(What are all those dead hunks of metal there? All piled up?) (Cars, Fred.) (I thought cars moved.) (They did, once.)
(They all went there to die?)
(They were dead when they got there, probably.)
(But they've all climbed on top of each other! When they were dead?) (No, Fred. They have machines—)
(What was that? There are three — I don't know who those were, but they have them shut up in a box hanging from that long thing.)
(No one you know, Fred. That was a traffic light.)
(It was emitting— Look, he's trying to say something! Hello! Hello!)
(Fred, you're flashing! Calm down or someone'll sec you!)
(Well, I don't know what a nice guy like him was doing in a place like that)
Nita sighed out loud, "Where were we?" she said to Kit.
"The battery."
"Right. Well, here it is."
'Lithium-cadmium?"
Right. Heavy thing, it weighs more than anything else we've got That's last thing for activating the piece of time, isn't it?" more. The eight and a half sugar cubes."
Nita held up a little plastic bag. Now the worldgate stuff. The pine cone—"
(<Bristlecone pine." Nita held it up, then dropped it in her backpack. aspirin." huh."
"The fork."
"Here."
"The rowan branch."
"Yup." She held it up. Cut down and peeled, it was about a foot long, a greenish-white wand.
"Great. Then we're set, You've got all that other stuff, why don't you give me the battery?" "Here." Nita handed it to him, watched as he found a good spot for it in his backpack, under the sandwiches. "What's that?" she said, spotting some-thing that hadn't been accounted for in the equipment tally.
"Huh? Oh, this." He reached in and brought out a slim piece of metal like a slender rod, with a small knob at one end and broken off jaggedly at the other. "What is it?"
"A piece of junk. A busted-off car antenna. Well," Kit amended, "it was, anyway. I was sitting out behind the garage yesterday afternoon, reading, and I started talking to my dad's old car. He has this ancient Edsel. He's always talking about getting it reconditioned, but I don't think he's really going to— there's never enough money. Anyway he goes out every now and then to work on the engine, usually when he's tired or mad about something. I don't know if he ever really gets any work done, but he always comes inside greasy all over and feeling a lot better. But I was going over the spells in my head, and the car spoke to me in the Speech—" "Out loud?"
"No, inside, like Fred does. Kind of a grindy noise, like its voice needed a lube job. I wasn't too surprised; that kind of thing has been happening since I picked the book up. First it was rocks, and then things started to talk to me when I picked them up. They would tell me where they'd been and who'd handled them. Anyway, the car and I started talking " Kit paused, looking a touch guilty. "They don't see things the way we do. We made them, and they don't understand why most of the time we make things and then just let them wear out and throw them away afterward… " Nita nodded, wondering briefly whether the train was alive too. Certainly it was as complex as a car. "What about this antenna thing, though?" she said after a moment.
"Oh. The car said to take it for luck. It was just lying there on the ground, rusting. Dad replaced the antenna a long time ago. So I took it inside and cleaned it up, and there are some wizardries you can do with metal, to remind it of the different forces it felt when it was being made. I did a couple of those. Partly just practicing, partly…"
"You thought there might be trouble," Nita said.
Kit looked at her, surprised. "I don't know," he said. "I'm going to be reful anyway. Carl was pretty definite about not messing around with the nrldeate; I wasn't thinking about anything like that. But it occurred to me ,1 t jt'j be easy to carry the antenna to school if I wanted to. And if anyone started bothering me—" He shrugged, then laughed. "Well, that's their oroblem. Hey, look, we're getting close to that big curve where you can see the city before you go under the river. Come on, these trains have a window in the very front of the first car. Fred! Want to see where we're going?" (Why not? Maybe I'll understand it better than where we've been. -.) Kit and Nita wriggled into their backpacks and made their way up through a couple of cars, hanging on carefully as they crossed the chained walkways between them. Treetops and housetops flashed by in a rush of wind and clatter of rails. Each time Nita touched the bare metal of the outside of the train, she jumped a little, feeling something, she wasn't quite sure what. The train? she thought. Thinking? And now that I'm aware that it does, I can feel it a little?—though not as clearly as the trees. Maybe my specialty is going to be things that grow and Kit's is going to be things that run. But how many other kinds of life are there that I could learn to feel? Who knows where thought is hiding?… They went into the first car and made their way up to the front window, carefully hanging on to the seats of oblivious riders to keep the swaying of the train from knocking them over. There were no more stops between there and Penn Station, and the train was plunging along, the rails roaring beneath it. Those rails climbed gradually as the already elevated track went higher still to avoid a triple-stacked freeway. Then the rails bent away to the left in a long graceful curve, still climbing slightly; and little by little, over the low brown cityscape of Brooklyn, the towers of Manhattan rose glittering in the early sunlight. Gray and crystal for the Empire State Building, silver-blue for the odd sheared- off Citibank building, silver-gold for the twin square pillars of the World Trade Center, and steely white fire for the scalloped tower of the Chrysler Building as it caught the Sun.
The place looked magical enough in (ne bright morning. Nita grinned to herself, looking at the view and realizing that there was magic there. That forest of towers opened onto other worlds. Une day she would open that worldgate by herself and go somewhere. Fred stared at the towers, amazed. (This is more life? More even than the place where you two live?)
(Ten million lives in the city, Fred. Maybe four or five million on that lsland alone.) I Doesn't it worry you, packing all that life together? What if a meteor hits What if there's a starflare? If something should happen to all that life— ho* terrible!) v, /
,. to laughed to herself. (It doesn't seem to worry them… .)Beside her, Was hanging on to a seat, being rocked back and forth by the train's speed. Very faintly Nita could hear what Kit heard and felt more strongly; the train's aliveness, its wild rushing joy at doing what it was made to do — its dangerous pleasure in its speed, the wind it fought with, the rails it rode. Nita shook her head in happy wonder. And I wanted to see the life on other planets. There's more life in this world than I expected…
(It's beautiful,) Fred said from his vantage point just above Kit's shoulder.
"It really is," Nita said, very quiet.
The train howled defiant joy and plunged into the darkness under the river. Penn Station was thick with people when they got there, but even so it took them only a few minutes to get down to the Seventh Avenue Subway station and from there up to Times Square and the shuttle to Grand Central. The shuttle ride was short and crowded. Nita and Kit and Fred were packed tight together in a corner, where they braced themselves against walls and seats and other people while the train shouted along through the echoing underground darkness. (I can't feel the Sun,) Fred said, sounding worried.