“Not in my world,” I said. “They found a bunch of cases of it in a basement in Sydney, and got it analyzed. But anyway, whatever it might be worth financially, here it’s a lifesaver. Calories, liquid, and a wake-up drug—exactly what we need.”
The rusty caps broke rather than bent when we pried at them, and the liquid inside foamed up violently and then was instantly flat, but it was recognizably Coke, and I don’t think I’ve ever had anything better to drink than three warm Cokes in the back of the old Merriman’s Drugs.
“Well, there’ll be daylight enough if we leave now,” Paula pointed out, “and plenty to live off in this town if we spend the night here. Maybe we should do a little scouting.”
We found seven Telkes-battery trucks and cars, and taking a guess, picked the newest one. It took a crowbar to get under the hood, but we were rewarded by the wail of an alarm siren, which told us it still had power; unfortunately its motor seemed to be rusted solid. A few minutes later we had the set of three batteries out of it; each weighed about twenty pounds and would fit in one of the backpacks that Terri had scrounged from a Sears catalog store. The note attached to the packs said they were being held for pickup for a Mr. Wobbeck, along with an old-style fedora and a gray raincoat. We didn’t figure he’d be coming by for them.
Jesús, Esmé, and I agreed to carry batteries; Paula came along because she was the only one of us, so far, that could drive the Chevy van, but she was much too small to carry a Telkes battery in a pack for four miles. We each took along a couple of Cokes, and it’s amazing the difference that it makes to know that you can have a drink if you need one—we got back to the van in just about an hour and ten minutes.
Neither Jesús nor Esmé was much of a talker, and Paula was just tired enough not to start, so I was left alone with my thoughts—which were mostly about Helen. Seeing her dead had been a horrible shock, and yet I couldn’t associate the tough intelligence agent with whom I’d spent the last few days with the gentle, shy woman I was engaged to. I didn’t know if all the versions of her, all the tough versions of her, or just that one version of her were currently dead, and until I was released from this mission and picked up a phone, I wasn’t going to find out.
The hot road surface gnawed at the soles of my feet, and I moved over onto the gravel shoulder to give them a chance to cool. My feet and legs were going to be a mess tomorrow; I really hoped the Chevy van would hold up all the way to Santa Fe.
Did I want to get back to my old life, and to Helen? I was a scientist. I depended on information interchange. Unhook me from the networks, make me communicate by slow means or not at all, and there just wasn’t much I could do; so if I resumed my old life and job, I would be crossing over again. For that matter, I liked driving land vehicles well enough, but I thought very few, if any, of the worlds out there would tolerate my operating and navigating any kind of aircraft, ballistic ship, or orbital craft entirely by hand.
So even if I got back to Helen, I couldn’t go back to my old way of life without risking, every day and all the time, slipping away from her again. And unlike Iphwin, I couldn’t roll the dice so fast and often that sooner or later I got a roll I liked; no, if I got stuck in a bad world, I would be stuck for a while, and it would be a struggle to get out.
First conclusion, then: even if I found a way back to the Helen I had known, and it was likely to be very difficult and take a long time to do that, I had no guarantee that I would remain in that world with her for very long. Even if I didn’t wander off during a phone call, net connect, or plane flight, it could just as easily happen to Helen—and we could hardly arrange our lives to always be on the same connection and in the same vehicle.
Nor could I imagine being permanently unhooked from all communication. That might have worked for a caveman or medieval peasant, but I was a creature of the modern world and just a few days of being off the net and out of the loop was already driving me crazy.
Second conclusion: getting the Helen I knew, loved, and wanted back was going to be barrels of work for a very uncertain result.
We topped a rise and looked southward; from this particular spot we could just make out the little dot of the van, still at some distance. Sweat was pouring down our faces—those batteries got heavier somehow, after a couple of miles—and we were all glad enough to stop and drink our Cokes.
“I sure hope we can find beds tonight,” Esmé said, “because I really want some rest. Hard to believe we stood that watch down in Mexico, early this morning, eh, Lyle?”
“I’m not sure I believe anything much, right now,” I said.
“I still don’t believe the Colonel is gone, after all these years,” Paula said, “and I can’t imagine what you must be feeling about Helen, Lyle.”
“Neither can I, actually,” I said, telling the truth.
After a quick break to go behind a rock and pee, we continued our hike along the old highway, still mostly silent. We’d seen no trace of any attacker since El Paso. I scanned the hills but not very diligently.
Truth to tell, much as I had liked Helen, the Helen I had known—or the Helens, I reminded myself, since what I had known must have been a few hundred or thousand generally similar but subtly different versions of her—had fit very conveniently into my dull, steady life, and I was getting a sinking feeling that I just couldn’t count on a dull, steady life anymore. I was starting to feel vulnerable because of skills and attitudes I lacked; I needed to be a more adroit mechanic with more devices, I needed to be better with weapons, I needed to speak more languages, most of all I needed more poise in the face of uncertainty, because I now knew that anything and everything could drop out from under me at any moment.
To the extent that there had been any trouble of any kind in the life Helen and I had shared—and “trouble” was too strong a word, it had been more like occasional mild stress—I had been the one in charge of handling it and she had more or less sat there and let me handle it. Now that I knew how dangerous the world was—or the worlds were—I didn’t feel up to the job of protecting someone else, in exchange for not being lonely and getting some quiet affection. I hadn’t liked the hard, aggressive version of Helen much, but I had to admit she was better suited for the way things worked.
And another part of me just missed her terribly—any version of Helen would have been better than the great aching void I felt now—and wanted to be done with all the adventures, and back in a safe world where nothing ever happened. I recognized the signs of impending self-pity, and concentrated, instead, on watching the landscape for any possible ambush. None showed up.
With four of us to do the job, it only took a few minutes to get the “new” Telkes batteries into the Chevy van. It started right up, and we were almost air-conditioned into comfort by the time we pulled into Radium Springs.
Terri flagged us down and pointed us into a parking lot. “We’ve been busy,” she said cheerfully, after we rolled to a stop. We were in the parking lot of the Honeymoon Motel, a place that I suspected had been more than a hotel when last occupied. “We have the other batteries out and stacked in the lobby, so we ought to have enough cruising range to get to Santa Fe tomorrow. We’ve got five crates of Coke, and some dehydrated food from an outdoor supply store. And it turns out this place has a well, a roof tank, and electric hot water. The hardware store had an inverter, and Iphwin’s got two Telkes batteries set up to power the pumps. We’re filling the water tank on the roof right now, and we’ll have hot and cold running water tonight. Plus there were no dead people and no rats or snakes in here, and there’s beds for everybody.”