“All right, Tom,” Charley said gently. “That’s enough for now, okay, Tom? We’re coming off the bridge. We’re in San Francisco. Right in the middle of town.”
“Hey, look at it!” Buffalo cried. “You ever see beautiful? All those white buildings. All those green trees. Just breathe the air. That air, it’s like wine, huh? Like wine. ”
Tamale said, “Were you serious, Choke? About an earthquake tomorrow afternoon, half past three?”
“Well, they can predict them, can’t they?” Choke said. “They can measure the earthquake gas coming out of the ground days and days before.”
“So you know for sure? There’s one tomorrow? What we doing here, then?”
“I don’t know shit about tomorrow,” Choke said. “I was only running my mouth, man. If there was an earthquake tomorrow, don’t you think everybody would be packed and out of town by now? Jesus Christ, Tamale, how can you be so dumb? I was only running my mouth.”
“Yeah,” Tamale said, with a little laugh. “Yeah. I knew that. I knew it, man.”
Tom sat quietly among them. The wonder of the visions still lay on his soul. Those marvelous unhuman cities, those noble beings moving about from place to place upon the faces of their amazing worlds. He thought of what he had said, that there was no such thing as an ugly city, not anywhere. He had never considered that point before, but it was true, and not just in the far galaxies. There was beauty everywhere in all places, in all things. Everything radiated the miracle of creation. San Francisco was beautiful, sure, but so were the desolate towns of the abandoned Valley behind them, the rusted crumbling wasteland towns, and so was everything else in the world, because everything had God’s hand in its design. Mujer was beautiful. Stidge was beautiful. Once you begin looking at things with eyes that have been opened, Tom told himself, you see only beauty wherever you turn.
“Pull up here,” Charley said. “We can park across the street, look around, ask some questions, find ourselves a place to stay. Rupe, you watch the van, you and Nicholas. We’ll be back ten, fifteen minutes, maybe. Tom, you stay close to me. Are you with us, Tom? You back on Earth, man?”
“I’m here,” Tom said.
“Good. You make sure you stay here a while, okay?” Charley grinned. “What do you think of San Francisco? Pretty city?”
“Very pretty,” Tom said. “The air. The trees.”
They headed up the street, scattering out, Buffalo going first with Choke right behind him, then Stidge and Tamale close together, Mujer near them, and Charley and Tom a little way back. It was important, Charley said, not to look like an invading gang. Sometimes the bandidos came in from the back country in gangs of ten or twenty to clean out the city, and they got into wars with the city vigilante commissions. Charley didn’t want that. “We’re just going to spend the summer here, keeping low, easy and cool, not attract any attention, okay? This is a good place to be, in the summer. And maybe when the rains begin we’ll go somewhere else, up north, maybe, or maybe down to San Diego. It’s nice and warm there, San Diego, in the winter.”
Tom stared. It was a long time since he had been in a city, a real city. Things looked old here, even ancient, all the small wooden buildings that seemed to come out of a vanished era when life had had certainty and stability. There was something very peaceful about San Francisco, very comforting. Perhaps it was the scale, everything so small and close together. Or perhaps it was the way everything looked old. The cities he had seen before were not anything like this, the ones in Washington, in Idaho, in the other places up north where he had been. Even the cities that had come to him in his visions were not like this.
One thing that particularly struck him were the hills. The hills here were astounding. Tom looked up and saw the tiny white buildings climbing the hills, and it was hard to believe that they would build on hills like that. Of course he had seen worlds where they built their houses on glass-sided mountains that went straight up to the sky, houses jutting out from the side like eagles’ nests, but that was on other worlds where everything was different, the air, the gravity. Some had no air at all. Maybe some had no gravity at all. There were all sorts of worlds. But this was the Earth and for a long time Tom had been living in places that were flat, and now he was in a city that seemed to be all peaks and valleys.
They moved warily to the end of the street and across. There wasn’t much traffic, a few old combustion cars and some ground-effect ones. The sky was a bright hard blue and the air was amazingly clear, sunlight bouncing almost visibly off the dazzling white facades. A cool dry wind, very sharp, was blowing from the west, where the ocean lay hidden from view by the hills.
Charley said, walking close by Tom’s side, “That was beautiful, you know, what you were telling us on the bridge. About those cities. Sometimes you can get a little crazy, but all the same you got a wonderful mind, Tom. The things you see. The things you tell us.”
“I know how lucky I am,” Tom said. “The bounty of God has been conferred on me.”
“I wish I saw a tenth the things you see. I do see them, you know. Some of them, anyway.” Charley’s voice was low, as it was sometimes when he didn’t want the other scratchers to overhear him. But they were all up ahead, halfway up the block. “I been dreaming, almost every night, fantastic dreams. Fantastic. You know I saw that blazing bright world, the one you told me about, where the Eye People live? I didn’t care to say while we were traveling. But I saw it just like you told it, that flood of light filling everything. And I saw another where there were two suns in the sky, a white one and a yellow, the damnedest shadows over everything and the sky all red.”
“The Fifth Zygerone World,” Tom said, nodding. “I thought you would. It comes through very strong.”
“You know their names and everything.”
“I’ve been seeing them practically all my life. Since I was small, when at first I thought everybody saw such things. It scared me, later, when I knew nobody else did. But I’m used to it now. And now others are seeing, too. And what I see, it gets clearer and clearer all the time.”
“You think I’m starting to see them because I’m traveling close to you? Can that be it?”
“That could be,” Tom said. “I don’t know. Am I the source? Or are we all having the visions all at once? Maybe the other worlds are breaking through to the whole human race now, and no longer just me. I don’t know.”
Charley said, “I think some of the others are having the dreams too but they don’t want to own it up. Choke, I think, and maybe Nicholas. Maybe everybody is. But they’re all afraid to talk about it. They look a little strange some mornings, but nobody says anything. They think they’ll be called crazy if they say they’re seeing the things you see. They think they’ll be made fun of. That’s the thing they hate most, these guys, being made fun of. Worse than being called crazy.”
“I don’t mind it. I’m used to it. Either one, being made fun of, being called crazy. Poor Tom. Poor crazy Tom. Sometimes it can be pretty safe, being crazy. Nobody wants to hurt a crazy man. But the things that poor crazy Tom sees are real. I know that, Charley. And one day the whole world will know too. When we’re called to the Crossing, I mean. When the skies open and we go forth unto the worlds of the Sacred Imperium.”
Charley smiled and shook his head. “Now that’s when I begin to feel funny about you, man, when you start talking like that. When you start to go on and on about—” He stopped in midstride. “You hear anything back there, Tom?”
“Hear what?”