The friends were ready again to take on anything that moved — other than swarms of killer bees.

Krysty stood in the passage, waiting for them. "Doc's woken up," she said. But the look on her face made it patently clear that this wasn't necessarily good news.

"But?"

"See for yourself, lover."

The old man lay on his back, boots stacked side by side on the floor, the sheet pulled up under his chin. With his hands folded on his chest, he looked like the carved figure of a crusader in an ancient church memorial.

Ryan perched on the end of the bed, the other three behind him. "Hi," he said.

Pale blue eyes turned slowly toward him. "Good day to you."

"Know who I am?"

"I fear not."

"Know where you are?"

"Some hospital for the poor and needy?"

"Do you know what the year is?" Krysty asked.

"Of course. It's 1896."

Krysty nodded. "Right on."

Doc made an effort to sit up, then relaxed and lay back on the double pillows. "Please, will one of you take a message to my dear wife? She will be so worried at my absence."

"Absence?" Ryan queried.

"I've been away from home for... let me see. It must be very close to two hundred years now, and she will be beginning to become concerned about it. Do you not think?"

Ryan kept his face schooled not to show his deep worry. "We'll do what we can. I didn't catch your name, I'm afraid." He'd fallen into the older man's old-fashioned and stilted way of speech.

"Theophilus Algernon Tanner. Doctor of Science at Harvard. Doctor of Philosophy at the English university of Oxford. A pleasure to meet you. Pray forgive my not rising."

"Course. Can we get you anything to eat, Doc? Drink?"

"Thank you. A glass of water, and perhaps a Bath Oliver, if you have such a thing."

Ryan nodded, hiding his total ignorance of what Doc wanted to eat. "Sure. Listen, me and the others have to talk some. Then we're going out for a kind of... of a walk. The nurses have all gone home so you better come with us."

"Delighted, my dear fellow. And you won't forget to inform my sweet Emily of my temporary indisposition, will you? My card is in my waistcoat."

"Everyone ready now? I'll just trigger the main doors for a few inches. Jak, get down and have a look under it. See anything you don't like... just say 'close,' and we'll shut it again. We don't need any more of those bastard bees. I can still feel the stings in me."

The boy lay down, his newly washed white hair spreading out on the concrete like spilled foam. Ryan punched in the number code and threw the green lever up. Almost immediately he returned it to a central position to stop the sec door about eighteen inches from the floor. Jak took his time, looking all around outside. "Nothing," he said finally.

"Nothing?"

"Fucking big trees. Fucking hot. Nothing."

Cautiously Ryan allowed the arma-door to slide all the way up.

The heat swept into the redoubt like a tumbling wave, carrying with it an overwhelming smell ofgreen.

The entrance was set back into a hillside, behind what had once been a turning area for large military wags. But that was now a plateau of solid, waving grass, speckled with clusters of the most colorful flowers Ryan had ever seen. Crimsons, golds, purples and vivid yellows seemed even brighter against the swaying emerald backdrop.

"Paradise," Krysty murmured, shaking her head in admiration and wonderment.

Beyond the flowery carpet they could see the tops of luxuriant trees, some of them resembling monstrously big palms. The air was heavy with moist scents and languorous perfumes from the flowers, some of them verging on the sickly.

"Got be Hawaii, or someplace in the Pacific," Ryan said. "Seen an old sec vid about Hawaii. Called Fiftyit was. Weird name."

"I think Hawaii had big mountains," Krysty offered doubtfully. "This looks like it's too flat to be Hawaii."

"Africa," J.B. suggested. "Or India. I've seen pics of jungles looking like this."

"Tell you one thing," Ryan said. "This surely isn't any place in Deathlands."

Doc was wandering around in small circles, head up, staring at the vivid pink clouds that scarred the orange sky. "Red sky in the morning, then shepherds take warning," he said, looking around at the florid walls of the tropical jungle. "Here be tygers, I fear. We must exercise care."

J.B. had taken the tiny microsextant from a pocket and was busily shooting the sun, checking his data on a comp-table of locations. He checked again. And again.

"Hawaii?" Ryan asked. The Armorer shook his head.

"Africa? Or India?" Krysty probed.

J.B. shook his head. "No. It's... According to this, we're in the middle of what was Minnesota."

Doc Tanner began to laugh.

Chapter Nine

Ryan carefully closed the door into the redoubt. His knowledge of prenuke America wasn't vast, but there were still enough old books to be found around the Deathlands for him to be certain of one thing — Minnesota hadn't been a state that was filled with a wild profusion of tropical plants set amid a luxuriant forest.

J.B. had checked his sextant a fourth time, then a fifth time and had shown the reading to anyone who would look at it. "Yeah, Ryan," he finally admitted. "It's Minnesota. North, right up close to where the border with Canada used to be. But it's not supposed to be like this. It's supposed to be..."

"Bleak," Krysty concluded. "And look at these flowers."

"And that butterfly," Doc said, reviving his interest for a moment. "It must be the size of a soup plate." The insect's wings were a good two feet across, and fluttered lazily in the afternoon sunshine. Two tips trailed from the back of the orange-and-brown-dappled wings.

"Giant Yellow Swallowtail," the old man said admiringly. "Habitat's all over South America, right up to Mexico and into Texas. But the suggestion that such a beautiful creature could survive as far north as Minnesota is obviously absurd. Therefore we are not in Minnesota. Quod erat demonstrandum."He smirked in a foxy way at the others. "Which means that which was to be proved."

"Great, Doc," Ryan said. "So we're in Minnesota, but we're not in Minnesota."

"Who gives fuck?" Jak asked. "We going look around, or not?"

"Okay," Ryan agreed, "let's go."

As they moved away from the entrance and down through the clinging vegetation, they saw that the hill was very short. Effectively the whole place was set in a shallow bowl of similar low mountains, making a flat-bottomed valley. Ryan guessed that it was this particular sheltered formation that kept the air so still and warm. But it didn't explain how such rare tropical trees and flowers came to be in Minnesota.

At the back of Ryan's mind, though he hadn't mentioned it to any of the others, was Rick Ginsberg's information about other freezie centers. One was near Big Bend, down in south Texas, and the other was somewhere close to the old city of Duluth, in northern Minnesota.

One of Krysty's areas of specialized knowledge was botany. In her birthplace of Harmony there had been a number of men and women with arcane skills. Dulcie Harrison had encouraged the flame-haired young girl to read in the ville's surprisingly extensive library on all aspects of horticulture and agriculture, pointing out to her that Deathlands was never likely to become industrialized again.

"The land, Krysty, my dear," she used to say, spluttering around her ill-fitting false teeth in her vehemence, "there has always been the land. And there will always be the land."

"Silver oaks and begonias," Krysty said now. "And that's a huge eucalyptus. No idea what that is, but I know that's a giant nasturtium climbing all over it."