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The sun began to climb, and still they moved forward, scraping their fenders against the edges of the wrecks, using their wings like plows. They were on the bridge for three hours before its end came into sight through a rift in the junkstacks.
When their wheels finally touched the opposite shore, Greg sat there breathing heavily and then lit a cigarette.
"You want to drive awhile. Hell?"
"Yeah. Let's switch over."
He did, and, "God! I'm bushed!" he said as he sprawled out.
Ta
It took him hours, and as the sun fell at his back he saw the blue aurora begin once more in the north. But the sky stayed clear, filled with its stars, and there were no black lines that he could see. After a long while, a rosecolored moon appeared and hung before him. He turned on the music, softly, and glanced at Greg. It didn't seem to bother him, so he let it continue.The instrument panel caught his eye. The radiation level was still climbing. Then, in the forward screen, be saw the crater and he stopped.
It must have been over half a mile across, and he couldn't tell its depth.
He fired a flare, and in its light he used the telescopic lenses to examine it to the right and to the left.
The way seemed smoother to the right, and he turned in that direction and began to negotiate it.
The place was hot! So very, very hot! He hurried. And he wondered as he sped, the gauge rising before him: What had it been like on that day. Whenever? That day when a tiny sun had lain upon this spot and fought with, and for a time beaten, the brightness of the other in the sky, before it sank slowly into its sudden burrow? He tried to imagine it, succeeded, then tried to put it out of his mind and couldn't. How do you put out the fires that burn forever? He wished that he knew. There'd been so many places to go then, and he liked to move around.
What had it been like in the old days, when a man could just jump on his bike and cut out for a new town whenever he wanted? And nobody emptying buckets of crap on you from out of the sky? He felt cheated, which was not a new feeling for him, but it made him curse even longer than usual.
He lit a cigarette when he'd finally rounded the crater, and he smiled for the first time in months as the radiation gauge began to fall once more. Before many miles, be saw tall grasses swaying about him, and not too long after that he began to see trees.
Trees short and twisted, at first, but the further he fled from the place of carnage, the taller and straighter they became. They were trees such as he had never seen before —fifty, sixty feet in height—and graceful, and gathering stars, there on the plains of Illinois.
He was moving along a clean, hard, wide road, and just then he wanted to travel it forever—to Floridee, of the swamps and Spanish moss and citrus groves and fine beaches and the Gulf; and up to the cold, rocky Cape, where everything is gray and brown and the waves break below the lighthouses and the salt burns in your nose and there are graveyards where bones have lain for centuries and you can still read the names they bore, chiseled there into the stones above them; down through the nationwhere they say the grass is blue; then follow the mighty Missus Hip to the place where she spreads and comes and there's the Gulf again, full of little islands where the old boosters stashed their loot; and through the shagtopped mountains he'd heard about: the Smokies, Ozarks, Poconos, Catskills; drive through the forest of Shenandoah; park, and take a boat out over Chesapeake Bay; see the big lakes and the place where the water falls, Niagara. To drive forever along the big road, to see everything, to eat the world. Yes. Maybe it wasn't all Damnation Alley. Some of the legendary places must still be clean, like the countryside about him now. He wanted it with a hunger, with a fire like that which always burned in his loins. He laughed then, just one short, sharp bark, because now it seemed like maybe he could have it.
The music played softly, too sweetly perhaps, and it filled him.
By morning he was into the place called Indiana and still following the road. He passed farmhouses which seemed in good repair. There could even be people living in them. He longed to investigate, but he didn't dare to stop. Then after an hour, it was all countryside again, and degenerating.
The grasses grew shorter, shriveled, were gone. An occasional twisted tree clung to the bare earth. The radiation level began to rise once more. The signs told him he was nearing Indianapolis, which he guessed was a big city that had received a bomb and was now gone away.
Nor was he mistaken.
He had to detour far to the south to get around it, backtracking to a place called Martinsville in order to cross over the White River. Then as he headed east once more, his radio crackled and came to life. There was a faint voice, repeating, "Unidentified vehicle, halt!" and he switched all the sca
He was hitting forty miles an hour along a halfway decent section of roadway, and he gradually increased his speed to fifty-five, though the protesting of his tires uponthe cracked pavement was sufficient to awaken Greg.
Ta
He touched the brake as he rounded a long curve, and he did not reply to Greg's "What's the matter?"
When he saw it there, blocking the way, ready to fire, he acted instantly.
The tank filled the road, and its big gun was pointed directly at him, As his eye sought for and found passage around it, his right hand slapped the switches that sent three armorpiercing rockets screaming ahead and his left spun the wheel counter-clockwise and his foot fell heavy on the accelerator.
He was half off the road then, bouncing along the ditch at its side, when the tank discharged one fiery belch which missed him and then caved in upon itself and blossomed.
There came the sound of rifle fire as he pulled back onto the road on the other side of the tank and sped ahead. Greg launched a single grenade to the right and the left and then hit the fifty calibers. They tore on ahead, and after about a quarter of a mile Ta
As soon as they reached a level plain, commanding a good view in all directions. Ta
"Where do you think they got hold of that armor?"
"Who knows?"
"And why stop us?"
"They didn't know what we were carrying—and maybe they just wanted the car."
"Blasting, it's a helluva way to get it."
"If they can't have it, why should they let us keep it?"
"You know just how they think, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Have a cigarette."
Ta
"It's been pretty bad, you know?"
"I can't argue with that."
"... And we've still got a long way to go.""Yeah, so let's get rolling."
"You said before that you didn't think we'd make it"
"I've revised nay opinion. Now I think we will."
"After all we've been through?"
"After all we've been through."
"What more do we have to fight with?"
"I don't know all that yet."
"But on the other hand. we know everything there is behind us. We know how to avoid a lot of it now."