The jeep growled along after them, keeping in low gear. One of the sec men kept position on the machine gun in the rear, covering the seven of them.
"Sure is a big ville," J.B. said.
Doc Tanner shook his head. "There is something about it that puts me unconscionably in mind of a trim little town in the Bible Belt before the war."
"In vids, you mean, Doc?" Finnegan asked.
"Yes, of course."
The leader of the patrol called out to them as they neared a barrier across the road: a single striped pole beside a small stone hut. Two sec men, carrying brightly polished carbines, marched briskly to and fro in front of the barrier. Ryan was struck again by the neatness and cleanliness of the whole operation.
"Hold it there."
They stopped. Ryan turned to face the jeep. "This going to take long? We're real tired and we could do with some food."
"You don't have any passes. Don't have any Ginnsburg Falls creds. No food slips. And you haven't seen Mayor Sissy."
"Who?" Ryan asked incredulously.
"Mayor Sissy. And I surely hope that isn't a smile I see on anyone's face. Best learn first off that rule number one isn't to find names funny. Believe me, an outworlder can get chilled faster than a fish down a fall. You'll meet Mayor Theodore Sissy before you reach your quarters. First, we got to get your names. Corp!"
The taller of the two guards on the barrier came smartly forward, giving a salute that involved patting his left shoulder with his gauntleted right fist. "Yes, Sec Commander?"
"Note of names."
"Sir."
The man in charge of the jeep came closer. "You're the leader here," he said, addressing Ryan Cawdor. "Watch your people and walk the line. You'll enjoy your time with us in Ginnsburg Falls. You'll do fine."
"Have a nice day," Doc Tanner said, making the sec commander turn and look at him suspiciously, as though he suspected the old man was sending him up.
"You," the tall guard said, pointing at Ryan. "Name. Place."
"You mean, where have I come from?"
"Yes. Place of habitation."
"Name's Ryan Cawdor. I came from..." he hesitated, wondering just where he did come from "...Front Royal out in the Shens."
"Don't know it. That's outworld here."
The Armorer answered next. "Name's J. B. Dix."
The guard wrote it down on a large pad. "Another outworlder. What are the letters for?"
"What letters?"
"Your name? Your first name?"
Ryan's jaw dropped. He'd known the little Armorer for something approaching ten years, and he realized now that he'd never even known what the initials stood for. It had always been J.B., nothing else.
"First name's John."
"What's the Bfor?"
"Barrymore, you double-stupe bastard! John Barrymore Dix. You got it?"
"Don't let anger lead you into dangerous pathways, my outworlder friend," the sec guard replied, calmly writing the name down.
"John Barrymore!" Ryan repeated unbelievingly. "No wonder you kept that closely guarded."
"Your mother must have had thespian interests," Doc Tanner said.
"She was as fucking norm as me, so watch that flapping lip of yours, Doc," J.B. warned, bristling like an enraged bantam cockerel.
"No, my dear friend. A thespian. A lover of the theatrical arts. There was a famous actor called John Barrymore many years ago."
"Oh," he said, slightly mollified. "I never knowed any of that, Doc."
"Oh, yes, indeed. A famous man. A wonderful, wonderful actor."
"Your name, old man?" the guard demanded.
"Dr. Theophilus Tanner, master of arts, doctor of philosophy and a citizen of the free world."
"Outworlder?"
"Yes."
"Thomas O'Flaherty Fingal Finnegan, born somewheres around the Windy City," Finn butted in.
"Where were you born, old man?" the sec guard asked, ignoring the fat man's exaggerated bow.
"South Strafford, a tiny hamlet close by White River Junction in the beautiful state of Vermont. In the year of Our Lord..." Suddenly he stopped, as if someone had jammed his tongue in a closing door. He coughed, glancing sideways, but only Ryan had been listening to him; the sec man wasn't interested in anyone's age.
"You, boy? By the crucified Savior! Your hair? And your eyes and skin. Are you the spawn of Beelzebub?"
"No, I'm Jak Lauren from West Lowellton."
The guard swallowed hard, then scribbled the name down.
J.B. raised a hand. "You never asked where I came from."
"Where?"
"Cripple Creek, in the Rockies."
It was all dutifully entered on the pad. The jeep still waited behind them, engine ticking over. Ryan watched the sec men and saw how sharp they seemed, constantly alert, never taking their eyes off the newcomers.
Particularly, he noticed, they were fascinated by the bizarre appearance of Jak Lauren, seeming almost frightened by the fourteen-year-old boy with the colorless skin.
"That's all," the sec commander said. "Head on in and we'll tell..."
"What about us?" Krysty Wroth interrupted.
"How's that?"
"You haven't taken our names down. My name's..."
"Shut it."
The command was flat and dismissive. Ryan felt Krysty stiffen in anger, and he put a cautious hand on her arm. But she shook him off and stepped up to face the man, staring into his hooded eyes.
"Don't talk to me like that."
Ignoring her, the sec officer said, "Outworlder Cawdor, tell her that in Ginnsburg Falls, it's only men that count."
"Don't understand," Ryan said.
The sec commander continued, speaking more slowly and distinctly, as if he were addressing a backward child. "Others don't function."
"What the?.." Krysty began, stopping when Ryan turned and glared at her.
"Unpersons here. Non-men. Just home-keep and breed. Or whores. Them two whores?" he asked, interested in both Krysty's striking red hair and Lori's long blond tresses.
"No. They're both... home-keeps. Can we go now?"
"Sure. Registration'll follow later. Go to corner of Fourth an' Sissy — that's the main street in the ville. Red building called Outworlders' Dorm. Don't leave there till you're told."
No other outworlders were in town just then, so they had the spotlessly clean building with eating hall and dormitories to themselves. Doc and Lori went into a small room with three beds, as did Ryan and Krysty. The others shared a room with six beds, overlooking Sissy Street.
An old man, apparently the janitor, seemed delighted to have seven visitors all at once. He wore a smart uniform of dark green, with silver piping around the lapels and down the sides of his pants. His gray hair was neatly combed, and he was clean-shaven.
"Lucky to be here in Ginnsburg Falls, folks," he said, speaking to the men but treating the two women as though they were invisible. "There's to be a stoning at dusk. Haven't had one o' them in weeks."
"What's a stoning?"
"Stoning, Mr. Cawdor, is what the name suggests. Those that crosses the laws here in the ville has to pay the price. Walk the line and you'll be fine."
"Stoned to death? Who by? What for?" Krysty Wroth asked.
The janitor ignored her. "Couple been caught in adultery tonight. Down the quarry. Follow Seventh to the edge of the lake and walk up the lane to the left. Mercy me! Why tell you that? Just follow the whole town and you'll see it for yourself." He hesitated. "Being outworlders, you won't know all the lines to walk, Mr. Cawdor. But home-keeps aren't allowed. Be trouble if they left here."
"Thank you," Ryan said. "We'll all take care to walk the line."
"Registers'll be here soon. Give you the cards and passes you'll need while here. Give you work allocations an' all."
"Double fucking weird," Finnegan exploded after the old man brought them bowls of vegetable soup and fresh-baked cornbread. The old man paused for a moment when he saw Lori and Krysty sitting down with the men. Muttering something about stupe outies, he stamped off, leaving them alone with their meal.
"Yeah," J.B. agreed. "Never saw a ville the like of this one."
Doc Tanner spooned his soup, pausing and looking across at Ryan. "You know that this place is rife with evil, do you not, Mr. Cawdor?"
"How's that again, Doc?"
"Ginnsburg Falls. Mayor Sissy. A stoning. Nonpersons. Breeding. But not a speck of dirt to be seen. Neat guards with polished weapons. It appears to me to be a mutated and idealized version of some Midwestern fascist dream."
"Don't like this walk-line shit," Jak Lauren said quietly. The boy had been subdued ever since they'd been brought into the ville.
"See that sign at the entrance?" Krysty asked. "By the old man's cubicle? It said that any dropping of litter or dirtying meant a minimum of twenty hours ville labor. Never met such a tight hole. When do we go?"
Ryan sniffed. "Soon as we can. But I agree with Doc. We have to step careful. Walk the line, like they say. They got rules on top of rules. We make a mistake, and it could cost us. You two..." looking at Lori and Krysty "...have to be most careful. Women come way second in Ginnsburg Falls. Don't talk back, please. For all our sakes."
The light was beginning to fade when a pair of sec guards entered the building and motioned for the men to join them. "Outworlders come to the stoning," the one with two silver stripes on his sleeve said.
"Is that a request or an order?" Ryan asked, getting only a blank look for a reply. "Guess it's a little of both."
Leaving the two women behind, the men followed the guards out and down the scrubbed stone steps, turning left along the main street.
"Lot of folks," Doc Tanner commented.
"No," Ryan said. "Lots of men. No women at all."
It was true. The street was thronged with males of all ages, all neatly but plainly dressed, walking quietly along as if they were going to some sort of religious ritual. Several of them cast glances at the strangers, but nothing was said. None of them smiled or uttered a greeting. Just in front of them a boy about nine years old who had been eating some candy pushed the empty bag into his pocket. But in his haste it dropped out again and fell to the sidewalk.
"Jasper!" the father exclaimed in a voice taut with shock and anger.
"I'm sorry, only..."
The man swung a cracking roundhouse swing at his son, hitting the boy across the face. The slapping sound echoed all across the street, but only a few heads turned. The lad staggered sideways, hands flying to his mouth, blood flowing thick from a cut on his lip and oozing from his nose.
"Pick it up now," the man said, voice easing under control. "And don't ever..."
The boy picked up the crumpled piece of white paper and stuffed it in his pocket. Ryan and the other four watched in silence. The father caught them staring.
"Sorry, all. Please don't report us for... Wife's been ill and if reported we'd..." He stopped and looked more closely at them. "Outworlders! Didn't see at first. Oh, that's all right. Come on," he said to his son, dragging him by the arm along the street.
"Krysty's right, Ryan," Finnegan whispered. "Sooner we get out of this fucking ville the better."
"Yeah, Finn. With you there. Best get us some food and then mebbe hoist a wag and head on north."
They walked on in the thickening crowd. The calm of earlier had been replaced by a tenseness, an air of muted excitement. More and more eyes turned to look at the strangers, and again and again they heard the word "outworlder" repeated, plus the expression "first stone," or something that sounded like that.
The buildings were in excellent repair — far better than any ville Ryan, J.B. and Finn had ever seen. There were several stores, mostly selling plain clothes or food. Also for sale was a newspaper, the Ginnsburg Falls Regulator, whose proprietor, named on a trim board, was Isaac Sissy. That name was obviously quite popular. There was also the Sissy Temperance Hotel and the Rachel Sissy Second Pentecostal Baptist Church of His Last Coming.
"This Sissy family sure has the ville sewn up tight," J.B. said.
"Don't like the feel at all," Ryan replied, keeping his voice quiet so that none of the men and boys surging around them would catch what was said.
"Me, neither," Jak said. "Dumb creepy mutie bastards, all of 'em. Why not go, Ryan?"
"Tomorrow," Ryan said.
There were lights coming on all around the township, with lamps on street corners glowing into golden life. Doc Tanner looked around in delight. "I swear that I have not encountered such a degree of civilization in... in many long years."
"Where's the power plant?" Ryan asked the sec guard, who still walked stolidly along beside them, the heels of his boots ringing on the stone sidewalk.
"West. On Salvation Avenue. Big generators."
"You got radio?"
"Yes. Just for us. No vids. Mayor says one day. Gotta get spares. Folks up north could help. So my father said to me. Said his father 'fore him heard the same."
"That must..." Finnegan began, stopping suddenly when Ryan surreptitiously angled a foot out to trip him. The stout gunman stumbled and nearly fell over. He looked at Ryan in sudden anger, then saw the warning shake of the head and calmed himself. Ryan didn't want the sec men of Ginnsburg Falls to know anything about the faint radio message they'd heard, and Finn nodded his understanding.
"Got vids or teevee?" Jak Lauren asked.
"Said not."
"Said no vids. How's 'bout teevee?"
"No." The word was flat and final.
Ryan was surprised they hadn't been ordered to remove their blasters and leave them with the sec men. All of them had chosen not to carry their heavier guns, relying on side arms. Most of the adult males of the ville wore pistols, many of which looked like remakes.
On some of the side streets small domestic wags were parked, and just beyond the Harold Sissy Memorial High School, close by the lake, there was a big old Kenworth rig with chromed exhaust.
They followed the throng off the main drag and up the narrow slope of Quarry Road.
Several of the older men were smoking pipes, and Ryan wrinkled his nostrils at the familiar smell. He looked sideways at J.B., seeing that the Armorer had also recognized the scent.
"Maryjane, huh?" he whispered.
"How's that sit with that temperance hotel back there?" J.B. wondered. "From the Mayor Sissy Cannabis Plant?"
"Watch the tongue, friend," Ryan warned.
"Fireblast!" exclaimed Ryan Cawdor when they arrived at the quarry. It was possible that more people had gathered here than he'd ever seen in one place. He did a quick count in the gathering gloom, estimating there were something like seven thousand men and boys present.
That meant there was something wrong. Something, somewhere, that was terribly wrong.
"Doc," he said, noting the villefolk had left a circle around the five outworlders as though they were suspected of being plaguies.
"What?"
"You're the man of science."
"Was, my dear boy, was."
"What did that sign say when we came into the ville? The population?"
"Eight thousand four hundred and... and seven. Real big town for these days."
"Do me a rough count on how many's here."
The old man was silent, lips moving as he let his eyes run around the natural arena, ticking off the figures on the different ledges in the quarry. Away to their left there was some sort of disturbance in the crowd, with a phalanx of sec men pushing through.
"Something between seventy-three hundred and seventy-four hundred. Difficult to count a shifting mob of chapped-hand yokels in poor light. I counted legs and divided by two."
Finnegan was listening to the exchange. "Wait a fucking minute," he began. "If there's a total..."
"Keep your voice down," J.B. snapped. "We get the picture, Ryan. Total population eight and a half thou. Man seven and a half thou. Take off some male babies. Can't leave more'n a few hundred women in the whole ville."
All four of them pondered that. The chatter around them had subsided, and the great granite bowl was silent, with only the whistling of the wind to break the stillness. As on the previous evening, it had become bitingly cold, and a chem-storm was raging away to the north, the crimson clouds torn apart with golden curtains-of forked lightning.
There was a ramp that led to a raised podium near the middle of the quarry. The sec men were climbing it, with someone or something at their center. Jak Lauren had the keenest eyes.
"Cripple. They're wheeling."
Ryan saw him then: a tiny, frail man with a head, fringed with silvery hair, that looked too large for his body and a skin almost as pale as Jak's. They were only about fifty yards off, and Ryan could see the little hands, soft and pink, decorated with chunky rings and a golden bracelet. The legs trailed, wasted, in neat, highly polished shoes of black leather. The man wore a tailored suit of light cream cloth. As he was wheeled up to the platform, his head jiggled and rolled on his shoulders.
"Silence for Mayor Theodore Sissy," one of the sec men bellowed unnecessarily, since the crowd had fallen quiet the moment the leader of Ginnsburg Falls had appeared.
There was a microphone at the front of the stage, already adjusted to the height at which Mayor Sissy could speak into it comfortably from his chair. His voice was soft and trembling, like a nervous child.
"Bring them before us."
The stillness was broken by a murmur of sound that slithered around the quarry like some great rustling reptile.
A half-dozen sec men, including the leader of the patrol in the jeep, moved into the center of the quarry with two people in their midst.
"Let there be light," the cripple on the platform breathed. There was the sharp sound of a lever being thrown, and the whole place was flooded by arc lamps that stood on pylons circling the stone arena.
The stark glare made Jak's white hair stand out like spun magnesium. All round them the men and boys backed farther off, muttering and pointing. Fortunately they were distracted by the events at the middle of the quarry.
"Here stand Jolyon Manscomb and the whore. Taken in the act of adulterous lust. It is admitted that the whore lured him, as Eve lured Adam, with her cunt filled with honey. But both pay the price."
The woman was slightly built, with dull brown hair cropped raggedly at shoulder level. She was dressed in a short robe, like a shift, of some coarse material that looked as if it had been used as sacking. It was dyed a vivid, sickly yellow. The man, whose head was bowed and balding, was wearing a similar robe, colored flat ocher. Both of them were barefoot and both had their hands tied in front of them with a thick rope.
Ryan had noticed that he stood on uneven ground. It was covered with a thick layer of stones, ranging in size from pebbles to jagged chunks of granite as large as a man's fist. There were similar piles of stones all about the floor of the quarry, the nearest only a dozen paces from where he waited with J.B., Jak, Finn and Doc Tanner. He licked his lips, finding them suddenly dry as he realized what the stones were for.
"Outworlders, step forward," the little man in the wheelchair commanded, reading slowly from a creased piece of paper that one of the sec men had handed him. "Cawdor, Dix, Finnegan, Lauren and Tanner. All come to stand before me."
Conscious of every man's eyes upon them, the five stepped across the uneven ground, picking their way around the piles of stone. Ryan noticed that the woman in the sack robe watched them, but the man at her side remained with his head bowed, mumbling to himself, shoulders shaking as he wept.
"Welcome, outworlders, to Ginnsburg Falls." The little man had a face reminiscent of pictures Ryan had once seen in an old book of maps — chubby cheeks, pursed as though to blow a great wind across the quarry, eyes twinkling coldly in the flat light.
"Like a damnably evil cherub," Doc Tanner whispered.
That had been the word Ryan wanted. Cherub. But with a darker side of power and evil.
"When we have men in from beyond our borders, we allow them the privilege of aiding our rituals. You are blessed that you have an opportunity to prove your worth on your first night among us."
"Do he mean what I think he fucking means?" Finn said, looking around in disgust.
"Can the talk, Finn," Ryan hissed. "You'll get us all chilled."
Mayor Sissy had stopped, the merry glitter vanishing for a moment. When he resumed, the voice was a shade or two less amicable.
"The punishment of Jolyon Manscomb and the whore is now to begin. The shame is made worse by the help of the outworlders. By their actions shall they also be judged. Sec Commander?"
"Sir."
"Begin. Remember, all present, that you may share the stoning only when one full minute has passed on the counting of the sec commander here. To begin too early would disappoint me."
Ryan reached up and eased the patch over his left eye socket. He rubbed his cheek and found that he was sweating despite the cold.
"Are you ready, outworlders?"
Obviously an answer was required. Ryan coughed to clear his throat. "Yes. We're ready."
"Then begin."
Ryan didn't move. The others at his side tensed like hunting dogs. Without looking, he knew that fingers would be questing for the butts of blasters. He also knew that if they made one wrong move, death was a dozen heartbeats away.
"Begin, outworlders, or join the fool and the whore." Bending slowly, Ryan reached down with his right hand and picked up a large, jagged stone, his fingers tightening around it.