Johnny Reb (1) One man coughed as he rolled his third cigarette in twenty minutes, and another wasn't careful enough to avoid some noise as he set his beer mug down on the scarred wooden table. Other than that, the twenty or so patrons of the Wolverine Truck Stop and Motor Lodge's big dining room were absolutely silent, listening to the end of their host's story. "Rhysling knew what had happened," Mick continued, "as soon as he picked himself up off the floor. It was a reactor core blow-out, caused by poor maintenance just like he'd suspected. If only the Captain had believed him instead of treating him like nothing but a blind bum � but now it was too late. "He pushed himself up next to the bulkhead to get a little extra shielding, but he knew that he didn't have much time. In a few minutes the radiation would kill him just as dead as the engineer whose blood he could already smell. The man had been directly in front of the main shield when it blew apart. Rhysling didn't need his eyes to see what the room would look like. The pink glow of the reactor core shining through the mists of vaporized emergency shielding in a room just like this one was the last sight he had ever seen, when he had been a spaceliner engine-man twenty long years before. Mick paused, apparently to take a sip of water. In fact, he wanted a chance to look at his audience a little more closely than he could while performing. He was glad to see that they were about as hooked as they could get. One good sign was when guys wouldn't let go of their beer mugs. That way, they wouldn't have to look down when they wanted to pick them up again. It felt good. He couldn't remember many short Heinlein stories well enough to do them, and he'd been saving up The Green Hills of Earth for a very long time. And something in the air this evening had told him that this was the night for something special. "The Captain's voice roared out of the speakers, and he sounded scared. 'Engine room! Damage report! We're showing pegged radiation levels in there!' The young Captain knew that if it was a reactor fire in there and nobody could get to it in time, he was going to lose the ship and every soul on board. He also knew that with all the power out it would take the fire team at least half an hour to cut through the blast-doors. That would be about twenty-five minutes more than they had left. "'Captain!,' Rhysling had to yell to be heard over the burning reactor. 'You got two engine men down in here! One's dead for sure and the other's probable. And you have a main reactor coolant failure and meltdown.' "As he spoke, Rhysling was already pulling himself up to the control panel and fitting his hands into the remote manipulator gloves. If he'd still had the use of his eyes, he knew very well that he would have lost them in the moment he faced the core. He knew, because that was exactly how he had lost his sight twenty years before. It was an accident exactly like this that had started his career as the blind poet-bum of the spaceways, trading his bullshit poetry and songs for free rides all over the solar system. Of course, younger men like the Captain wouldn't have bothered to learn that. All they knew was that all the old-timers on the crew would let this Rhysling bum ride for free, and there was nothing that a Captain or First Mate could do about it. "Rhysling could feel the hard radiation like it was sunlight shining through his bones. Twenty years before, an unshielded reactor core would give a man a fatal dose in ninety seconds. In the accident back then he'd gotten away with about thirty seconds to spare. Of course, ships' engines had gotten a lot bigger since then. What the hell. At least the controls hadn't changed much. His hands still knew just what to do. "The Captain yelled at him. 'Who the hell is that? Is that Rhysling?. What the hell are you doing down there? Put somebody on! Don't touch anything until the fire team gets there! Do you hear me?' "Rhysling yelled back. 'Captain, White is dead and the young guy is down. Copy? No time for nonsense, now!' He could already feel his throat burning from the radiation and God knows what toxins the fire would be pumping into the engine room's air. At least that garbage wasn't getting into the air in the rest of the ship. But the flood of alpha particles and fast neutrons would be going through the thin internal walls of the ship, turning it into a radioactive deathtrap in minutes. 'Your crew can't get down here in time, Captain. I am performing emergency reactor dump and core flush now.' His gloved hands flew through the emergency sequences that he would never forget." The truckers looked like they weren't breathing. Mick knew that anyone who had traveled across the country like they did would have plenty of bad memories of the dangers of radiation. Some would have stumbled into hot zones and almost not gotten out soon enough. Others would have seen farmers trying to get rid of their deformed livestock without anybody noticing. Or worse. "'Rhysling, you're a damned civilian! And you aren't rated for this vessel,' the Captain yelled back. But he was sounding a lot less certain than he had a few seconds ago. It made Rhysling laugh, even while he was hitting the controls. "'Well, sir, let's just say I'm reporting for duty. And paying for all the free rides. Now shut the hell up and start recording. "'What?,' the Captain yelled. There was a lot of racket in the room. 'Recording? Yes, I am recording.' "For once, the Captain did what the old bum told him to do. And that's how we got the last and best bit of genuine Rhysling poetry ever. As he was finishing the first reactor-flush and starting the second, Rhysling could already feel his strength going. In the last minute or two he had probably absorbed enough radiation to kill him ten times over. He knew that his buddies would see to it that he got to the right hilltop in Tennessee. He just hoped they'd use a thick enough lead coffin, so none of them would get hurt." "Normally, Rhysling would have wanted to sing his lyrics," Mick continued, "but his voice was too far gone for that. So he just yelled. "'Tell the XO I finally got the end to that damned song,' he shouted. 'And it goes like this.' "'I pray for one last landing On the globe that gave me birth. Let me rest my eyes On the fleecy skies And the cool green hills of Earth.'" Mick let that sink in while he took another sip of water that he didn't actually need. "When the rescue ship got to them a week later," he picked up again, "it was still so hot in the engine room that they waited until everybody else was off the ship before they would even open the blast-doors and send the men in rad-suits in there. Rhysling was still sitting there, just as fresh as the day he died. They could see that he'd even had time to sit down and have a couple of smokes before the end. And he looked like he knew he'd really done something. The men pulling him out assumed that he must have died happy about saving the ship and all the people on it. "The old-timers knew him better. Rhysling was smiling because he'd finally finished that damned song. They made sure that the old man got to his hilltop, and that last stanza got onto his headstone." Mick stopped and looked around the room, giving the little nod he always used to mark the end of a good story, glad to see how many of his tough-guy trucker customers might be getting a little misty-eyed. Then one guy started clapping, and in a few seconds everybody was going at it like they didn't have a care in the world. It was as busy a night as Mick had seen in years, with every one of the six tables full. During the story earlier he had counted thirty guests, and he suspected that a couple more had come in since then. There was no way he could take time now to count, though; it was all he could do to keep all their mugs topped off with his home-made beer. He would just have to hope that there were beds and cots enough for all. Note: make more cots ASAP. Talk Annie into another addition to get more bedroom space? This place is getting popular! He glanced over at Melanie, who was just unloading an absurdly full tray of her mother's specialty-of-the-house barbecue venison ribs to a table of eight loudly appreciative truckers. What percentage of the decibels over there, Mick wondered darkly, is due to the ribs and what percentage is due to the waitress? Well, at least she was enjoying the attention. Mick believed, and fervently hoped, that everyone knew just how far he would allow such attention to go. Otherwise he'd be hanging up a trucker next to the bucks in the smoke-shed pretty soon. She needs to see something more than truckers, pal, said a familiar voice in his head. As always, he frowned more darkly yet at that idea, and pushed it aside with the excuse of all the work to be done. When the first signs of trouble came, he was too preoccupied to notice. It wasn't much: a chair pushed back hastily and a voice saying, "Come on, man." Anyway, maybe he subconsciously didn't care. There was a minor fight once a month or so. He had come to think of it as one of the ways the boys liked to socialize. As long as they didn't involve the furniture and didn't threaten to do any really serious damage to each other, Mick was inclined to let it go. Unfortunately, this incident was different from the average tussle in two ways. The first difference he realized after a second or so of woolgathering: it was happening next to the table that Melanie was standing at. He saw the second difference as he looked toward the incipient fight, and it froze his blood. The man who was acting up, the man on whom Melanie was advancing with the intention of enforcing the peace, reached down to his side and drew a knife. At that point, everything happened in slow motion. Melanie had been coming toward the guy pretty fast, and his angle hid the weapon from her. She was intending to come between him and the other man, but as she neared the aggressive trucker she made the mistake of putting a hand on his shoulder. Since he had turned away from her to get the knife, she was just outside of his peripheral vision and the touch startled him. Already angry, and thinking that an enemy had come up behind him, the man reacted by turning and slashing. For a long instant, nothing existed in Mick's universe except the gleaming tip of the man's knife and the arc it traced through the still air. Melanie jerked her head to the left, and the knife whistled two inches past the end of her nose. She had made several mistakes, and in the coming days Mick would be speaking to her about those oversights. She would be doing corrective drills with him in the barn for the next two weeks. One point that he would have to give her was that, after seeing that knife, she definitely did everything right. She knew that the knife had gone past her with such speed that it couldn't possible come back for a second or more. That meant it wasn't an important target. Instead, looking as though she was squashing an ugly insect, she struck straight at the man's eyes. She hit them with stiff outstretched fingers: not hard enough to do permanent damage, but more than enough make him jerk his head back. The man cried out and the knife did indeed come back in another arc, but his assailant didn't bother about it. Poorly aimed, it would have passed a foot away from her this time even if she hadn't moved. But in fact she had moved: straight down. The instant after her strike at the man's eyes, she had let her knees go loose and let gravity pull her straight down, getting her out of harm's way at ten meters per second squared. Which put her in an ideal position for a nice quick crotch-punch. The man might have fallen anyway. As it was, he tried to draw his legs up in his pain even while leaning back from the strike to his eyes. The net effect was that he essentially threw himself to the floor on his back, making a sound like a gut-shot horse and half knocking down another man who had been scrambling backwards to get away from the trouble. Even as he went down, Melanie danced back up. Making sure that the knife was nowhere to be seen, and glancing around to make sure that no more crazy truckers were coming after her. None were. Her gaze had the effect of rooting the startled bystanders to the spots where they stood, in decidedly non-threatening postures. At that point everything stopped, and the place got pretty quiet except for the guy grunting and gasping on the floor. Mick was very vaguely aware of the swinging doors to the kitchen opening and a slender figure emerging. That would be Annie, and she would be carrying the sawed-off sixteen gauge that he kept in there in case of real trouble. That had never been necessary before, and it wouldn't be needed this time either. Mick was not really aware of anything very clearly. A large part of his mind was still seeing the arc of that knife, and his daughter's face slowly turning aside. He dimly understood that he was walking toward the man on the floor, but only because he noticed that his point of view was changing. Then he heard someone say "Shit!" and a lot more chairs were being pushed quickly back. Mick understood, from some mental distance, that he had drawn his handgun. The trucker on the floor had just started recovering enough to open his eyes, and now they quickly widened with fear. He saw a serious-looking old man with a very serious-looking handgun pointed at his guts. "Keep lying down just as you are," Mick said calmly, "and put your hands underneath your back." The man complied quickly, watching white-eyed as the Innkeeper knelt down next to his right side. He realized that the old man had placed his knee so that, even if he tried to get his arms out from under him, his right arm would have no place to go. Mick heard some of the other customers and his daughter saying things to calm him down, but he continued with what he was doing. It felt almost intimate, kneeling next to someone like this. It felt like something you might do to a fallen child. Moving gently, Mick nestled the barrel of his gun in the soft spot just below the man's larynx. The Innkeeper could feel tears on his face, and he knew that was pretty bad. He realized that he was no longer aware of any voices around him, but he didn't know it that meant they had stopped trying to reach him, or merely that he had lost the ability to hear them. The young trucker's breathing was coming in short shallow gasps. Mick knew that it was time to either pull the trigger or say something, but he could not yet trust himself to speak clearly. From right next to him, he heard his wife's voice say "Michael, she's OK." And some other things. Some time after that, Mick understood that he was going to speak rather than pull the trigger. "You have two minutes," he said. A loud whisper was the best he could do, and he had to breathe deeply every few words to be able to continue. "Get out. You and your rig. Don't pay. Leave the knife." After another few seconds Mick realized that, although he had finished talking, he was still holding the gun to the man's throat. "You didn't mean it," he said. Was that something he had just heard his wife say? His thumb went up to feel the back of the gun as he started to get to his feet. With a small shock he felt that the lever had been cocked. He had done it unconsciously, giving the gun a hair-trigger. He uncocked and safed the weapon as he got back to his feet. He knew that, on principle, he shouldn't turn his back on someone whom he had just threatened. But he had seen the man's eyes, and knew that there was no real harm in him. Also, his wife would be standing guard with the shotgun, and all the other truckers were there to watch his back for him. Mostly he just didn't care, and it was time to get outside. He walked toward the kitchen feeling shaken, and very old. This is probably not the best thing in the world for business, Mick thought as he walked out. But he was wrong about that. His trucker customers came to the Wolverine Truck Stop for four reasons: a safe place to stay, a hot meal, a cold beer, and a good story. All of it was top-notch, just like the original Wolverine had been back before the Wars. But in a world with little radio and no TV, it was the stories more than anything that kept them coming back. Sometimes the stories would be tales that their fellow truckers would tell about strange things they had seen in their travels down long empty highways through devastated lands. Half of those might be outright fabrications no matter how the man would swear by them. Then again, maybe half of the tales that you wanted most to disbelieve really had happened out there in the wild lands. Sometimes the stories would be Mick's old half-remembered yarns by ancient writers that the truckers would never have heard of otherwise. Perhaps sometimes a man would drive all night until he saw the kerosene lamps of the Wolverine parking lot because he was burning so hot with his own tale that he wouldn't sleep until he had run into the big dining room and blurted it out to everybody still awake. And sometimes, like tonight, the stories might happen right in front of you and just a table away, right here at the Wolverine Truck Stop and Motor Lodge. You just couldn't ask for anything better than that. Out in back by the wood pile Mick felt the October wind blowing. He smelled the cooking fire from the kitchen and another load of ribs and roast vegetables for the truckers. Far to the West he saw another thunderstorm coming in. The full moon, rising behind him, lit the cloud banks with a silvery imitation of daylight even as the clouds lit themselves flickering from the inside with hidden lightning, too distant yet to be heard. He reflected on how the storms were coming so much later into the autumn than he remembered from his youth. Everything changes. And yet, when the wind blew oak leaves in a swirl over the wood pile and away toward the parking lot, Mick smelled Autumn: dry leaves, dry cornstalks rattling, pumpkins for Halloween, and Winter on its way. Just as it always had been, and would be. Jesus, he thought, why did everything have to work out this way? And have I done things right? Above the distant cloud banks, stars still twinkled. Going on midnight it was time to lock up and get to bed, but Mick found three truckers still in the dining room, wreathed in smoke. They were men he had known for years, stopping in once every couple months or so. Like most, they made their living moving around the country looking for customers who had freight that needed hauling and who could pay enough to make it worth their while. The big one, Bobby, pushed out a chair for him. "Hey Mick, I was just saying how I saw a glow one time just like in your story. About this time last year, outside of Seattle. I was stopped about twenty miles out, spending the night there, and it was the damnedest thing! This damn pink glow all over the bottom of the clouds out toward the city, and no moon at all that night. I don't know what it was, but I figured that was just about as close as I felt like getting. I was running solo, and I'll tell you what: I didn't sleep much for a couple nights. There were some pretty damn weird noises around those parts, and in the daytime nothing to be seen. Man, I'll tell you: I got out of there and I got no plans to go back. I'll tell you what I think: that whole place was so hot with radiation it was still glowing. You know they must've used nukes like crazy around there." "That would be the right place for it," Mick agreed. "That's where the old U.S. submarine pens were, and I don't know which side they came down on in the War. They could have gotten nuked. But still glowing from it? It seems like it must have just been fires." "Well," Bobby exhaled smoke, "I didn't smell nothing. And I sure can't see how there'd be any damn thing left to burn up around there. Every place I went through around there looked liked the damned Moon." Washington State west of the mountains, along with a lot of southern British Columbia had all gone up in one vast firestorm that took weeks to burn. But it had been too late in the war for reliable news, and no one knew how it had started or even which side the Navy base there had been on. The fact that it was on American soil increased the odds that it had stayed with the United States. On the other had, the long-time involvement of the Seattle area with the submarine fleet also made it seem possible that the area's allegiance had gone to Foreign Command. For a little bit everyone was thinking of their own War memories, then Mick broke it up. "You fellas aren't planning to go outside anymore? About time for me to lock up." He thought they might want to check their rigs one more time, but they declined. Here, for once in their travels around the wide country, their trucks were behind a good fence and with dogs to guard them. Tonight they wouldn't worry about anything except smoking the night away, and seeing who could scare everybody with the best tale. The nightly locking-up process was a ritual that Mick had perfected years before. It would start with a walk around the perimeter with the dogs: Blackie, Brownie, Banjo, and Mr. Chips. The big dogs loved this part; running ahead with their noses to the ground, then doubling back and doing it over and over again. Although Mick's walk was only a mile long around the Wolverine's forty cleared acres, the dogs would cover five times that distance without ever getting a hundred yards away from him. They would smell every trace of every smallest being that had passed the land's borders during the day, while Mick listened to whatever late night sounds he could hear above their pattering feet, and peer into the dark woods beyond the edges of the land. The dogs knew that it was their job to keep watch at night, and nothing bigger than a squirrel would come on to it without their knowledge. After watering the dogs for the night, Mick would take a quick walk around the Wolverine itself, checking all the doors and the window shutters from the outside, then in through the kitchen, bolting the heavy door behind him, to check that the fires in the stoves and dining room were safely low and screened.
Copyright © 1999 Michael Goulish |