Chapter Twenty-Six

Doc continued down the access tunnel, which sloped into the heart of the mountain. Sensors buried in the walls reacted to his footfalls, or perhaps to his body heat, switching on the overhead banks of lights as he descended. A sleeping giant awakened.

Had Doc a thought for the unfortunates whom he had left outside the stockpile’s doors? Had he a scrap of pity for those who’d shown so little pity to him? In a word, no.

A terrible weight had been lifted from his shoulders. His spirit was buoyed up by liberty regained. Jubilant, the chain that linked his ankle manacles scraping across the smooth concrete, he angled down into the coolness of the earth.

Spearpoint was at least as big as the myth surrounding it claimed it was. A city of cities. Completely uninhabited, of course. For the first two weeks after his mat-trans jump to this place, Doc had wandered, completely lost, down its wide avenues, through its housing sectors, its seemingly endless laboratories. The lights turned on as he approached, turned off as he moved on.

His scrambled state of mind certainly contributed to his failure to find his way out of the redoubt; this was due to a combination of the brain damage he’d already suffered from time trawling, and the confusion a mat-trans jump always brought on. He talked, he sang, he walked with old colleagues, debating issues of philosophy and science long since resolved, and long since made irrelevant by the nukecaust. He slept when he got tired, on lab tables, on park benches, in furniture warehouses, in doorways.

After many days of this aimless travel, he finally took notice of the band of different colored stripes on the walls of the corridors. They turned this way and that, following the contours of impossibly long hallways, sometimes breaking off from their fellows to go their own way. He had watched them glide by as he rode on the moving sidewalks, thinking that their only function was decorative. Then, another possibility had occurred to him. It was days more before he found the first map key. It confirmed what he had begun to suspect, that each band of color led in a particular direction, to a particular destination. If you knew where you wanted to go, you just followed yellow to lavender, turned right to red and there you were.

It turned out the map keys were very conveniently located, if you knew where to look and how to operate them. The computer-controlled, voice-activated LCD screens remained black and empty until the command to awake was given.

Familiar with the map system from his previous visit, Doc paused at the first intersection he came upon and called for directions. After he got the route he wanted, he proceeded to an area of machine shops and metal-fabrication plants. It took some rooting about in cupboards and tool chests before he found what he was looking for. As everything in the shop was computer controlled, there wasn’t much call for a hacksaw. The collars around his ankles gave up the ghost quite easily, however. Postdark iron was no match for predark steel.

Once he had freed himself, he moved on to the nearest food-dispensing area. As he entered, the overhead lights came on, as did splashing fountains and soft guitar music. The food court had been constructed and decorated to look like a Mexican hacienda, with shops featuring different kinds of repasts clustered around a central atrium.

There were no humans working there, of course. And during his early wanderings through Spearpoint, that had put Doc sorely off his feed. Burning pangs of hunger had made him accept the automatons, and once he’d tasted the food, it didn’t matter what served it to him.

Doc opened the glass-paned door of the Ice Creamatoria. The little bell on the door jingled merrily as he entered. The clerk behind the long counter turned to face him. She wore a red gingham apron. Her blond hair was braided into pigtails. She was remarkably apple-cheeked, but her blue eyes stared at him glassily, like a doll’s.

“And what can I get you today?” said a cheerful recorded voice.

“I’ll have a banana split,” Doc said, “double fudge, no pineapple, with two scoops of chocolate, one of vanilla.”

“And would you like nuts and whipped cream on that?”

“Yes, and jimmies, too,” Doc said. “Extra jimmies.”

It took barely a minute for the automaton to prepare his dessert. As he took it from the countertop, the clerk said, “That will be four dollars, please.”

Doc just kept on walking.

“That will be four dollars, please.”

The door jingled as he shut it behind him.

He sat down on the edge of the dancing fountain and gorged himself. Though the ingredients were more than one hundred years old, it tasted so good that he licked the inside of the plastic bowl to get the last of the fudge sauce. When he was done, he dumped the bowl and spoon into a trash receptacle.

Feeling completely revived, he found another map key and got directions to the redoubt’s mat-trans unit.

He could have stayed around Spearpoint, of course, and there was a temptation to do just that, but more than endless quantities of food, he wanted fresh air and sunshine. He wanted to stretch his legs and put some miles under his boots.

Doc knew he was getting close to the mat-trans unit when he entered a low-ceilinged room lined with row upon row of computers, all of them apparently in sleep mode. The movement of solid matter from one location to another required the storage and transfer of massive amounts of information.

On the far side of the room was a short hallway, which ended in a familiar-looking bulkhead door. The moment he touched the handle, the banks of computers behind him began to chitter like a flock of startled birds. Everything was automatic. The process had begun.

Doc stepped inside the small chamber and slammed the door behind him. At once, a whisper of air started creeping around the ceiling, and he smelled something sharp and electric. The metallic floor plates beneath his feet took on a soft glow, as did the chamber’s armaglass walls, which were the color of golden honey. Wisps of cottony mist drifted down from the ceiling and swirled around his face.

“Morituri te salutamus,” he said.

And then he sat on the floor.