I continued to read from Baron Coranado’s report on this universe.  In flipping through the folder to the back where hid his sketches of mutated insects, a small post-it note fell out from the center crease.

"To the verser frozen in the ice, I and my wife wish we could talk to you, and hear your experiences as we are exceedingly keen on gathering data about the verse and versers.  Perhaps in another universe, we can.  I leave this report here to help you, and to start the conversation that begets knowledge, and from thus, perhaps some small wisdom.  All the best…May Ra Candleholder and the Great Dragonhawk watch over you.

–Baron Coranado and She-Who-Is-Gold"

Well, now it looked like I owed the two of them a favor since both of them were meticulous and painstaking researchers.   A heads-up on the nature of the world I was entering could be very useful.  Perhaps, I should start leaving notes where I arrived in case another verser came along behind me.  Of course, I might not want the locals to read it, which suggested putting it in Dar Koni which a fair number of versers have some idea on how to read.  I was undecided at the moment, and so turned back to reading the Report on World #312.

Day Six:

The seventeen year old female, a child really, although she doesn’t think of herself that way has prevailed upon us with much tears, and hystrionics to move our camp lest her tormenters descend upon us.  She paints gruesome pictures of the horrors they would unleash, but both I and She-Who-Is-Gold notice that many of the pertinent details are missing.

She doesn’t describe the popping sound one’s back makes as you are yanked lengthwise on a rack, as one example.  However, she does describe in detail the sensation of being put in stocks, and having the sun burn your neck as your muscles cramp.

So, I’m willing to believe she has suffered some moderately harsh corporal punishment.  But, in a Type 3b society of primitive, and isolated villages with minimal trade provided by a very few Free Traders, such is to be expected.

Day Seven:

Our new campsite is above a ravine, and to spare our ears, we’ve put Rachel Summerstars to work hauling water up hill in a bucket.  At least this way, we only have to hear her complain when she is at the top of the hill.

The fish in the river seem to be largely free of radioactivity, but smaller than one would expect in an untainted environment.  There are a number of albino fish as well, and the local fishhawks seem to avoid these.  I’m not sure why.

I think its time Gold went hunting.

Day Eight:

I’ve duct taped Rachel’s mouth shut.  Her shrieks of horror about She-Who-Is-Gold shooting a hawk with a bow were driving me crazy.  At first, she yelled about the pity of it, and then when she saw that was not working, she began to invent religious reasons, or so I believed.

This I might have respected if I had not already decided she was a self-dramatizing liar.  She-Who-Is-Gold is serious about her duties to the spirits, and had already apologized to the fishhawk for killing it.  But then, that is the difference between someone who is an opportunist and a follower of their gods.

I told her the duct tape was a spell of pain, and if she pulled it off it would hurt more and more each bit pulled off until the pain killed  her.  I should be ashamed of myself treating an uncivilized indigenous person that way, but I begin to sympathize with her tormenters who we have not seen any sign of.  I begin to expect that she ran away, and invented the whole tale.

Day Nine:

This is intolerable.

I opened one of our safe boxes to get out the hawk, and I find its gone.  Rachel threw it in the stream, and she is being defiant about it as well.  I decide not to tell her that she may have poisoned the stream.  Instead, I took out my pulse rifle, and shot one down out of the sky in front of her.

She collapsed in hysterics, and now my wife is furious with me.

However, my studies have yielded an interesting datum.  The fishhawk’s eyes are damaged by continuing radiation, and they seem not to be able to distinguish between the pale rocks of the creek bed, and the white albino fish.

Further study in the form of a trek with a geiger counter indicates that the fishhawk’s favorite watch rock from which they can examine the whole valley is hot enough to ‘cook an egg on it’ so to speak.  I don’t approach as even my microfauna guard against radiation might not be able to handle that many rads.

Day Ten through Fourteen:

To placate my wife, we move quickly toward "Haven", a local village that Rachel has heard Free Traders discuss.  This makes Rachel happy, and she does not begrudge too much the hourly stops to dig up soil samples, or the pictures taken of unique botanical specimens.

The field of five leaf clover is a pleasant surprise to all of us, although it does smell rank.

Day Fifteen:

She-Who-Is-Gold has begun to smile at me again, and I am happy.  Rachel has worn through the patience my harshness won her from my wife with her increasing tendency to treat us as servants.  But I would be happy to accept that since Gold gave me a secret grin.

We were attacked by a mountain goat today.  It lunged out of cover, and nearly gored Gold before I could knock it down with a tossed rock.  After that, She-Who-Is-Gold took her spear, and gutted it.

A close examination revealed that it had significant radiation burns, and was skeletal.  Its body was filled with huge amounts of adrenaline possibly from the pain of the burns. 

A closer examination was neccessary, and so we dissected it.  Its glands to regulate the amount of adrenaline in its blood were almost completely gone, dead tissue that had been destroyed by radiation.

So, it had been berserk when it attacked us, and in truth, I think its heart exploded as much as we killed it.

Day Sixteen:

We advance carefully with geiger counters out, and skirt a small valley which I believe must still glow blue at night.  In its depths, I see strange shapes moving about, but while my curiousity eats me, I know that radiation damage is a very hard way to go.

Day Seventeen:

We meet the Haveners.

They capture us with swords, spears, and whips in much evidence.

I am unhappy because the whips have radioactive shards of glass attached to them.  This is a sign of a 3b culture going perverse, and terror-driven.

However, Rachel when she proclaims her religion of the Green Tree is welcomed with open arms.  Myself, who has no particular god, although I like Christ and Ra Candleholder with his wife the Lady of Books, and Lord Tech, and my wife who is a devout worshipper of her spirits and their master, the Great Dragonhawk are confined.

Day Eighteen:

We escape the next night with ease.  Perhaps too easily.  However, in the night we get turned around, and walk through a High Rad Zone.

Since none of our pursuers seems close, we decide what to do with the last few days of our life here.

We have sensed a verser all along, and so we make for the verser.

Day Nineteen through Twenty-Three:

Every day was harder, and it took us a whole day to go the last five miles.  And then we discover the route to the verser is blocked.

This requires some thought.  We are tempted to give up, and move on.  Finally, we rig the Guitar Playing Robot Monkey with a camera, and lower it down a freight elevator shaft to find the verser.

We see that he is in ice, and we have stumbled on to some primitive cryofreeze facility.  After that, I retrieve the monkey, and collapse.  She-Who-Is-Gold has a slightly higher natural resistance, and she pens my note, and the last few words of this report, and sends down the monkey with the report.

After which, we will both drink the Tea of Peace, and fall asleep in each other’s arms to wake in a new world, world #313, and search out its secrets.

My eyes blur from tears, as I put down the folder on the stone floor of the room.  And then, I pick it back up, and scribble on the last page.

"I owe you. Thanks. Tadeusz."

Once that was done, I got up, and walked about.  The only way out was the freight elevator.  So, I pushed open the top hatch, and leapt up to grab the edge of the square window.  A simple pull-up, and my head protruded into darkness filled with skittering noises.

A cautious push forward of my left arm ran into dust an inch thick over cold metal.  I moderated my breating since I didn’t want to start sneezing up clouds of dust, and used that arm to begin to pull my body by friction and slight leverage up onto the roof of the freight elevator.

I hoped, and prayed, and found a central cable.  The oil on it had long since dried out which made this a basic exercise in endurance.  I began to climb the dirty, icky cable in the near-complete dark.

Counting arm lifts, I was beginning to feel good at twenty, when at thirty something ran down the cable, across my arms, down the back of my shirt.  I hung there, and then it decided to move on, and out my shirt.  It went down my leg and further on down the cable.

Rat or really large spider?

After that, I kept my ears open, and did not try to drop into trance to make the climbing easier.  At fifty feet up, my arms began to burn a bit.  At a hundred up, I took a break to wiggle my shoulders.

At one seventy-five, I touched thick, dust-laden spider silk.  Something dropped toward me, and I leapt in the dark with the light of the room far gone below. The arch of the jump stretched out, and I just knew I was going to run face first into a granite wall, and fall back and down.

Instead, my feet landed on a thin ledge, and I fell forward to smash my nose into a metal door.  I felt for the middle seam, where the doors parted, and found it.  But the door would not open.

Behind me! My senses cried out, and I ducked.  Something large and water-filled smushed and scratched past my head, and hit the door.  It slid down toward my legs, and I leapt again.

Backwards this time, I went, and caught the cable with both my hands.  This time, even as I heard things dropping toward me, and the skittering cries of my enemy, I spun about the cable horizontally.  Then I released, and flung myself at the spiderous mass on the door, and even more at the door itself.

The spider went plomph with a loud splatter, and then the doors fell forward ‘off’ their rusted into non-existence tracks.  I larrowed in light, with a graceful cat-like landing on top of the spider.

Behind me, I saw hundreds of fist-sized spiders, and one other really large football sized spider.  But they all moved rather sluggishly, and avoided the light.

I nodded to myself, and turned about, and clambered up a ramp, and went out through two doors of heavy steel, and into the great outdoors.

The exterior of the mountain was not what it had been before the bombs.  There was no mountain, no valley carpetted by pine.  Instead, a plain of shattered shale rock interspersed with chunks of limestone, and dotted with miniature joshua trees spread out before me.  A nuclear war is really bad for the environment.

The map in the folder had shown three villages.  One was Haven off to my left, or north about thirty miles.  The other, unnamed that Rachel must have come from was ahead of me to the east about ten miles.  Fifteen miles northeast of me was another village with what looked like some large structure in it.

Large structures are promising.  They tend to mean high technology.  And Haven did not sound too inviting with it imprisoning people for not worshipping a tree, if that is what they were doing.  And the other place, well, Rachel, who sounded a right troublemaker, had fled from there.  It was iffy.

I headed northeast across rocks that slid and wobbled underfoot even as rain clouds welled up in strength to the south.  The land pitched upwards, and then came to a short cliff.  Not wanting to break a leg in the wilderness, I searched to my left and right for a good half-mile looking for a pass. 

Finally, I found a narrow, winding path made by four-footed herbivores, and clambered on down with one hand dragging the ground to steady me on the steep slope.  So, my fingers came across a patch of fur.

I smelled it. Cat.  And not felinus domesticus either, I’d wager from the thickness of the hair.  It was probably a mountain lion.  And I had hardly any weapons.  This could be a problem.

At the base of the thirty foot tall cliff, I found a path leading northwest and southeast.  It looked like a human path, and so, even though I knew it took me off my course, I headed southeast through the thick dust along the bottom of the cliff.

A note chiselled into the cliff stone with uniform precision in the shape of a diamond caught my eye.

"Three knots to Ranger House.  Sign sanctioned by Hudsonian Bureau of Nature."  Since most of the ‘knots’ I knew were roughly similar to the ‘miles’ I knew, I took it in hope as a sign of a short walk ahead of me.  And it looked like this place had been named for Henry Hudson, although I could easily be totally wrong.  For all I knew this could be Central Asia, or the seven continent structure I was familiar with from my prime universe could be totally unusable here.

Eventually the cliff drooped to the ground, and left me walking down a track with intermittent lines of mint on either side.  The stuff, once planted, tends to survive, and replant itself.

Another half-mile, and I came to a log cabin.  Its porch had collapsed, and the windows were shattered, but even with its door open, it looked inviting.

And then the Siberian tiger walked out of its lair, the old Ranger House, and yawned at me with its very impressive teeth.  I’d forgotten that zoos have wild animals as exhibits, and that many of those exhibits had no doubt broken out in the bombs’ wake.  With my mouth dry, I tried to think up a plan even as four hundred fity pounds of man-eater tried to decide if he was hungry enough to get another snack right  now.