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    Tom O'Bedlam
    Tom O'Bedlam
    Tom O'Bedlam
    Ebook424 pages6 hours

    Tom O'Bedlam

    By Robert Silverberg

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A tortured man’s visions hold the key to mankind’s future in Robert Silverberg’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece
     
    Life in the blasted wasteland of 2103 California is nasty, brutish, and short. If the savage “scratchers” don’t kill you, the poisoned environment will. But one man wanders this desolate landscape and sees beauty: glorious visions of impossible places and majestic beings not of Earth. Scorned and mocked as a madman, Tom doubts his sanity until his visions mysteriously begin to spread to others and a returning star probe offers evidence that they are real. Now, as a new religion is born, with Tom as its reluctant messiah, violent forces are unleashed—forces that have the power to transform humanity . . . or destroy it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJul 28, 2015
    ISBN9781504014212
    Tom O'Bedlam
    Author

    Robert Silverberg

    Robert Silverberg has written more than 160 science fiction novels and nonfiction books. In his spare time he has edited over 60 anthologies. He began submitting stories to science fiction magazines when he was just 13. His first published story, entitled "Gorgon Planet," appeared in 1954 when he was a sophomore at Columbia University. In 1956 he won his first Hugo Award, for Most Promising New Author, and he hasn't stopped writing since. Among his standouts: the bestselling Lord Valentine trilogy, set on the planet of Majipoor, and the timeless classics Dying Inside and A Time of Changes. Silverberg has won the prestigious Nebula Award an astonishing five times, and Hugo Awards on four separate occasions; he has been nominated for both awards more times that any other writer. In 2004, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gave him their Grand Master award for career achievement, making him the only SF writer to win a major award in each of six consecutive decades.

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    • 4/5
      Aliens are coming, and in a run-down, post-nuclear America, one man can see them particularly clearly. Or, maybe, he's a mutant giving everyone around him hallucinatory visions. It doesn't really matter which until characters have to decide whether to let him send their spirits across space, leaving their (dead) earthly bodies behind. But at that point, for the characters - and the reader - the question becomes much more urgent: what do you believe is happening, death or transcendence?A bit slow at times, but the book is a thoughtful, pulp-y exploration of the nature of faith. It could have been told more conventionally as a story about religious faith, but the fact it is framed as science fiction perhaps makes the question more accessible for a secular audience. The book has aged well - reading it for the first time in 2014, it still feels fresher and more relevant than most other science fiction from the mid 1980s.

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    Tom O'Bedlam - Robert Silverberg

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    Tom O’Bedlam

    Robert Silverberg

    This one’s for Don

    INTRODUCTION

    Tom O’Bedlam is a novel about a world in chaos, where all governmental structures have collapsed and people can be sent off instantly to alien universes at the whim of a madman. It was fitting enough that I should write such a book in the winter of 1984–1985, during a time when my own life was being swept by whirlwinds: I was between marriages, between publishers, and faced with sudden enormous financial burdens, a problem I had never had to face before, as I entered my fiftieth year.

    What I wanted to do, when I first set about inventing the set of situations out of which I would construct Tom O’Bedlam, was write a novel somewhat different from the last few that I had done. I had written the three romantic and florid volumes of the original Majipoor trilogy, and then the huge, historical adventure, Lord of Darkness, told in a deliberately archaic style, and after that the historical fantasy, Gilgamesh the King, also somewhat archaic in mode. I was ready to do something crisp and modern, elliptical, understated. The texture of the new novel began to crystallize in my mind in the early months of 1984. And, while I was making the first very preliminary sketches of themes, settings, characters, and plot, my life started to unravel.

    About my personal situation it is sufficient to say that I had been separated from my first wife for a decade but was not yet divorced, and, just as I was finally contemplating a second marriage and the divorce negotiations that that would entail, the second relationship began to grow tenuous and then underwent irreparable damage. A few months later my publishing relationship—which for a professional writer is also a kind of marriage—unexpectedly destabilized itself as well.

    My publisher had been the brilliant, irascible Donald I. Fine, a fascinating, volatile tyrant who might well have been the most hated man in publishing, but who was, nevertheless, held in great esteem for his publishing acumen even by those who loathed and feared him. During his long and turbulent career Fine had helped to launch Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, had been instrumental in making Kurt Vonnegut a nationally known figure, had rescued Irwin Shaw’s career from a disastrous downturn, and had taken Elmore Leonard from paperback obscurity to the best-seller lists. Though he knew little about science fiction, Fine had decided that his company, Arbor House, ought to publish some; he had heard about me somewhere and wanted to add me to his list; and through a dazzling technical maneuver that had left me, my agent, and my former publisher blinking in amazement, he had in 1980 succeeded in taking me away from that publisher (Bantam Books) by invoking an obscure clause in the contract for an anthology that I had done for him.

    Although I was startled to find myself so abruptly an Arbor House author, I struck up an immediate and equally surprising rapport with Don Fine. His explosive temperament and abrasive style of dealing with other people were nothing at all like mine, but we had the same high regard for the art of fiction and we both believed, also, that literary quality and commercial success were not necessarily incompatible. Don was willing to let me write whatever I pleased, within reason, was willing to pay me well for my work, and intended to apply the full resources of modern book-promotion technique to the books I wrote for him. What he offered was the intimate relationship of a small publishing house combined with the high-powered sales tactics of a big one. Despite all I had heard about his fiery nature and frequently cruel treatment of rivals and even his own employees, I was quickly swept up in a warm and rewarding friendship with my new publisher.

    There was only one little worm working its way through the apple. Because his company was undercapitalized, Fine had decided, a couple of years earlier, to sell it to the giant Hearst Corporation. He had a contract with Hearst giving him complete control over Arbor House’s editorial side, while Hearst provided financial support and distribution. He seemed content with that arrangement. I regarded it as none of my business. We were both wrong.

    In the next three years I wrote Majipoor Chronicles for Don, and Lord of Darkness, and Valentine Pontifex, and he published a major collection of my short stories, besides. I also became consulting editor for a new line of science-fiction novels that he wanted to publish, and in the first heady months snapped up books by William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Michael Bishop, and others. It would have been a wonderful line, except that most of these writers’ agents were turned off by Don’s ferocious negotiating tactics and, to my regret, very few of the deals I had hatched actually were consummated.

    And then Don got fired by Hearst.

    His five-year employment contract was up; the Hearst moguls were weary of his thorny and choleric manner; and, in a move that no one, least of all Don, had anticipated, they refused to continue him in his position as head of Arbor House. Overnight he found himself separated from the company he had founded and nurtured.

    His reaction, an altogether characteristic one, was to start a new company, Donald I. Fine, Inc., less than three months later, inviting most of his favorite Arbor House writers to join him there—a move that led immediately to lawsuits as Hearst resisted the emigration of Arbor House’s literary core.

    I was one of the writers whom Don invited to move across. Early in 1984 he flew to San Francisco to discuss it with me, making the trip so suddenly that he left his credit cards behind and I had to pay for the breakfast we shared, which is not the usual publisher-author arrangement. I told him that I still regarded him as my publisher, and that I hoped to work with him again some day. But the last thing I needed just then, while I was beginning to do the arithmetic for my divorce, was to find myself entangled in a Fine/Arbor House lawsuit over a breach of contract.

    At the time of Don’s sudden disappearance from Arbor House I was bound to that company by a two-book contract, a contract that Don himself had negotiated. The first of the two, Gilgamesh the King, was already in progress when I met with Don in San Francisco. The second, an unnamed science-fiction novel, would eventually become Tom O’Bedlam. Don wanted those books. But I let him know that I intended to deliver both of them to Arbor House in accordance with my existing contract, and then would try to bring myself over to his new company. And, when he saw that in the current chaotic state of my private life I was unwilling to risk any kind of legal quarrel, he agreed to abide by my decision.

    Indeed I did turn Gilgamesh in to the new management at Arbor House in the spring of 1984. I began sketching out Tom, and on July 31 of that year I sent a preliminary outline of the book to my new Arbor House editor, Bill Thomson, telling him, I expect to go on thinking about the book, tinkering with it, working out the actual structures of events, over the next four months. I would begin writing toward the end of the year and intended to turn the manuscript in by April or May of 1985. I told Thomson I anticipated it would run about 100,000 words, roughly a 400-page manuscript. (The final manuscript was 409 pages long. I have no idea how I do this.)

    Thomson liked the idea. But that was the last happy moment in my relationship with Arbor House.

    The new people in charge there seemed to have great difficulty keeping the company on an even keel. Money that was owed me, both for my books and for my services as a consulting editor, never seemed to arrive unless I made repeated requests for it. My Gilgamesh book was inadvertently left out of an ad for the company’s new titles. The Arbor House promotion manager, visiting San Francisco, took me out to dinner (arriving at our elegant restaurant in his shirtsleeves) and said not a word all evening about the company’s promotional plans. He talked mostly about himself. Manuscripts by other writers that I had recommended for publication by Arbor House were left unread for many months. And so on and so on, a long series of minor bunglings and irritants. The Arbor House people knew I was annoyed, and promised better things to come, but I sensed that they would have no big objection to a parting of the ways. I asked my agent to investigate the possibility that Arbor House might be willing to transfer my contract for Tom O’Bedlam to Don Fine’s new company.

    They were, and it was, and in September, 1984, even before all the contractual stuff was over and done with, I sent Don the same Tom outline that Bill Thompson had seen. He replied, hands-on editor that he was, I take your caveat that the outline is just a sketch, but you know me, I’m not able to resist asking some questions even though they most surely will be answered in the actual writing. He had questions indeed. Had there been an atomic war sometime prior to the time of the story? Was Tom a superman in any way other than through his telepathic powers? Is he insane, or faking it? How does the mindpick device work? Why doesn’t Tom have the power to send himself to the other worlds? There were many more.

    I note your list of queries with pleasure, I told him. (I had never had any evidence that my immediately previous publishers paid any attention to anything I sent them.) As usual, your thoughts are to the point and everything will be dealt with in the text. I’ll take time now only to say that this is indeed a third-person book, with several viewpoint characters, and that Tom’s only ‘superman’ characteristics are mental powers. …

    From December, 1984 to March, 1985, amid the cascading confusions of my daily existence, I worked at the book with weirdly intense concentration, writing at the computer every morning and revising extensively by hand every afternoon. Early in March I turned the manuscript in, but I went on working at it anyway. Dissatisfied with the last nine pages, I rewrote them completely. Also I decided that I had gone too far in the use of obscenities in the interest of arriving at a more contemporary tone than I had used in the Majipoor books, and now I wanted to tone them down: there is in my files a bizarre letter dated March 6 in which I note that by my computer count there are 76 ‘fucks’ in the book, of which I’ve deleted about half. I go on to list all my expurgations, a list that begins like this:

    Page 14 line 12, change fucking to goddamn

    Page 28 line 21, fuck to screw

    Page 50 line 18, fucking to screwed-up

    And so on down to line 8 of page 389, where once again I wanted fucking replaced by goddamn.

    I continued to revise the book in the next few days, partly driven by some feverish compulsion of my own, partly in response to some editorial queries from New York. On March 11, I sent Don a second revised version of the six closing pages, calling it the final final ending. A day later I mailed him—we didn’t yet have faxes—still another rewrite of the last two pages of the novel, and also a collection of niggling little revisions that probably weren’t at all necessary: Change ‘He knew he couldn’t run much longer’ to ‘He knew he wouldn’t be able to run much longer,’ and such. Fine, obviously aware that his pet science-fiction author was starting to come unhinged, replied on March 15 that it was time to stop tinkering. I don’t even think some of these changes are especially helpful, though most are. But then he added, ominously: "I’ve taken the liberty of a few minor adjustments you’ll see in galleys."

    Minor adjustments? What minor adjustments? Had I not been over that manuscript eleven million times myself in the past four months?

    But I was too tired to worry about that just then. I put the matter out of my mind and returned to the process of getting divorced and the simultaneous task of extricating myself from the increasingly unworkable relationship that had motivated me to enter into the divorce proceedings in the first place.

    When the galley proofs of Tom O’Bedlam came in, a couple of months later, I found out what Don’s minor adjustments had been. Some of them really were minor. He had deleted a comma here and there; he had taken out an unnecessary line or two that explained too much; he had modified a few more of my expletives. But in the second half of the book he had started making more significant revisions to my text, nearly all of them pointless, so far as I could see. It’s all bewildering had become "It’s all very bewildering. Robinson rose and walked toward the door was turned into Robinson got up and walked toward the door. Elszabet’s sudden surge of fear became a sudden rush of fear." Minor, yes, but completely unnecessary.

    And then, in the closing pages that I had written and rewritten so many times, he had really given way to his inner novelist. Whole sentences were added. In one place I had written, Once more he reached for her. She was shaking all over. But she didn’t pull back. This became the considerably less terse "Once more he reached for her. She was shaking all over. But this time she didn’t pull back. She was ready. She knew it was right."

    And so on and so on. I deleted as many of the unwanted changes as I could, but by now I was so tired that I had a hard time telling my prose from Don’s, and I figured that if I couldn’t tell the difference, nobody else could either. And the book came out, and got some nice reviews, and sold a decent number of copies, and I finished my divorce arrangements and got out of the unsatisfactory relationship that I had wandered into in 1984, and just about the time Tom O’Bedlam was published Karen Haber came to live with me, and before long we were married and lived happily ever after. So all turned out for the best.

    Except, of course, that Don Fine’s new publishing company was woefully undercapitalized. By the spring of 1986, right when the worst of my divorce costs were hitting me, he started having difficulty paying me the large sums of money he owed me just as I found it necessary to be turning those same large sums over to my ex-wife; when I pressed Don for the money things got raucous between us, my agent of the time proved less than useless and it became necessary for me to invoke legal help, and in the early months of 1987 I found myself terminating what had been the most interesting and creatively rewarding publishing relationship of my life. We both regretted that, I think. As I told Don in May, 1988, I hold no real hard feelings and in fact have only the deepest sadness over the unfortunate malfunctions of communications that led to the needless breach of our warm and lively relationship. I hope all is going well for you and I wish you continued success. As I may have said already, you drove me nuts in 1986 but I still think you’re a fantastic publisher.

    Don Fine and his publishing company are long gone, but Tom O’Bedlam still exists, and here it is in a nifty new edition from which I have stripped most of Don Fine’s editorial amendments, so this can in fact be considered the author’s definitive text of the novel as I wrote it in those harried months of 1984 and 1985. I will not, I promise you, revise it again at anytime during my remaining years on earth.

    —Robert Silverberg

    June 2001

    To consider the Earth the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field sown with millet only one grain will grow.

    —Metrodoros the Epicurean

    c. 300 BC

    From the hag and hungry goblin

    That into rags would rend ye,

    And the spirit that stands by the naked man

    In the book of moons, defend ye.

    That of your five sound senses

    You never be forsaken

    Nor wander from yourselves with Tom

    Abroad to beg your bacon.

    While I do sing, "Any food, any feeding,

    Feeding, drink, or clothing?

    Come, dame or maid,

    Be not afraid

    Poor Tom will injure nothing."

    —Tom O’Bedlam’s Song

    ONE

    This time something had told Tom to try going westward. West was a good direction, he figured. You head for the sunset, maybe you can walk right off the edge into the stars.

    Late on a July afternoon he came struggling up the slope of a steep dry wash and paused in a parched field to catch his breath and look around. This was about a hundred, hundred-fifty miles east of Sacramento, on the thirsty side of the mountains, in the third year of the new century. They said this was the century in which all the miseries were supposed finally to end. Maybe they really would, Tom thought. But you couldn’t count on it.

    Just up ahead he saw seven or eight men in ragged clothes, gathered around an old ground-effect van with jagged red-and-yellow lightning bolts painted on its rusting flanks. It was hard to tell whether they were repairing the van or stealing it, or both. Two of them were underneath, with their heads and shoulders poking into the propeller gearbox, and one was fiddling with the air intake filter. The rest were leaning against the van’s rear gate in a cozy proprietary way. All of them were armed. No one paid any attention to Tom at all.

    Poor Tom, he said tentatively, testing the situation. Hungry Tom. There didn’t seem to be any danger, though out here in the wild country you could never be sure. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, hoping one of them would notice him. He was a tall, lean, sinewy man with dark, tangled hair, somewhere around thirty-three, thirty-five years old: he gave various answers when he was asked, which wasn’t often. Anything for Tom? he ventured. Tom’s hungry.

    Still no one as much as glanced toward him. He might as well have been invisible. He shrugged and took his finger-piano from his pack, and began to strum the little metal keys. Quietly he sang:

    Time and the bell have buried the day,

    The black cloud carries the sun away—

    They went on ignoring him. That was all right with Tom. It was a lot better than being beaten up. They could see he was harmless, and most likely they’d help him out, sooner or later, if only to get rid of him. People generally did, even the really wild ones, the killer bandidos: not even they would want to hurt a poor crazy simpleton. Sooner or later, he figured, they’d let him have a bit of bread and a gulp or two of beer, and he’d thank them and move onward, westward, toward San Francisco or Mendocino or one of those places. But five minutes more went by, and they continued not to acknowledge his presence. It was almost like a game they were playing with him.

    Just then a hot, biting wind rose up suddenly out of the east. They paid attention to that. Here comes the bad news breeze, muttered a short thick-featured red-haired man, and they all nodded and swore. God damn, just what we need, a wind full of hard garbage, the red-haired man said. Scowling glaring, he hunched himself down into his shoulders as if that would protect him from whatever radioactivity the wind might be carrying.

    Turn on the props, Charley, said one with blue eyes and rough, pitted skin. Let’s blow the fucking stuff back into Nevada where it came from, hey?

    Yeah. Sure, one of the others said, a little sour-faced Latino. That’s what we oughta do. Sure. Christ, blow it right back there.

    Tom shivered. The wind was a mean one. The east wind always was. But it felt clean to him. He could usually tell when radiation was sailing on the wind that blew out of the dusted places. It set up a tingling sensation inside his skull, from an area just above his left ear to the edge of his eyebrow-ridge. He didn’t feel that now.

    He felt something else, though, something that was getting to be very familiar. It was a sound deep in his brain, the roaring rush of sound that told him that one of his visions was starting to stir in him. And then cascades of green light began to sweep through his mind.

    He wasn’t surprised that it was happening here, now, in this place, at this hour, among these men. An east wind could do it to him, sometimes. Or a particular kind of light late in the day, or the coming of cold, clear air after a rainstorm. Or when he was with strangers who didn’t seem to like him. It didn’t take much. It didn’t take anything at all, a lot of the time. His mind was always on the edge of some sort of vision. They were boiling inside him, ready to seize control when the moment came. Strange images and textures forever churned in his head. He never fought them any longer. At first he had, because he thought they meant he was going crazy. But by now he didn’t care whether he was crazy or not, and he knew that fighting the visions would give him a headache at best, or if he struggled really hard he might get knocked to his knees, but in any case there was nothing he could do to keep the visions from coming on. It was impossible to hold them back, only to bang and jangle them around a little, and when he tried that he was the one who got most of the banging and jangling. Besides, the visions were the best thing that had ever happened to him. By now he loved his visions.

    One was happening now, all right. Yeah. Yeah. Coming on now, for sure. The green world again. Tom smiled. He relaxed and yielded himself to it.

    Hello, green world! Coming for to carry me home?

    Golden-green sunlight glimmered on smooth alien hills. He heard the surging and crashing of a distant turquoise sea. The heavy air was thick as velvet, sweet as wine. Shining elegant crystalline forms, still indistinct but rapidly coming into sharp focus, were beginning to glide across the screen of Tom’s soul: tall fragile figures that seemed to be fashioned of iridescent glass of many colors. They moved with astonishing grace. Their bodies were long and slender, with mirror-bright limbs sharp as spears. Their faceted eyes, glittering with wisdom, were set in rows of three on each of the four sides of their tapering diamond-shaped heads. It wasn’t the first time Tom had seen them. He knew who they were: the aristocrats, the princes and dukes and countesses and such, of that lovely green place.

    Through the vision he could still dimly make out the seven or eight scruffy men clustered around the ground-effect van. He had to tell them what he was seeing. He always did, whenever he was with other people when a vision struck. It’s the green world, he said. You see the light? Can you? Can you? It’s like a flood of emeralds pouring down from the sky. He stood with his legs braced far apart, his head thrown back, his shoulders curving around as if they were trying to meet behind him. Words spilled from his lips. Look, there are seven crystallines walking toward the Summer Palace. Three females, two males, two of the other kind. Jesus, how beautiful! Like diamonds all up and down their skins. And their eyes, their eyes! Oh, God, have you ever seen anything so beautiful?

    Hey, what kind of nut do we have here? someone asked.

    Tom barely heard. These ragged strangers hardly seemed real to him now. What was real were the lords and ladies of the green world, strolling in splendor through glades and mists. He gestured toward them. That’s the Misilyne Triad, d’ye see? The three in the center, the tallest. And that’s Vuruun, who was ambassador to the Nine Suns under the old dynasty. And that one—oh, look there, toward the east! It’s the green aurora starting! Jesus, it’s like the sky’s on fire burning green, isn’t it? They see it too. They’re all pointing, staring—you see how excited they are? I’ve never seen them excited before. But something like this—

    A nut, all right. A real case. You could tell, right away, first thing when he walked up.

    Some of these crazies, they can get damn ugly when the fit’s on them. I heard stories. They bust loose, you can’t even tie them down, they’re so strong.

    You think he’s that bad?

    Who the fuck knows? You ever see anybody this crazy?

    Hey, crazy man! Hey, you hear me?

    Let him be, Stidge.

    Hey, crazy man! Hey, nutso!

    Voices. Faint, far-off, blurred. Ghost-voices, buzzing and droning about him. What they were saying didn’t matter. Tom’s eyes were glowing. The green aurora whirled and blazed in the eastern sky. Lord Vuruun was worshipping it, holding his four translucent arms outstretched. The Triad was embracing. Music was coming from somewhere, now, a heavenly music resonating from world to world. The voices were only a tiny scratching sound lost somewhere within that great mantle of music.

    Then someone hit him hard in the stomach, and he doubled over, gagging and gasping and coughing. The green world whirled wildly around him and the image began to break up. Stunned, Tom rocked back and forth, not knowing where he was.

    Stidge! Let him be!

    Another punch, even harder. It dizzied him. Tom dropped to his knees and stared with unfocused eyes at brown wisps of withered grass. A thin stream of puke erupted from him. It felt like his guts ripping loose and spewing out of his mouth. It was a mistake to have let himself fall down, he knew. They were going to start kicking him now. Something like this had happened to him last year up in Idaho, and his ribs had been six weeks healing.

    "Dumb—crazy—nut—"

    Stidge! Damn you, Stidge!

    Three kicks. Tom huddled low, fighting the pain. In some corner of his mind one last fragment of the vision remained, a sleek and gleaming crystalline shape, unrecognizable, vanishing. Then he heard shouts, curses, threats. He was aware that a fight was going on around him. He kept his eyes closed and drew his breath carefully, listening for the inner scrape of bone on bone. But nothing appeared to be broken.

    Can you stand up? a quiet voice asked, a little while later. "Come on. Nobody’s going to hurt you now. Look at me. Hey, guy, look at me."

    Hesitantly Tom opened his eyes. A man whose face he did not know, a man with a short-cropped dense black beard and deep dark rings under his eyes—one of those who had been working inside the gearbox before, most likely—was crouching beside him. He looked just about as mean and rough as the others, but somehow there seemed to be something gentler about him. Tom nodded, and the man put his hands to Tom’s elbows and delicately lifted him.

    Are you all right?

    I think so. Just shook, some. More than some.

    Tom glanced around. The red-haired man was slumped down by the side of the van, spitting up blood and glaring. The others were standing back in a loose semicircle, frowning uneasily.

    Who are you? the black-bearded man asked.

    He’s just a fucking nut! the red-haired one said.

    Shut up, Stidge. To Tom the man said again, What’s your name?

    Tom.

    Just Tom?

    Tom shrugged. Just Tom, yeah.

    Tom from where?

    Idaho, last. Heading for California.

    You’re in California, the black-bearded man said. You going toward San Francisco?

    Maybe. I’m not sure. Doesn’t matter a whole lot, does it?

    Get him out of here, Stidge said. He was on his feet again. God damn you, Charley, get that nut out of here before I—

    The black-bearded man turned. Christ, Stidge, you’re asking for a whole lot of trouble. He brought his right arm up across his chest and cocked it. There was a laser bracelet on his wrist with the yellow ready light glowing. Stidge looked at it in astonishment.

    Jesus, Charley!

    Just sit back down over there, man.

    Jesus, he’s only a nut!

    "Well, he’s my nut now. Anybody hurt him, he’s gonna get hard light through his belly. Okay, Stidge?"

    The red-haired man was silent.

    Charley said to Tom, You hungry?

    You bet.

    We’ll give you something. You can stay with us a few days, if you like. We’ll be going toward Frisco if we can ever get this van moving. His dark-ringed eyes scanned Tom closely. You carrying anything?

    Tom patted his backpack uncertainly. Carrying?

    Weapons. Knife, gun, spike, bracelet, anything?

    No. Nothing.

    "Walking around unarmed out here? Stidge is right. You got to be crazy. Charley flicked a finger toward the blue-eyed pitted-faced man. Hey, Buffalo, lend Tom a spike or something, you hear? He needs to be carrying something."

    Buffalo held out a thin shining metal strip with a handle at one end and a teardrop-shaped point at the other. You know how to use a spike? he asked. Tom simply stared at it. Go on, Buffalo said. Take it.

    I don’t want it, Tom said. Someone wants to hurt me, I figure that’s his problem, not mine. Poor Tom doesn’t hurt people. Poor Tom doesn’t want any spike. But thanks. Thanks anyway.

    Charley studied him a long moment. You sure?

    I’m sure.

    Okay, Charley told him, shaking his head. Okay. Whatever you say.

    They don’t come no crazier, do they? the little Latino asked. We give him a spike, he smiles and says no thanks. Out of his head crazy. Out of his fucking head.

    There’s crazy and crazy, said Charley. Maybe he knows what he’s doing. You carry a spike, you likely to annoy somebody who’s got a bigger spike. You don’t carry any, maybe they let you pass. You see? Charley grinned. He clapped his hand down on Tom’s bony shoulder, hard, and squeezed. You’re my man, Tom. You and me, we going to learn a lot from each other, I bet. Anyone here touches you, you let me know, I’ll make him sorry.

    Buffalo said, You want to finish on the van now, Charley?

    To hell with it. Be too dark to work, another couple hours. Let’s get us some jackasses for dinner and we can do the van in the morning. You know how to build a fire, Tom?

    Sure.

    All right, build one. Don’t start no conflagration, though. We don’t want to call attention to ourselves.

    Charley began pointing, sending his men off in different directions. Plainly they were his men. Stidge was the last to go, limping off sullenly, pausing to glower at Tom as though telling him that the only thing keeping him alive was Charley’s protection, but that Charley wouldn’t always be there to protect him. Tom took no notice. The world was full of men like Stidge; so far Tom had managed to cope with them well enough.

    He found a bare place in the dry grass that looked good for making a fire and began to arrange twigs and other bits of kindling. He had been working for about ten minutes, and the fire was going nicely, when he became aware that Charley had returned and was standing behind him, watching.

    Tom?

    Yeah, Charley?

    The black-bearded man hunkered down next to him and tossed a narrow log on the fire. Good job, he said. I like a neat fire, everything lined up straight like this. He moved a little closer to Tom and peered around this way and that as if making sure no one else was nearby. I heard what you were saying when you were in that fit, Charley went on. His voice was low, barely more than a whisper. "About the green world. About the crystal people. Their shining skins. Their eyes, like diamonds. How did you

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