The Fly-By-Nights Read Free Page B

who could find his way to their co-ordinates. Moreover, head tech Fielding believes these co-ordinates are known to us, from marks made by our forebears on what few pre-war maps have been preserved!”
    Here pausing to let all of that sink in, Big Jon Lamon had relaxed just a little, relieved to note that the various family and craft groups had now begun to talk excitedly among themselves. For finally they had recognized at least something of how certain of his previous statements now made sense. And so for a quarter-minute Big Jon had stayed silent, letting the buzz gain momentum as it rippled through the crowd…

     
    II

     
    Garth Slattery’s thoughts, memories from a comparatively recent life which now seemed a thousand years in the past, were abruptly interrupted when the trundle swayed, lurching over an uneven mound of stony debris. Garth’s father, Zach, grasped his shoulder to hold him steady.
    “Asleep, were you?” Zach inquired.
    The trundle had steadied up and Garth shook his head. “Day-dreaming,” he answered. “Thinking back in time, to the Southern Refuge. Compared to this journey, it no longer seems such a bad place!”
    His father nodded. “Then I’d advise you to think of what we might have at journey’s end. It’s no good dwelling in the past, Garth. Especially one that’s burning in a cold, invisible fire, or perhaps beginning to shine a little, back in that great dead hole in the ground!”
    “As you say,” Garth had to agree. “But I know you too well, Father, and that your occasional talk of a future Eden is meant only to buoy me up. And really there’s no need; I’m only young, but as I’ve often heard you say, hope springs eternal. Well, it does in me anyway; and I want you to know I neither despair nor fear for whatever lies ahead—though I suspect that you do, if only for my sake…” He paused to offer a frustrated shrug, and then went on: “I think what I’m trying to say is that I’m hopeful, and that I do have plans for the future.”
    With which he almost unconsciously glanced across the weapons rack in the trundle’s central aisle, to the row of seats on the far side where Layla Morgan sat beside Ned Singer, just out of earshot by reason of the trundle’s banging and rattling. 
    Garth’s father noticed, smiling as he correctly interpreted his son’s glance and something of his “plans for the future.”
    “Perhaps you’d be more comfortable over on that side, eh?”
    It was no good pretending; Garth had given himself away on too many occasions recently; and as he knew his father, so Zach knew him just as well, if not better. And sighing, he answered, “Layla can’t seem to decide who she likes best, me or Ned Singer. Older and more experienced—the important leader of a scav team, at least as was—Ned may be more to her taste.”
    “Maybe so,” said Zach, “but I noticed it was Ned who seated himself beside Layla—not the other way around. As to who she likes best: you’ll never know unless you ask her. And remember, we mate young in the clan, for children are our future—assuming we’re to have one! As for Ned Singer: you should watch out for him. Ned’s too excitable and has a bad temper; doesn’t like to be beaten, not at anything. He had a wife, taken by disease. She was a frail thing and I didn’t know her well. There were no children, and…I don’t know, perhaps I shouldn’t mention it, but from what I saw of her she seemed to bruise too easily…”
    With that said, and as he looked here and there around the swaying trundle, Zach’s thoughts and his mood turned dark once more. Garth was right: it was only for him that Zach lightened up from time to time. But inside he had felt empty—angry and frustrated, sad and despondent—ever since his wife, Garth’s mother, had died in childbirth. While no blame attached to the boy, still the father had never stopped grieving.
    Now like Garth he let his memories drift back in time, but a great