David Drake - Men Like Us

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MEN LIKE US

By David Drake

There was a toad crucified against them at the head of the pass. Decades of cooking in the blue

haze from the east had left it withered but incorruptible. It remained, even now that the haze was

only a memory. The three travelers squatted down before the talisman and stared back at it.

"The village can't be far from here," Smith said at last. "I'll go down tomorrow."

Ssu-ma shrugged and argued, "Why waste time? We can all go down together."

"Time we've got," said Kozinski, playing absently with his ribs as he eyed the toad. "A lot of the

stories we've been told come from ignorance, from fear. There may be no more truth to this one

than to many of the others. We have a duty, but we have a duty as well not to disrupt needlessly.

We'll wait for you and watch."

Smith chuckled wryly. "What sort of men would there be in the world," he said, "if it weren't for

men like us?"

All three of them laughed, but no one bothered to finish

their old joke.

The trail was steep and narrow. The stream was now bubbling ten meters below, but in springtime it

would fill its sharp gorge with a torrent as cold as the snows that spawned it. Coming down the

valley, Smith had a good view of Moseby when he had eased around the last facet of rock above the

town. It sprawled in the angle of the creek and the river into which the creek plunged. In a niche

across the creek from the houses was a broad stone building, lighted by slit windows at second-

story level. Its only entrance was an armored door. The building could have been a prison or a

fortress were it not for the power lines running from it, mostly to the smelter at the riverside.

A plume of vapor overhung its slate roof.

One of the pair of guards at the door of the power plant was morosely surveying the opposite side

of the gorge for want of anything better to do. He was the first to notice Smith. His jaw dropped.

The traveler waved to him. The guard blurted something to his companion and threw a switch beside

the door.

What happened then frightened Smith as he thought nothing in the world could frighten him again:

An air raid siren on the roof of the power plant sounded, rising into a wail that shook echoes

from the gorge. Men and women darted into the streets, some of them armed, but Smith did not see

the people, these people, and he did not fear anything they could do to him.

Then the traveler's mind was back in the present, a smile on his face and nothing in his hands but

an oak staff worn by the miles of earth and rock it had butted against. He continued down into the

village, past the fences and latrines of the nearest of the houses. Men with crossbows met him

there, but they did not touch him, only motioned the traveler onward. The rest of the townsfolk

gathered in

an open area in the center of the town. It separated the detached houses on the east side from the

row of flimsier structures built along the river. The latter obviously served as barracks,

taverns, and brothels for bargees and smelter workers. The row buildings had no windows facing

east, and even their latrines must have been dug on the riverside. A few people joined the crowd

from them and from the smelter itself, but only a few.

"That's close enough," said the foremost of those awaiting the traveler. The local was a big man

with a pink scalp. It shone through the long wisps of white hair that he brushed carefully back

over it. His jacket and trousers were of wool, dyed blue so that they nearly matched the shirt of

ancient polyester he wore underneath. "Where have you come from?"

"Just about everywhere, one time or another," Smith answered with an engaging grin. "Dubuque,

originally, but that was a long time ago."

"Don't play games with the chief," hissed a somewhat younger man with a cruel face and a similar

uniform. "You came over the mountains, and nobody comes from the Hot Lands."

Chief of police, Smith marveled as he connected the title and the shirts now worn as regalia.

Aloud he said, "When's the last time anybody from here walked over the mountains? Ever?"

Bearded faces went hard. The traveler continued, "A hundred years ago, two hundred. It was too hot

for you to go anywhere that side of the hills, but not now. Maybe I'll never sire children of my

own, but I never needed that. I needed to see the world, and I have done that, friends."

"Strip him," the chief said flatly.

Smith did not wait for the grim-looking men to force him. He shrugged off his pack and handed it

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to the nearest of the guards armed with crossbows and hand-forged swords. He said, "Gently with

it, friend. There's some of it that's fragile, and I need it to trade for room and board the next

while." He began to unhook his leather vest.

Six of the men besides the chief wore the remnants of police uniforms over their jackets. They

were all older-not lean warriors like the crossbowmen-but they carried firearms. Five of them had

M16 rifles. The anodized finish of the receivers had been polished down to the aluminum by ages of

diligent ignorance. The sixth man had a disposable rocket launcher, certain proof that the

villagers here had at some time looted an army base-or a guardroom.

"Just a boy from the Midwest," Smith continued pleasantly, pulling out the tails of his woolen

shirt. "I wanted to see New York City, can you believe that? But we'll none of live forever, will

we?"

He laid the shirt, folded from habit, on his vest and began unlacing his boots of caribou leather.

"There's a crater there now, and the waves still glow blue if there's even an overcast to dim the

sun. And your skin prickles."

The traveler grinned. "You won't go there, and I won't go there again, but I've seen it, where the

observation deck of the World Trade Towers was just about the closest mortal man got to heaven

with his feet on man's earth . . . ."

"We've heard the stories," the chief grunted. He carried a stainless-steel revolver in a holster

of more recent vintage.

"Trousers?" Smith asked, cocking an eyebrow at the women in dull-colored dresses.

The chief nodded curtly. "When a man comes from the Hot Lands, he has no secrets from us," he

said. "Any of us."

"Well, I might do the same in your case," the traveler

agreed, tugging loose the laces closing the woolen trousers, "but I can tell you there's little

enough truth to the rumors of what walks the wastelands." He pulled the garment down and stepped

out of it.

Smith's body was wiry, the muscles tight and thickly covered by hair. If he was unusual at all, it

was in that he had been circumcised-no longer a common operation in a world that had better uses

for a surgeon's time. Then a woman noticed Smith's left palm, never hidden but somehow never

clearly seen until that moment. She screamed and pointed. Others leveled their weapons, buzzing as

a hive does when a bear nears it.

Very carefully, his face as blank as the leather of his pack, Smith held his left hand toward the

crowd and spread his fingers. Ridges of gnarled flesh stood out as if they had been paraffin

refrozen a moment after being liquefied. "Yes, I burned it," the traveler said evenly, "getting

too close to something the-something the Blast was too close to. And it'll never heal, no. But it

hasn't gotten worse, either, and that was years ago. It's not the sort of world where I could

complain to have lost so little, hey?"

"Put it down," the chief said abruptly. Then, to the guard who was searching the pack. "Weapons?"

"Only this," the guard said, holding up a sling and a dozen dense pebbles fitted to its leather

pocket.

"There's a little folding knife in my pants pocket." Smith volunteered. "I use it to skin the

rabbits I take."

"Then put your clothes on," the chief ordered, and the crowd's breath eased. "You can stay at the

inn, since you've truck enough to pay for it"-he nodded toward the careful pile the guard had made

of Smith's trading goods-"and perhaps you can find girls on Front Street to service you as well.

There's none of that east of the Assembly here, I warn you. Before you do anything else,

though, you talk to me and the boys in private at the station."

The traveler nodded and began dressing without embarrassment.

The police and their guards escorted Smith silently, acting as if they were still uncertain of his

status. Their destination was a two-story building of native stone. It had probably been the town

hall before the Blast. It was now the chiefs residence as well as the government's headquarters.

Despite that, the building was far less comfortable than many of the newer structures that had

been designed to be heated by the stoves and lighted by lamps and windows. In an office whose

plywood paneling had been carefully preserved-despite its shoddy gloominess-the governing

oligarchs of the town questioned Smith.

They were probing and businesslike. Smith answered honestly and as fully as he could. Weapons

caches? Looted by survivors or rotted in the intervening centuries. Food depots? A myth, seeded by

memories of supermarkets and brought to flower in the decades of famine and cold that slew ten

times as many folk as the Blast had slain directly. Scrap metal for the furnaces? By the millions

of tons, but there would be no way to transport it across the mountains. And, besides, metals were

often hot even at this remove from the Blast.

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"All right," said the chief at last, shutting the handbook of waxed boards on which he had been

making notes. The room had become chilly about the time they had had to light the sooty naphtha

lamp. "If we think of more during the night, we can ask in the morning." His eyes narrowed. "How

long are you expecting to stay?"

Smith shrugged. "A few days. I just like to . . . wander. I really don't have any desire to do

anything else." He raised his pack by the straps and added, "Can one of you

direct me to your inn?"

Carter, the youngest of the six policemen, stood. He was a blocky man with black hair and a pepper-

and-salt beard. He had conducted much of the questioning himself. "I'll take him," he said. Unlike

his colleagues, he carried a heavy fighting knife in addition to his automatic rifle. He held the

door open for Smith.

The night sky was patchy. When the silver moon was clear, there was more light outside than the

bud of naphtha cast within. The pall of steam above the power plant bulged and waned like the

mantle of an octopus. Tiny azure sparks traced the power lines across the bridge and down into the

smelter.

Smith thumbed at the plant. "They made light from electricity, you know? Before the Blast. You

ever try that?"

His guide looked at him sharply. "Not like they did. Things glow, but they burn up when we can't

keep all the air away from 'em. But you'd be smarter not to ask questions, boy. And maybe you'd be

smarter to leave here a little sooner than you planned. Not to be unfriendly, but if you talk to

us, you'll talk to others. And we don't much care for talk about Moseby. It has a way of spreading

where it shouldn't."

The policeman turned through an open gate and up a graveled pathway. Rosy light leaked around the

shutters of a large building on the edge of the Assembly. Sound and warm air bloomed into the

night when he opened the door. In the mild weather the anteroom door was open within.

"Carter!" shouted a big man at the bar of the taproom. "Just in time to buy us a round!" Then he

saw Smith and blinked, and the dozen or so men of the company grew quieter than the hiss of the

fire.

"Friends, I don't bite," said Smith with a smile, "but I do drink and I will sleep. If I can come

to an agreement with our host here, that is," he added, beaming toward the barman.

"Modell's the name," said the tall, knob-jointed local. Neither he nor the traveler offered to

shake hands, but he returned the other's smile with a briefer, professional one of his own. "Let's

see what you have to trade."

The men at the bar made room as Smith arranged his small stock on the mahogany. First the traveler

set out an LP record, still sealed in plastic. Modell's lips moved silently as his finger hovered

a millimeter above the title. "What's a 'Cher,'?' he finally asked.

"The lady's name," said Smith. "She pronounced it `share.' " Knowing grunts from the men around

him chorused the explanation. "You've electricity here, I see. Perhaps there's a phonograph?"

"Naw, and the power's not trained enough yet anyhow," Modell said regretfully. His eyes were full

of the jacket photograph. "It heats the smelters is all, and-"

"Modell, you're supposed to be trading, not running your mouth," the policeman interrupted. "Get

on with it."

"Well, if not the record, then-" Smith said.

"I might make you an offer on the picture," one of the locals broke in.

"I won't separate them, I'm afraid," Smith rejoined, "and I won't have the record where it can't

be used properly. These may be more useful, though I can't guarantee them after the time they've

been sitting . . . ." And he laid a red-and-green box of .30-30 cartridges on the wood.

"The chief keeps all the guns in Moseby besides these," said Carter, patting the plastic stock of

his M16. "It'll stay that way. And there's a righteous plenty of ammunition for them already."

"Fine, fine," said Smith, unperturbed, reaching again into his pack. He removed a plastic box that

whirred until a tiny green hand reached out of the mechanism to shut itself off. It frightened the

onlookers as much as Smith's own radiation scars had. The traveler thoughtfully hid the toy again

in his pack before taking out his final item, a GI compass.

"It always shows north, unless you're too close to iron," Smith said as he demonstrated. "You can

turn the base to any number of degrees and take a sighting through the slot there, but I'll want

more than a night's lodging for it."

"Our tokens are good up and down the river," one of the locals suggested, ringing a small brass

disk on the bar. It had been struck with a complex pattern of lightning bolts on one side and the

number SO on the other. "You can redeem 'em for iron ingots at dockside," he explained, thumbing

toward the river. "Course, they discount 'em the farther away you get."

"I don't follow rivers a great deal," the traveler lied with a smile. "Let's say that I get room

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