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Jens dressed even faster than he’d undressed. Where before he’d thought of nothing but getting his ashes hauled, now he recalled how much a stranger he was here, and what could happen to strangers when they fooled around with small-town women.
Another question formed in the back of his mind: did Mary expect to get paid? If he asked and the answer was no, he’d mortally offend her. If he didn’t ask and the answer was yes, he’d offend her a different way, one that might end up with his having a discussion he didn’t want with the gunman behind that curtained window.
After a few seconds’ thought, he found a compromise that pleased him. “What do I owe you for lunch and everything?” he asked. If she wanted to interpret and everything to mean a couple of beers, fine. If she thought it meant more than that, well, okay, too.
“Paper money?” Mary asked. Jens nodded. She said, “Thirty bucks ought to cover it.”
Given the way prices had gone crazy since the Lizards came, that wasn’t out of line for good chicken stew and two mugs of beer. Jens felt a surge of pride that she hadn’t been a pro. He dug in his pocket for a roll that would have astonished him in prewar days, peeled off two twenties, and gave them to her. “I’ll get your change,” she said, and started for the cash register.
“Don’t be silly,” he told her.
She smiled. “I said you were a gentleman.”
“Listen, Mary, when I come back from where I’m going-” he began, with the sentimentality satiation and a bit of beer can bring.
She cut him off. “If I ever see you again, tell me whatever you’re going to tell me. Till then, I’m not gonna worry about it. The war’s made everybody a little bit crazy.”
“Isn’t that the truth?” he said, and thought about Barbara for the first time since he decided to try playing footsie with Mary. Take that, bitch, he said to himself. Aloud, to Mary, he went on, “Thanks for everything-and I mean for everything. I’d better be heading out now.”
She sighed. “I know. Nobody ever stays in Idaho Springs-except me.” She took a couple of quick steps forward, pecked him on the cheek, and moved back again before he could grab her. “Wherever it is you’re going to, you be careful, hear me?”
“I will.” Suddenly he wanted to stay in Idaho Springs, a town he’d never heard of until he started planning the trip for Hanford. Amazing what a roll in the hay can do, he thought. But discipline held, aided by doubts whether Mary wanted anything more from him than that one roll, either.
The doorbell jingled again as he walked out of the First Street Cafe. He climbed onto his bicycle. “Giddyap,” he muttered as he started to pedal. The world wasn’t such a bad old place after all.
He held that view even though he needed a solid day to get to the top of Berthoud Pass, which wasn’t much more than twenty miles beyond Idaho Springs. He spent the night in the mining hamlet of Empire, then tackled the run to the pass the next morning. He didn’t think he’d ever worked so hard in this life. He’d gained a thousand feet between Idaho Springs and Empire, and picked up another three thousand in the thirteen miles between Empire and the top of the pass. Not only was he going up an ever-steeper grade, he was doing it in air that got thinner and thinner. Berthoud Pass topped out at better than eleven thousand feet: 11,315, said a sign that announced the Continental Divide.
“Whew.” Jens paused for a well-earned rest. He was covered with sweat and his heart was beating harder than it had when he’d come atop Mary Cooley, a day before and most of a mile lower. Denver had taken some getting used to. He wondered if anybody this side of an Andean Indian could hope to get used to the thin air of Berthoud Pass.
And yet signs on side roads pointed the way to ski resorts. People actually came up here for fun. He shook his head. “Me, I’m just glad it’s downhill from here on out,” he said, swigging from one of the canteens he’d filled back at Bards Creek in Empire. The kind folk there had also given him chunks of roast chicken to take along. He gnawed on a drumstick as he tried without much luck to catch his breath.
He thought he’d sweated out every drop of water in him, but emptying the canteen proved him wrong. He went off behind a boulder-not that anybody would have seen him if he’d taken a leak right out in the middle of US 40-and unzipped his fly.
The second he started to whiz, he hissed in sudden and unexpected pain; somebody might as well have lighted a match and stuck it up his joint. And along with the urine came thick yellow pus. “What the hell is that?” he burst out, and then, a moment later, as realization struck, “Jesus Christ, I’ve got the fucking clap!”
And where he’d got it was painfully obvious, in the most literal sense of the word. Not from the palm of his own hand, that was for goddamn sure. Somebody who’d lie down with one stranger passing through Idaho Springs… he wondered how many strangers she’d lain down with. One of them had left her a present, and she’d been generous enough to give it to him.
“That’s great,” he said. “That’s just wonderful.” Here he’d been on the point of rejoining the human race, and this had to happen. What he’d hoped would be his ticket out of the black gloom that had seized him ever since Barbara started laying that miserable ballplayer now turned out to be just another kick in the nuts-again, literally.
He thought about turning the bicycle around and heading back toward Idaho Springs. Give that tramp a Springfield thank-you, he thought. It would be an easy ride, too-all downhill. Down that grade, I could do twenty miles in twenty minutes. He knew he was exaggerating, but not by that much.
In the end, he shook his head. He didn’t quite have cold-blooded murder in him. Revenge was something else. As far as he was concerned, the whole human race had given him a screwing that made the dose he’d got from Mary Cooley look like a pat on the back by comparison.
Well, not quite like a pat on the back. As he climbed back onto the bicycle and started down the western slope of the Rockies, he was already dreading the next time he’d have to piss. Back before the war, sulfa had started knocking gonorrhea for a loop, if any doctor so much as had the stuff these days, he’d be saving it for matters more urgent than a case of VD.
“Hanford,” Jens muttered. His breath smoked as the word escaped his lips; even now, the snow didn’t lie that far above Berthoud Pass. He pedaled harder to get warm again.
He’d go on to Hanford. He’d see what there was to see. He’d head back for Denver and make his report. He wondered how much good it would do, or whether General Leslie hotshot Groves would pay the least bit of attention to it if he didn’t like what he said. None of the Met Lab people paid any attention to him these days. They were probably too busy laughing at him behind his back-and they’d laugh even harder when he came home with a drippy faucet. So would Barbara.
He wondered why he was wasting so much effort on sons of bitches-and one proper bitch-who wouldn’t appreciate what he did if he went out and built a bomb single-handed. But he’d said he’d go and he’d said he’d come back, and duty still counted for a lot with him.
“Hell, hadn’t been for duty, I’d still be married-yes, sir, I sure would,” he said. They’d asked him to take word about the Met Lab from Chicago to the government-in-hiding in West Virginia, and he’d gone and done it. But getting back hadn’t been so easy-and nobody’d bothered to ask his wife to keep her legs closed while he was gone.
So he’d do what he’d promised. He hadn’t made any promises about afterwards, though. He might take it into his head to ride east out of Denver after all.
He picked up speed and he rolled downhill. The thin air that blew against his face was spicy with the smell of the pines from the Arapaho National Forest all around.
“Or who knows?” he said. “I might even run into some Lizards on the way to Hanford. They’d listen to me, I bet. What do you think?” The breeze didn’t answer.
XVII
Atvar stood on sand, looking out to sea. “This is a most respectable climate,” the fleetlord said. “Decently warm, decently dry-” The wind blew
bits of grit into his eyes. They bothered him not in the least; his nictitating membranes flicked them out of the way without conscious thought on his part.
Kirel came crunching up beside him. “Even this northern Africa is not truly Home, though, Exalted Fleetlord,” he said. “It grows beastly cold at night-and winter here, by the reports, is almost as hideous as anywhere else on Tosev 3.”
“Not winter now.” For a moment, Atvar turned an eye turret toward the star the Race called Tosev. As always, its light struck him as too harsh, too white, not quite like the mellow, sunshine of Home. “I thought I would come down to the planet’s surface to see it at its best, not its worst.”
“It is well-suited to us here,” Kirel admitted. “Reports say the Tosevites from Europe there”-he pointed north across the blue, blue water-“who were fighting here when we arrived, spent most of their time complaining about how hot and dry this part of their planet was. Even the natives don’t care for the area during summer.”
