That long walk was very strangely peaceful; we had none of us known each other well, even ten days before, and since then we had lost friends, lovers, our very worlds and realities, we four, and we had little to look forward to except solving a riddle posed by a machine, and yet we kept going as if we were four old friends out for a pleasant backpacking trip.
Albuquerque had been partly wrecked by flood and fire, but not looted; the further we walked into it, the more apparent it was that the people had vanished, and all the damage we saw was merely a case of things not being repaired. We found intact buildings next to burned ones, with useful and valuable stuff lying around; a city prone to flash floods, as its canals and sewers became blocked, had been partially washed away, but there was no plan to the damage. It was just as if everyone had walked away, a few decades ago, and left it to do this on its own.
After about forty minutes of wandering up and down residential streets, looking fruitlessly for a car with the keys in it, Terri said, “I have an idea.”
“That puts you ahead of the rest of us,” Jesús said.
“It might. I was just thinking, everything here looks like people just vanished, doesn’t it? And took nothing of any value with them?”
“Right.”
“So would they have taken their car keys?”
“Only if they were in their pockets,” Jesús said. “And besides, lots of people keep a spare in the house. This is a great idea, Terri. All we have to do is break into a house with a car we want in the driveway.”
Half a block later we found a suitable-looking Jeep with low miles and Telkes batteries, parked under a carport. We went around back to minimize visibility, in case someone hunting for us should be not far behind, and found a dog skeleton still chained to an overhead wire. “Poor thing,” Terri said, “don’t you just bet he starved or died of thirst?”
That cast kind of a pall over things, but in a minute we had discovered that there was no lock on the tool shed, and a perfectly fine crowbar was in there. With a little effort, the back door opened, and we were inside.
Not a thing had been touched; everything looked as if the owners had just planned to be gone for a few minutes. We scattered through the house to look for the keys; a moment later I heard Jesús swear, and ran to see what he’d found.
There was a desiccated cat on the floor, clearly mummified in the dry indoors, but that wasn’t it. Near the cat was a crib, and in the crib there was a scattered tumble of bones. “You see?” Jesús said. “They must have vanished with no time at all. They left their baby behind. And then after a while, the cat was hungry, the baby had probably already starved ...” He shuddered and crossed himself.
“What did you find?” Paula said, cheerfully, from the hallway.
“Something we’d rather not have seen,” I said. “There’s a corpse of a baby in here.” I looked around further and said, “And two plugged-in VR headsets on the bed. As if the people wearing them just vanished.”
Paula came in anyway, and, practical sort that she was, got a towel from the bathroom and made a makeshift shroud for the little pile of bones. “We can bury it in the backyard,” she suggested to Jesús.
Shortly Jesús and I were digging a small grave in back, in the hot desert sun, working our way through the hardpan soil. While we were doing that Terri came out to let us know that they had discovered a fairly large supply of soda in the basement, and a much larger supply of wine—”and the car keys,” she said. “On the worktable in the garage. We didn’t even have to come into the house to find them, if we’d known.”
By the time we had buried the little body, and put the birth certificate that we had found in the desk into a freezer bag under a rock on top of the grave, it was getting later in the evening, and we decided to stick around, have a dinner of canned vegetables and wine, and get started in the morning.
“The clue to it all, I think, if I could sort it out,” I said, “is the headsets on the bed. VR connect time is incredibly expensive everywhere, even today. And that VR box that they have is stamped with a US government insignia and says it was issued by the Department of the Pursuit of Happiness.”
“We’ve seen people appear and disappear, while talking on the phone,” Jesús pointed out. “And VR goes through the same quantum compression and decompression as the phone does.”
“But usually what people do is trade places between universes,” Paula pointed out. “How come no one traded in for these people?”
None of us could think of anything. Nobody wanted to sleep in the master bedroom, where we’d found the body, but there were two kids’ beds in other rooms, a guest bed, and the couch. Feeling noble, I took the couch, and fell asleep at once. It made two good nights’ sleep in a row, which left me feeling practically human.
The next morning we discovered, in the fridge, an unopened gallon of irradiated milk. Sure enough, it was still perfectly drinkable, though of course it had separated; there were also unopened packets of cereal, also irradiated and therefore not spoiled, though they had managed to become very dry. We all had two or three bowls of cereal and a large glass of milk. “Breakfast of seven-year-olds,” I said, “and look at how much energy they have.”
Just as we were getting up from the table—something about the niceness of the place made us stack our dishes in the nonfunctioning sink—Paula looked up over my shoulder, stared, and said, “Oh, shit.”
“Oh shit what?”
“This place has a silent alarm, people.” She pointed at a box on the wall where a little red light pulsed like a tiny, evil heart. “See? It says the alarm was activated.” She got up, walked over to it, and looked at the readout. “All the while we’ve been asleep, the house has been phoning for help. We can hope it’s been dialing a number that isn’t hooked to anything, but I don’t think we can count on it. Grab your stuff and run to the car—we’ve got to move.”
We were out the door and the Jeep was rolling, two minutes later. “How can whoever picks up that alarm be sure it isn’t an animal opening the door, or the door just falling down after all these years, or something?” Terri asked.
“They can’t be, but if they’ve got the resources to send, what, twenty people or so after us, so far, into this place, they probably can check out all the alarms eventually,” Paula said, making her third U-turn in ten minutes. She was jigging around, trying to find a way through a city of fallen bridges and washed-out roads. “We’ll just have to do what we can.”
Though it took hours to find our way through the ruins of Albuquerque, with so many bridges down, once we found a way back to I-25 it was just a bare hour to reach Santa Fe. We expected to be shot at, at any moment, or the car to die and leave us halfway between, but neither happened. “Here we are,” I said, pulling off the highway and heading into town, “and to judge by the number of signs telling us where to find the Department of the Pursuit of Happiness, we’ll probably find it pretty soon. That will put an end to one part of the adventure, and start another. Anyone have any profound thoughts?”
“I wish we’d never come,” Terri said, tears in her voice, speaking better for me than I had for myself.
The Department of the Pursuit of Happiness turned out to be on the old town square, facing the cathedral; it was a huge building and though forty years or more had gone by, it was conspicuously newer and in better shape than anything around it. It was huge, square, and forbidding, taking up at least one whole city block and reaching at least ten stories into the sky— we had seen it from the highway without knowing what it was.