screeched around a turn, braking in and accelerating out. They raced through another ghost village. Why were these sites abandoned? A matter of population decline, or was it part of a plan to redistribute population? Get people out of the countryside and into compounds of high rises so as to be more easily controlled? Perhaps. There were precedents in Earth history, though sometimes the flow went the other way, from the cities to the country. But dictatorships were notorious for shunting masses of people around, bulldozing villages, deporting ethnic groups, other high-handedness. The only people you’d need in the country would be personnel to work the fields of the huge state-run farms, like those he’d seen from the air, and those workers would live in residence complexes. There were no independent farmers, so no quaint farming villages were necessary.
He heard the whine of turbine engines above. He craned his neck to look. A VTOL craft was following,
