CHAPTER ELEVEN

"… The Lumber of the World"

Sherrine watched the brown, sere grasslands of Wisconsin slide past the windows of the van. It seemed as if she had spent half her life in Bob's vehicle. First, the drive to Fargo; now this. The gentle shaking of the suspension; the lullaby hum of the tires. And another two days out of her life.

Bruce and Mike had flown to Chicago. She could have gone with them. There were still flights from Minneapolis to Chicago every Monday, Wednesday and Friday; and the ticket prices were not completely out of her range. But…

She turned and looked into the back, where Alex and Gordon lay on air mattresses, practicing their yoga under Steve's guidance. Flying the Angels on a commercial flight would be risky. Eye-catching. Two gaunt, skinny beanpoles who couldn't walk… Bob had suggested splitting them up to make them less conspicuous, but Gordon had gone into a panic at the idea and Alex had said no, definitely not, out of the question. Sherrine wondered at that. The Angels hadn't seemed to be on friendly terms.

At least they were speaking to each other again. But Gordon tended to slip into morose silences that needed all of Steve's cheery prodding to dissipate. Alex was no help there. Gordon's silences seemed to disgust him. There was a hardness to Alex, a kind of intolerance for failure that was almost Darwinian.

She turned forward and resumed her study of the dreary Wisconsin countryside. Oh, well. At least this time she got to sit in the shotgun seat; and the van was not quite so crowded. Just Steve and the Angels and Thor and Fang. And the running motor kept them warm.

Wooden rail fences topped by barbed wire paralleled both sides of the two-lane blacktop road. Beyond the fences, a jumble of kames, eskers, and moraines; and nine thousand lakes strewn carelessly behind by yesteryear's glaciers; soon to be gathered and scoured by today's. Sparse, wilted grass sagged against the rolling dells of farm pastures. A corporal's guard of bony cattle, rib-bound and yellow-faced, chewed with half a heart. Someone had brought in a strain of Highland cattle, more ox than cow, hairy like the yak, with huge horns. Their fur gave them advantages, but they didn't look happy either. Their hooves kicked up dust from the bare spots. Her eyes locked with one; and they stared at each other, human to bovine, until the van had rolled past.

The road was draftsman straight. The rural roads of Wisconsin had been laid out by a maniac armed with T squares and straight edges. It stretched toward the vanishing point on the horizon, where it converged with the fence lines on either side. Sherrine had the sudden, disorienting notion that it was the road that was fenced in, and they drove along a long, thin, blacktopped pasture.

A weathered sign dangled at the roadside. JUNCTION, COUNTY ROADS F AND CC. Wisconsin county roads bore letters. A, B, C; AA, BB, CC. Steve had joked that if they found Route KKK he'd just as soon turn back.

They came on the intersection, right-angled as she had known it would be, and Bob spun the wheel and they turned right, leaving the Interstate farther behind.

It made sense to assume that the Interstate Highways out of Minneapolis would be watched; sure it made sense to take back roads. But she was tired of watching the richest dairylands in the world turning into desert; she was tired of watching patiently starving milch cows convert the last of the northern prairie into cow pats and methane. Every year, more and more water was locked into the Ice. The prairie lands at the foot of the glaciers were becoming scrub desert. Like West Texas, only cold.

"Cornish game hens," Fang said suddenly.

Her head came up. "What?"

"Alex! How about Cornish game hens? For the ship. They're small, but they're great eating."

The Angel grunted. "They sound delicious."

"They taste like chicken."

Sherrine heard the wistful humor in the older man's voice. "I'm sure they do."

"Say, Alex," said Thor. "Don't just take female animals up with you. Take pregnant female animals. Embryos don't weigh anything and you get two critters for the mass of one."

Bob braked suddenly and Sherrine jerked into her harness and then bounced against the headrest. Steve, who had been sitting lotus-fashion in the back, caught himself on the back of her seat. "What the hell?"

"What happened?" asked Alex.

Sherrine turned. "Are you guys all right?"

"I'm sorry," said Bob. "The bridge is out."

Sherrine followed his finger. The road bed crossed a crumbling concrete slab. Holes gaped in the paving and corroded reinforcing bars showed through. The bridge abutments looked as if they had come loose from the earth embankment. Off to the left the dirt had been chewed into muddy ruts by truck tires. Matching ruts corrugated the farther bank. "Doesn't look like anyone has used that bridge for a while," Sherrine said.

Bob hopped from the van and walked to the edge of the creek bank. "Ford over here. Doesn't look deep."

Sherrine left the van and joined Bob at the bridge. Where was the county road crew? How bad had the infrastructure gone that they hadn't had the time or resources to fix this bridge? She ran her glove along the crumbling masonry. Not for a long time.

Thor and Fang joined them.

"I think the van can make it across," Bob said.

Fang walked out onto the bridge span. "Slab bridge," he commented. He crouched with his hands on his knees peering at the cracks and holes. Then he jumped across one gaping hole to the other side, and Sherrine held her breath, afraid that he might fall through.

Thor said, "It looks bombed. Maybe we've driven into a war?"

"No. Spalling," Fang called back. "Worst case of spalling I ever saw."

"What causes it?"

"Water and salt get down cracks in the concrete. The salt corrodes the steel reinforcing rods. Then the water freezes and expands. Concrete chunks pop right out of the road surface."

And the freezing season has grown a lot longer, Sherrine thought, and they salt the roads a lot more.

Fang danced back to the bank where Thor waited. "So what do we do?" asked Thor. Fang looked at Bob.

Bob said, "Drive across the ford."

Fang ran one of his outsize fingers along his nose. "Maybe. But if we try to cross and get stuck, we won't be up the creek, we'll be in it."

Bob worked his lips; then he sighed. "Yeah, you're right. Jesus, can you imagine being stuck out here in, the middle of nowhere? It's so empty. I haven't seen a soul for the last score of miles."

"Don't you believe it," said Thor. "There were eyes in every one of those farmhouses watching us as we went past. They don't like or trust strangers out here. If you ain't white and Protestant, you ain't shit. Sorry, Steve."

Stephen Mews was standing by the opened side door of the van. He shrugged. "It isn't exactly news to me."

Sherrine waited, shivering. It was worse than that. This was Proxmire country. These were the people who had elected and reelected the nation's premier technophobe to the Senate, where he could give his Golden Fleece Award every month to some especially vulnerable example of scientific research.

Most of the targets he had drawn bead on had cost less than a single Washington bureaucrat. So how would these people react to a band of technophiles travelling in their midst? The Senator had always voted for dairy price supports. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. She supposed that if she had been a Wisconsin farmer she might have voted for him, too. Farm subsidies never won the Golden Fleece.

Bob nodded. "Okay. We'll look for a detour. Maybe the next road over goes across." He patted his jacket. "At least we can't get lost while we have the transponder. We know which way we want to go. It's just a matter of finding a road that will cooperate."