The Rainbow at Midnight

By Val Linn

Scientist Andrew Hirsch awakes from involuntary cryogenic preservation 500 years after an atomic war. His home, his wife and his children centuries lost, Andy is revived in the woods near what he once knew as Scapoose, Oregon in a primitive and brutal new world by two hard-luck kids who need him as much as he does them. Together, with cunning, tenacity and a little scientific “magic,” they forge a path through midnight in a story that will grab your heart, mind and curiosity, and pull you into their evolving world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Val Linn
• Release date: Jun 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476086682

Val Linn

Val Linn is currently rewriting and polishing the production of his last ten years, and has published the first novel of his Carlyntown trilogy, The Rainbow At Midnight. This story creates the post-apocalyptic world that the rest of his work takes place in, so is the natural place to start the publication of his work. He went to college directly out of High School, and studied Religion, intending to become a Christian minister, then served in the Army for three years. He learned infantry squad battle tactics and then Intelligence functions, Special-Agenting in the C.I.C. (Counter Intelligence Corps. division of Army Intelligence). During those Army year, his first family broke up and the obstacles of pain and fear remained and had to be overcome before he could engage in life’s other battles. The family split gave him a natural sympathy for those left alone or abandoned in life. After the Military service, he used his experience to become a professional counselor, working for over twenty years to lesson the pain and struggle that people around him were fighting. His stories take seriously the obstacles his characters face, and show how those characters meet and overcome them to build satisfying and productive lives for themselves. Val lives with his wife and a diverse array of other life forms on a small farm in the hills of Scappoose, Oregon.

Book preview

Prologue

My beautiful wife, Audrey, and I were up until the wee hours. making preparations to flee to a place in the mountains with our four kids if the atomic war threatened by the South-Russian jihad started. Exhaustion finally overcame her. I switched the God-awful, twenty-five-hour-a day-doomsday news broadcast off, scooped her up from the couch, and carried her to our room.

I’m okay, Andy, I just need to . . .

You just need to get some rest. I laid her in bed, gently kissed her lips and crawled in after her. I fell asleep to dark-passage dreams – you know the kind, where you can’t find that one treasured gold coin your grandfather left you, that you’ve always been proud of – or, the sheriff’s here to evict you from your house, so you have to move, but to where?

Two hours later the phone rang. It was my ex-boss, Bailey, the lying scumbag who was so full of meanness and chicanery that I quit his millionaire job the minute I finished its Cryogenic capsule, and its underground chamber, which together were capable of preserving him alive—indefinitely! Design and oversight of the project was a source of accomplishment, guilt, and regret - did Oregonians in a devastated future deserve to have that misanthrope unleashed on them?

Andy, uh, I need your help, Bailey struggled to sound civil. He wasn’t used to that mode of interaction.

Yeah, I know, I certainly couldn’t argue with him there.

My daughter, Sherry, and her baby boy are stranded at the Troutdale airport over in your neck of the woods and I, uh, I was wondering if I could get you to pick her up and bring her out here.

I’d laugh if I weren’t so tired, I waited for him to retaliate. He didn’t, which was also highly unusual, I don’t work for you anymore, Bailey.

I . . . I know, There was a long pause while the rat tried to remember how to be human., The severance package agreed on in our contract is all here now. Bring my girl and grandchild home and . . . I’ll have it waiting here for you.

I didn’t want to leave my family to rescue his and I didn’t owe him any favors, but we needed the forty half-ounce, gold Eagles and the thousand rounds of .270 Winchester ammunition that were included in that package. He’d denied me those items of my pay because I quit. Paper money would be worthless if the government collapsed, and high-velocity big-game ammunition might never be manufactured again in my lifetime. I got dressed and off I went.

Chapter 1

Outside her window, the entire twilight world of dawn seemed candle-lit in mystical ceremony. Lila thought she could see hazy processions of ancestral shades gliding through the fir forest that towered on every side of their village, keeping time with a music heard only in their realm. They had to be around. The annals from ancient times said that most of her distant forebears died violently in the burning-time wars, their souls tumbled to earth early to wander. The huge city-of-the-dead was just a day's journey south of them, and no one had survived there. The changing images in the swirling mist held her spellbound, and calmed her.

Her thirteenth or courtship-year birthday was only two months away and her father had announced the prior evening that he'd choose a husband for her that would be to the family's advantage. To his advantage, is what he meant. All of his fringsteader friends were robbers and drunks, at least as quick of temper and as cruel as he was. She might just be twelve but she had eyes to see. Their women came through town on market days as often as not with black eyes, swollen lips or noses and bruises in blossom colors. He was going to sell her to fill his coin-purse or to keep his wine-jug filled from their barrels.

If she’d jumped up and down and screamed at him like she felt like doing, he would have beaten her. So, never mind the risk, she was going to invoke one of the irascible ancestral shades that morning to get help with her problem. She'd jump off the Dahlman cliff before she'd marry anyone from that crew of savages.

The back door squealed as it flew open, letting in a cold draft heavy with the smell of horse manure and hints of sour wine.

Lila jumped. It was him. Her thoughts tumbled back into the dimly lit great room and her stare locked onto her food before her father could catch her daydreaming. All of her attention went to wolfing down her breakfast porridge. Her brother's stinky hound, Bruno, lay on the hearth next to the rough-hewn table. Even he flinched as Thomas came through the swinging door. The smell of last night's wine grew stronger as he shuffled toward them past the food cutting table.

Didn’t wake you kids up opening the door, did I? Thomas asked, with a half twist of smile. While you sit here dawdling, the goats are so hungry they’re trying to climb out of their stalls. Do you need a stick against your butts to get you out herding to earn your keep?

The smile, that could have been seen as sympathetic, drooped to his customary frown, face set in stone again. This morning he had large dark bags under his bloodshot eyes, usually a sign of an extended romp with the tankard-tippers the night before. The sediment-filled local wine was always a painful excess come the next morning.

Lila thought, Yeah, we go and work in the icy rain so you can dawdle by the fire. She started to say the words but winced and her mouth snapped shut. She shook her head and assured herself, I didn't say it, I didn't say it. She tilted her bowl and scraped her wooden spoon heaping full of porridge, then shoved it between her lips.

Almost done. One more minute. Jock, Lila's lanky older brother of fourteen, spoke with his mouth full, then swallowed with a exaggerated gulp.

You better be. There's still thick brush along the Chapman town road going up the canyon. Get your lazy-bones moving in that direction.

But Papa, it's dangerous up the canyon. Evil spirits pace the ancient home sites Even grown men disappear up there. Jock's twitching fingers went unconsciously to his teeth as he stood there, waiting for a final decision. Lila scraped her wood bowl with loud clunking noises that drove her father to distraction. Otherwise, he was sure to notice Jock's fingernails slide between his teeth, as they did whenever he was scared or perplexed.

Too late.

Listen to you, Thomas taunted. You'd like to stay by the hearth all day like a granny, wouldn't you? You get moving, Sonny, and you too, Sissy, or the stick is going to sting your butts. Go where I've already scouted out good browse for the goats. You can choose your own way when you grow up enough to stop chewing on your fingernails like a baby gorging at a tit.

Lila cringed. She would be the next target. Her last mouthful of porridge went down in a gulp. She jumped over to the wall pegs to pull down her homespun and buckskin wraps and hat. She danced in place for a moment trying to get her left arm, shortened and with a bulky woolen mitten protecting her crippled hand, jammed into a swinging sleeve. When she succeeded she scampered for the door, hat crushed under her stiff arm.

As the cold outdoor air slapped ice against her cheeks, she caught flutters of movement far inside the misty forest's morning ceremony. The ancients were still moving about the spaces that were theirs in life, though the forest had grown to fill those spaces and the ceremonies of their lives were lost to living memory. Now their small valley with its creek wandering between steep slopes was just a thin slice of clearing in the thousand-mile forest. That very morning one of those ancestor's shades might give her a sign.

The enchantment of dawn only lasted a few feet past the cabin door. Icy rain quickly snuffed out the spell. Lila wished she was grown to adult size and was attractively plump instead of being so skinny. Then the cold wouldn't run through her quick as the sharpest of knives. But the knife-edged cold might be a sign in itself, a different sort than she hoped for. It might be a prediction that pain and loneliness would fill her future.

Even when the rain carried ice in every drop, their three goats followed where the leading doe led. The doe's meandering, however, was as slow as a dancing lesson. Three steps forward, two back. Hours later, and a mile away from the village, the frigid rain finally soaked all the way through Lila's buckskin and wool wraps. She squinted up into the stinging sleet to search for a hint of blue sky. The morning mist had risen to merge with storm clouds parading over the towering fir trees, and their silent formation seemed to roll on forever. Lila pressed her lips into a scowl of defiance toward the commands of tyrant fathers, the storm gods, and the whole order of nature.

She had an idea. She straightened her back, picked the right tone, and started singing a song of springtime. Lila's voice echoed in her cathedral of trees like a silver bell, as her melody rose and fell she forgot the misery of January ice and the crock of hatefulness her father carried instead of a heart. When the last note was gone, the enormous green gloom of the forest descended to swallow her again. Lila hated the pain of ice water worse than almost anything. She modulated her silver-toned voice to a banshee shriek.

Jock, it's time for home. As she listened for Jock's reply, she cradled her herder's lance with small barbed point in the crook of her left arm and pushed her hair back under her felt hat with her good hand. The prior summer her father flew into a rage after one of her sharp-tongued comments and attacked her with his walking stick. He smashed her forearm against the stone fireplace and shattered both its bones. She had collapsed and landed on that arm. It felt like bone-slivers sliced back through her forearm muscles like daggers. Wendace, their shaman and healer, set the break as best she could, but it healed into a shortened club with a weak grip.

A big lump was left where the breaks had mended, and she squeezed it to warm away the ache of the cold. She could hear Jock approaching through the trees and hoped that meant they were about to head back toward a warm hearth.

Who says it's time, huh? Who says? Jock said from beyond the thicket. And hush your screaming, noise-box! Every Messing and Plympton renegade in the forest’ll hear you – and if anything goes wrong Papa always blames me.

Jock complained a lot, especially since she had the easy job herding on the road while he had to thrash through icewater-slinging brush confining their goats on the uphill side. Lila didn't respond and shrugged to snuggle deeper into her wraps. After that grumpy outburst he would be jumpy again, and his fingers would go to his mouth. He wouldn't even realize his hand had moved.

They had trekked so far out they had entered the territory of ancestral ruins. Each step she took farther into the canyon buried her deeper in an ancient world, populated only with shades in their day. She had to contact an ancestral shade but what would it look like? Terrifying pictures of shadow-faced specters swept into her mind. On the road she wasn't stepping on their dusty-stone cabin foundations. No trace of the ancient structures was visible to the eye, but the annals stated definitely that twenty to thirty home-sites had been counted, one after the other, going up this canyon.

If Jock walked on ancient foundations under the trees, she breathed a silent prayer that his footsteps would be gentle and do no violence to any shade's serenity. People had vanished out here and the ancestral shades probably were responsible. Everyone else said such shades were evil but Lila had been guessing that those people were wrong. These blood-ancestors should have every reason to sympathize with and help their own descendants. She hoped to receive a sign from one of them to prove her point.

A drip off the trees the size of a grape hit her hat brim with a whack and jarred her back to the soggy roadway. She looked both ways with shadow-sorting eyes and gave herself a stern reminder. It was dangerous to daydream out here. She had not seen nor sensed any sign of a real shade. Maybe they hid from such weather themselves.

Their three skinny goats browsed in the roadside foliage where more light supported the thickest growth. The two does, Croptop and Alice, were brown but Alice, the dominant one, had white spots on her neck and face. Claude, the buck, was all white with curved horns. Wherever Lila and the dominant doe led them, they nipped and munched with panicked intensity, vying for evergreen blackberry leaves. They even vied for red freeze-scarred berry leaves and live twigs, with little caution. Lila's gaze probed all around, substituting for wariness the goats lacked. A stock-killing cougar lived somewhere up the mountain and haunted this whole area. She worried that she wouldn't spot that shadow demon before he pounced. She had to see him to get her herder's lance into play and protect herself. It had a small barbed point, unlike the warrior's knife-edged spear-points. Their lances would not be likely to kill something as big as a cougar but the lance would cling in the wound. It was said that an animal would fight to free itself from the lance, rather than pursue the herder. She decided to try another tactic on Jock.

We're too far from the village, Jock. We're halfway to Chapman town now. Let's go back.

She knew better than to press her brother. Jock was weak-willed when it came to following their Papa's orders. He'd stay out here doing his best to obey instructions even if the snow was two feet deep and it killed them both. He hoped Papa would arrange the blacksmithing apprenticeship he'd promised him. Papa could arrange it in a minute, but every time Jock's fingernails went to his teeth Papa ridiculed him for being a baby and promises were forgotten.

Claude sidled away, aiming for a lane that intersected the road ahead.

Hushaway, hushaway. Lila threw a harsh herder's attention-call at him but the goat didn't waver in his trek. She ran forward and stopped him with a shove from her lance. Up close, his musk odor almost made her gag. His grimy white coat reminded her of something dead and smothered in maggots. Her stomach churned.

Your buddy Claude just pushed me, Jock. You stink but he smells even worse. She giggled. Please use your friendship with him to keep him far away from me.

Horsemen coming fast on the road, Jock said in a high pitched, but muted voice.

The shrillness in Jock's voice stabbed panic through her.

Run, Lila. Run!

She jumped, and her head jerked to the blind curve ahead. That dim tunnel through the forest was empty. Her anger pulled her up straight. For him to scare her with a robber-sighting in retaliation for her joking insult was too underhanded for play. A goat at her back did an alarm snort. She turned to scream at Jock and saw glimmers of sky reflecting from foreign helmets and cuirass armor. Three mounted men trotted around the curve of road behind them.

Lila's gaze darted up and down the roadside thicket to find a break in the sticker-covered blackberry vines. Her heartbeat sounded like a drum-roll in her own ears. She bounded along the barrier of clutching vines, looking for a passage through. Her loose hat flipped off as she ran.

She heard a yell go up from the horsemen. They spurred their mounts to a gallop. Lila sprinted for the small gap the panicked goats had just squeezed through.

Don't leave me, Jock! she screamed.

She leaped from the road to the short opening, arched over by two wickedly spiked blackberry canes, thick as ladder-rungs. The pounding of hooves on gravel became an ear-hammering thunder. Lila dived under the canes, past the foliage, and rolled. She kept a dogged grip on her lance through the jarring maneuver. She was shaken but bounced up and ripped past another couple mounds of vines, finally leaping clear.

She glanced over her shoulder. The riders galloped toward the small gap in the brambles like the arrival of an avalanche. They were going to ride right through it. She couldn't outrun horses. She froze in terror behind a tree. There was a movement behind her. Jock was coming fast, two jumps away, full-moon eyes darting.

The horse in front saw the hide-tearing canes, whinnied in distress, and braced itself in a braking slide. All three men and horses collided into a crunching press in the ditch. Horse rammed horse and then milled and the armored men bumped and swore at their mounts and at each other.

Jock grabbed a handful of her buckskin jacket and yanked. His strength snapped her out of her horrified trance, but tipped her off balance. She pitched forward. Her shoulder slammed against a tree root the size of a kitchen water barrel. The impact left her head swimming.

Jock snatched up her dropped lance--he had two in one hand--his gaze flew to the raiders. Lila's head still whirled in sickening circles. She looked at Jock. His face twisted in terror. He lifted and strained to get her up on her feet. She didn't want him to be captured because of her.

The closest raider, eight or ten paces away over the brambles, bent forward and started to dismount. Jock sprang upright and pitched her lance at him. The small spear flashed over the mounds of vines and hit the horse in the ribs where the raider's leg had been a split-second before. It rammed in and stuck.

The horse screamed, reared, and kicked. It bit the dismounting rider and yanked the reins from his hands. The rider lunged after him, his bleeding hand grabbing at the air to catch the whipping reins. The horse rammed into the other horses. It glanced off the second man, who had just dismounted, and threw him down the road. He made it to his feet and limped painfully after his partner, chasing the screaming, bucking horse. The lance clung in the horse's side for at least ten jumps, then tore loose and flew clattering across the gravel.

Lila and Jock bounded away through the forest going up the hillside, dodging through saplings and brush. Lila glanced back when they were high enough to see through the trees, her teeth chattering with terror. The wounded horse stood in the middle of the road, head down, chest heaving. Foam bubbled from its mouth. Jock kept heading up the hill. Lila tried to keep up with his longer strides. She knew that a blond girl, even an ugly one, was worth several gold pieces at the Longsite slave auction.

A raider examining the horse screamed with fury and shook his fist in their direction. Lila's fear cramped in her chest. A cursing man meant pain was on the way, and could arrive at any second. Jock ran faster. Every raiding clansman wanted easy gold, and Lila was coinage on two feet. Her breathing came in gasps now. Terror could no longer propel her uphill flight. Jock reached back to pull her on. She was ashamed that she had dismissed him earlier as weak-willed. That was only with things involving their father. In a crisis, he was stubborn and courageous.

Whatever happens, I won't leave you, he said. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she lurched along behind him.

High on the slope they stumbled onto an overgrown roadbed from ancient times marked plainly with the tracks of their goats. They were higher up the mountain than Jock had ever gone before. He surveyed the discovery with wonder, but it held no fascination for Lila. Her chest heaved as she struggled to breathe.

Let's leave the goats--and run for home, she said between breaths.

Wait, Lila. They have a horse that probably isn’t ride able. They won't follow us. We've got to get the goats while we know where they are.

If they're still after us, they've got me. I'm so tired I can't move. Lila collapsed to a patch of wet roadbed grass and sat back panting, propped on her arms, even though the left one ached. She raised her face to the drizzle of sleet that fell through the tree-tops, and tiny flecks of ice ran down her cheeks to cool her. Lila couldn't relax, though. She missed her small lance that also served as her staff. Jock had just tested the notion that an animal would fight to free itself from the lance. It proved true for horses.

I don't hear anything, Jock said. I'll go check. He climbed the steep up-hill bank and doubled back, stalking through the trees to look for the raiders. Lila was still puffing and out of breath and her mind raced ahead. Could she escape pursuing slavers once she caught her breath? Slavery would start with rape, and raiders almost always injured their victims when they forced themselves on them. The pain of physical injury would be followed by one horror of humiliation after another. Slaves at auction were stripped naked for display in front of a crowd of men, a prelude to more abuse and pain. Jock ambled back on the lane.

They're headed out on the road, Sis. He offered a hand to help her up and pulled her into a hug. Her arms folded around him eagerly. She squeezed him as she sobbed for a moment. It was the first time she could remember him intentionally hugging her.

Thank you, wonderful brother. She rubbed her face on his blanket-cloth coat to wipe the tears from her cheeks. That was such excellent lance throwing. If Papa could have seen that, he'd have to eat his words about your not being a man.

With a bashful grin Jock pushed her shoulder to release the embrace. She grabbed his arm, shook it with mock ferocity, then hugged it against her face.

They slowly followed the goat tracks up the overgrown road. She trailed behind Jock like he was forcing her to go see a hanging. Leaving the ancestral area behind without carrying out her resolution to invoke a male ancestral shade was a defeat for her. She stomped her feet as she walked, an accompaniment to thoughts of 'I hate this, I hate this.' Her entire future depended as much on success at that endeavor as it did on evading slavers.

Lila disliked most men. Men generally were mountains of bluster and noise, while their achievements only stacked up as high as the manure pile behind the barn. But she was desperate for an answer, facing her courting year and betrayal by her father. She had decided to convey her supplication to a male ancestral shade face-to-face--the dangerous way. Couldn't one of her esteemed kinsmen on the other side, where they knew the past and the future, please give her some detail that would be a sign? A scar, a mole, a falling tree, a barking dog. Some signal she could use to identify the young man she would insist on marrying even if it meant her banishment, the one who could make her life happy beyond just being an accomplice to a manure-pile existence?

Mist still hovered behind a thicket further up the mountain, or was it picking its way down to meet her? She jumped, startled, then began the chant that would entrance her mind so she could meet the shade in the middle realm, the spirit world above the Earth but below the heaven of the gods. She bobbed side to side with the rhythm as the verses passed her lips and her concentration narrowed. She tingled with excitement and dread as the misty apparition seemed to stalk, wafting between bushes and tree trunks toward her in step with the accents of her chant. The excited feeling fell behind as the sky yielded and her spirit drifted higher. Her stomach dropped with a shiver of cold. She hoped the form approaching her read her complimentary thoughts about him. High on the mountain she couldn't be treading heavy trespasser steps on a homestead. The apparition wasn't in a hurry. When it hesitated behind a thicket she took a second to pray in her chant that it wasn't malevolent.

Lila coaxed her mind to expect success. This one had to be friendly. See, he was even coming to meet her. He might even tell her where money-metal, the knobby iron rods that everyone used for money, weapons and tools, was hidden in dusty-stone slabs under moss and ferns. She shivered, however, when in one secluded recess of her mind she saw the shadowed form of a shade. He might have a face like the night sky that swallows light and shows only burning eyes. With that picture in focus, her nerve deserted her. She abruptly halted the chant and wiped the apparition out of her mind's eye. She was too afraid.

She breathed easier, but scolded herself. She never wandered this untraveled area and, anyway, she was stuck out there. She should have stayed with her trance to a conclusion. Today could have been the day. She was getting practice, though, and with practice would come confidence. Next time she'd be able to hold her concentration long enough to establish a contact.

Around the next bend, all three of their animals came into view, stripping a thicket of leafless alder saplings of their juicy bark at a wide spot where the roadway seemed to end.

Hushaway, hushaway, Lila called the herder's attention call to gather them. Jock circled behind them to push the goats toward Lila, in case they were too preoccupied with harvesting this bounty to obey the call. When Croptop heard Jock behind her she stepped away to follow Alice, but reached to get one last sweet-barked twig. She pulled the brown filigree of underbrush branches with her. She yanked the twig stubbornly, jaws working.

Yeowee, I can't believe it, Jock let out a squeal as he stared at the rock outcropping behind the tangle.

What is it? What is it? Lila hurried to his side.

I saw a glimmer of metal behind the brush. A big glimmer of metal. Both kids pulled at the branches and exposed an expanse of metal on the face of the cliff. Metal was scarce and valuable. This plate was as tall as the gables of their house and almost as wide as their barn-door. The size of it amazed both of them. But even though it looked like a door, there was no handle.

Look at the size of this thing, Lila. And it shines like someone polished it yesterday. Jock danced with elation. The rock had disintegrated on the right side where the road approached the shield, and exposed several inches of the inner frame behind the metal face.

The broken rocks in new slides are brown or rust-colored. See the blackness of the broken rocks here? It's a break-up that has weathered for a long time. Probably from ancient days after the burning-time wars. Since the shield is shiny it must be made of that rustproof metal like the pots we fetch from the ruins.

A small black box on the inner frame was exposed. Jock scratched it with a rock. It was as soft as wood, so he gave it a good smack. It shattered, and what looked like stiff strings, colored red and black and yellow, sprang out of its inner cavity. It looked to Lila like one of the strings gave a spark as the dust and fragments flew. There was nothing under the tangle of strings that told what the shield or its frame protected. Jock examined the panel carefully, and gave it a determined push. It wouldn't budge. He turned to Lila with a troubled frown, his face set in a stubborn expression that she hadn't seen very often, with his fingers hovering on his chin.

Lila, I don't want Papa to take that shield and everything behind it. I found it. I deserve whatever's here. Please don't tell anyone about my metal find. Jock finally seemed to be realizing what she had known about Thomas'sdefects of character for some time. She nodded.

Sooner or later, he'll find out, Jock. Then there'll be hell to pay.

I have to chance it. If things get too bad, I'll just abandon the find rather than have him plunder it. Promise me you won't tell!

I promise. I'll help you, too. I can be a lookout to help keep your work on it secret. It's you and me together on this adventure, clansman warrior Jock Peterson. Now he was nodding and smiling, and his hand went back to his pocket. They were partners, and if she could be of real assistance to him, she could count on his helping her later. He might be rich by then, if things went as she would want them to. This adventure could end in disaster, but she welcomed the vow since he shared the risk with her. She wore an impish grin all the way down the hill. This find had to be a first step toward the sign she'd been hoping for. The shade of an ancestor of her own blood was probably waiting behind that shield to talk with her.

* * *

The surveillance orb dropped from the ceiling to its operating position just inside the chamber before the rock's hollow boom had finished echoing in the tunnel. It spun around recording the noise and action. Lights blinked on in the corridor ceiling, and in the room it served deeper in the mountain. The lights remained on, except for the two that flashed and went dark--one with a popping noise. The camera lens in the surface of the orb jerked back and forth, trying to orient itself to changes in the light and the sound.

The surveillance orb recorded the low hum and a fluttering under the floor as valves adjusted the flow of natural gas for the increased demand from the fuel-cell.

Natural gas from the Mist Gas Field remains at ninety four percent of operative pressure, the flickering image of a female technician on the desk monitor murmured through its buzzing loudspeaker.

The gas fed the fuel-cell that supplied electricity to the crypt. Ceiling fixtures gave soft light that threw deep shadows from banks of apparatus in the room and almost hid a long, low cabinet against the right-hand wall. It had a thick layer of frost-coated ice mounding over it and extending to the floor.

A thump sounded against the door and it quivered . The camera swung around to look in that direction. The brittle foam insulation that had sealed it crumbled and drifted out of the cracks around the door as dust.

Malfunction of outer door switch and breach of the integrity of the chamber sealant barrier, combined, have created a dangerous condition: the emergency defrost cycle has been triggered, and will commence immediately, the technician spoke again in the cold and shadows.

A red light blinked on in the panel above the monitor desk, and a sequence of yellow and red lights flashed on with beeps of sound. The icy crust on the capsule began to melt and dripped into an expanding puddle on the dust-covered floor. The lens of the orb focused on the glitter and echo of the drips, and since it ignored other changes of light and sound, it seemed to be thrown into a trance state by them.

Chapter 2

"It's behind this ‘ere alder thicket." Jock grabbed two handfuls of branches and put all the muscles of his lanky young body into pulling on the springy saplings. His adult friend Berdan, his muscular shoulder high to support his tool-bag, focused his sharp blue eyes to see Jock’s find and rubbed his short brown beard with interest. Jock stepped aside with respect. Berdan was a craftsman and warrior lieutenant, and a thoroughly admirable man who was kindly toward him.

I was standing right in front of it and couldn't begin ta’ see it, Berdan said. My, what a big door! How thick ya’ spose the metal is?

Jock shook his head and looked mystified, and Lila shrugged, too. Berdan pushed the branches aside and ran his fingers over the metal. To Jock, his touch seemed almost caressing.

It might be thick enough to hold my broken plow together. He stole a glance at Jock to catch his reaction. Jock brightened and nodded.

And it's so slick. If I covered the whole moldboard with it, I might be able to plow ground too wet and sticky for our iron plows to cut through. And, cutting through this outside plate may open it, so you can get in. Berdan looked over his large cold chisel with a critical frown. This big salvage-slicer will cut it, if anything will.

You think it's a door? It doesn't have a handle, so I thought it might just be a shrine or marker, Jock said, moving up the embankment as lookout on the east side to stop the action if anyone was coming on the road.

I don't think the ancients’d chip an expensive road-cut up this rocky hillside for the sake of a marker. It's probably some kind’a storage space from afore the burning-time wars.

Lila looked at Jock, eyebrows flying high, and he looked back at her, grinning.

Berdan started in the top right corner with the chisel. The face of the door slowly buckled in as he pounded, like it was formed of thin metal.

Good sign. It's bending in, so it's definitely hollow. It vibrates, so the poundin’s loosened it. He hammered again with regular rhythmic strokes. A dented groove formed in the tough metal on the right edge of the door. Berdan extended it, making the outline of a strip about ten inches wide at the top and down for a foot or so on each side. He kept pounding until the metal finally parted.

It broke through. There's no screamin’. Not even a whisper from a shade. At least we know it isn't a tomb, Berdan said.

Jock beamed. Then as long as we can keep this a secret we'll be able to salvage it. I want you to have as much of this metal as you need, Berdan. You deserve it.

Berdan gave an assenting nod but didn't comment further on the pact, or the anger from Thomas, their father, that it might earn him.

*

Lila stood as a lookout, watching the road going west through the canyon below, and held her ears while Berdan hammered on the door. She wondered how they could keep it secret making so much noise. Leaning against a tree, her mind rose in the dance of youthful possibilities, and time was forgotten.

Her hair bounced between her shoulders as she looked one way, then the other. She both hated and loved her hair. Jock might have the resources from this discovery to finance his independence from their father but her hair was all she could count on. She hadn't cut her golden hair in two years, growing it long and counting on its prized color to attract a kind and gentle suitor. Her thirteenth birthday in March, just two months away, would commence her courting year. Her future was twice as uncertain now that her handicapped arm made her a less desirable match. Thomas wanted to choose her spouse and that was a terrible danger. Her young man would have to have a kind and gentle disposition. But could she keep her bull-headed father out of the process? Fear cinched her stomach into a knot.

Her hair had already caught the eye of one Towertown youth. He had lit up with an enthralled smile looking at her. She usually kept her left arm tight to her side, and wondered if he had noticed it. If he did come calling after her thirteenth birthday, she'd have a hearth of her own before long. She couldn't remember if the sun had been shining that day but the dazzle of his grin lit up the whole trip for her. She thought his name was Hank and he had curly hair. It was more attractive than her family's straight hair. Her runny nose was dripping and sleet ran down her cheeks but the twinkling eye of her mind rehearsed how this young man would approach and talk with her, how clever his conversation would be and how quickly they would feel affection for each other.

The day she turned fourteen, according to tradition and given that her monthly show of blood had started on schedule, her courtship year would end and they would marry. They'd have a simple wedding and settle into a small cabin in Towertown. That was two or three miles from her father's ranting but within walking distance of her wise and wonderful mother, her lame-brained but esteemed brother, her cousins and friends. Hank would treat her with respect, and would even thank her now and then for serving him a tangy stew or knitting him a woolly pair of socks. They would have a cow and she'd be done with the musk-stink of goats.

Movement up the canyon road brought her mind back to the dripping January forest and a shiver shook her.

Berdan, visitors, Lila called softly.

Berdan and Jock both ducked down and hurried to her side to peer over the edge of the road-cut and through the vegetation. Far below them a family rode into view coming from Chapman town to the west, husband and son on one horse, and mother and daughter on another. They talked with voices raised, flinging quick exclamations back and forth, pointing fingers jabbing toward the top of the hill. Then the boy slid down to the gravel and strode into the trees moving toward them.

Oh, damn, Berdan said under his breath. I was hoping to finish quickly. We better fold up our work and head across the ridge trail. We've got to stay off the road. Maybe we can return tomorrow morning before people coming from Chapman town have had time to reach this point. Berdan frowned, then nodded, like he’d decided that ought to work. He smoothed the sapling tangle back into place and brushed their tracks out of the foliage as best he could. The boy from the road didn't climb far. The family talked with animation as they traveled on.

Both Lila and Jock blew out relieved sighs as Berdan led them up the hill toward the ridge trail. They were safe for the moment, and there were good possibilities that both Jock and Berdan would benefit from the find. The benefits could be big. They shelved their hopes till the next morning's continuation of the adventure.

*

The lights in the hillside chamber burned unnoticed, day and night. Signal lights flickered on the control panel periodically, as it monitored the computer's work on a problem of great complexity. The camera moved to focus on each flicker or beep. Melt-water from the ice and frost on the capsule descended with slow drips. Late in the evening of the second day a blue light appeared on the panel over the monitor. There was a hum from the base and a last layer of brittle ice shattered and fell from the top, clattering to the floor as the capsule's sealed lid inched open on hidden hinges. It moved with the quivering motions of a stubborn electrical mechanism until it thumped to rest against the wall. A rush of steamy vapor boiled out of the warm cavity and became a cloud in the icy chamber. A man's head was visible inside, covered skin-tight with what looked like aluminized shrink-wrap. The head was motionless. It gave every appearance of being dead.

Chapter 3

Jock was still abed as the next dawn spread to daylight. He finally came dragging down the step-log, red of eye as Algyve ladled porridge from the hearth kettle.

You woke me up three times last night moaning in your sleep, Lila said.

It was true. Terrifying images had bedeviled his sleep. The events of the day before had created a mountain of uncertainty that made Jock's morning chores seem to go on forever. Thomas had risen early and left. His unannounced arrivals and departures increased the risks for the partners. Jock dreaded the inevitable explosion should his father discover that Berdan was helping him, and would benefit from his find.

When Jock carried in an armload of firewood to begin replenishing the day's cooking and heating stack, Thomas was back, slouched in his favorite bent-sapling chair at the front room hearth with one of his fringesteader friends. Even in a slouch he quivered with manic energy. His friend, Feders, was a large brawny man with a goiter lumping and quivering way out on the left side of his neck. He sat up straight to gesture as they argued. His bald and scaly head reminded Jock of a lizard, and his eyes were as cold as a snake's hunger. When Jock saw them there, throwing words back and forth like javelins, he hesitated with his load.

Could have been pounding on a wedge in a tree or anything, for God's sake, Thomas. Feders sniffed his mug with irritation. He tried to calm down his excitable friend so he could get it emptied.

No, hitting a wedge makes a 'thud' sound, Thomas insisted. It was pounding on metal.

There's a talus under the Dahlman cliff up there where everyone gets fireplace rocks.

Dressing stones makes dull 'clunk' sounds. Wendell said 'clang,' like hitting metal. He said it made the canyon ring. You heard that.

Jock stood in shock, listening to them discussing his and Berdan's work on the find up that hillside. Thomas had guessed what it was and he knew where to find it. Jock fought down the bubble of panic rising in his chest and with a conscious effort, snapped his mind back to his chore. He bent to set the firewood in its place.

Missed you yesterday, Thomas barked. Stand still when I'm talking to you. Stand up straight. That's more like it. Where'd you go?

Jock flinched. Here it comes, he thought. He looked bewildered for an instant as the times he had groveled on the barn floor screaming in pain under his father's belt or stick flooded back. So many times. That accumulation of terror nudged his determination aside. His fourteen year-old resolve crumbled.

I went back up the hillside to where I thought I saw a gleam of metal when Lila and I were being chased. I checked and found a marker or plate of some kind up there made of the rustproof metal, and started hammering on it.

Thomas turned to Feders with a wagging finger, See there. I told you that what Wendell described had to be metal salvaging.

He turned back to Jock. Feder's cousin came down the road yesterday and heard a clanging up the mountain. Farther along he saw a new path trampled through a cherry-sapling thicket. Anyway, I'm going with you when you go up there next time.

Jock was taken aback for a second, then spoke shaking his head and frowning. That metal was so high on the mountain and so hard to get at that I wondered if all the effort could be worth it. I was going to just forget about it. I'm not through cutting today's firewood. I won't have my chores done for another hour, at least.

Thomas frowned, but nodded.

* * *

After finishing his chores Jock dashed up the road to get to Berdan's shop without being caught on the way by Thomas. Berdan looked him over as he slunk in disheveled and plopped sullen onto a stool. Something had gone awry. He listened as Jock's story tumbled out, and shook his head. Here came the confrontation he had hoped to avoid.

Berdan Amos, I know now it's a mistake for me to claim that metal find. Papa will take it away from me. I can't stop him. He'll use whatever's there for boasting to his drinking comrades, and he'll claim he was the only one who recognized the metal's value. He'll make off with anything that can be peddled, and whatever he thinks has no value he'll destroy. I'd rather have whatever's there rot than see him waste it. It'll be best to just give up on it for now. I could get back to it later, maybe. I don't think anyone else will find it since they'll be looking for something out in the open. He shook his head with defeat, and his right hand started to go to his mouth. Jock caught himself. He paused as if weighing his words.

My pa won't be convinced I'm a man till ten years after everyone else is. What if--what if you staked a claim for that property?

Me? Berdan straightened with surprise.

If you owned the find you'd do something with it right in the village that would make it better for every one of us.

Berdan thought for a moment, nodding his head. I'm impressed, Jock. You're thinking like a grown-up, and willing to share like a full-fledged clan grown-up, too. I have an idea. Let's you and I go lay your problem at the feet of your uncle Carlyne.

Jock's eyebrows shot up with alarm. Carlyne and Thomas might be brothers, Petersons from the clan's leading family, but Carlyne was the successful one. He functioned as the warrior-leader of the clan, and their local town-master. Thomas was trying to undermine Carlyne's status and win favor with the