Third World by Louis Shalako Page A

Billy Perkins was his best friend back then. He wondered
if Billy even remembered him or thought about him from time to
time.
    Hank was petrified at leaving
Earth.
     
    ***
     
    They called the area The Land of a Million Lakes, and while there probably wasn’t quite that many, to take the
wrong road and end up facing a small and nameless lake became a
part of the routine to Newton’s increasing frustration. Everything
seemed to take forever on this planet.
    Whether using the terrain map or
satellite pictures, the lack of man-made features meant it all
blended into green mush, only the texture giving a hint as to
actual vegetation, with the occasional rock outcrop in grey and the
more ephemeral watercourses shown in dotted blue lines.
    But the people were something else.
Their friendliness, their exuberance astounded him after the
austere discipline, the personal and professional reserve he’d
lived with for years.
    He’d never seen anything like it. You
asked someone their name and they started off the tale with their
great-grandpa and how he came to be here. They worked their way
through aunts and uncles, cousins and nieces and nephews, and
finally they came to their own story.
    There were three more villages, all
uninteresting in their sameness, all empty of anyone the facial
recognition software in the helmet viewers could discern, and by
the time they got out of each village, Newton was convinced they
had met pretty much everybody. Half of the buildings were shacks,
there were some small, cozy cabins, definitely in the minority, and
they had run across any number of abandoned buildings, rotting away
in the moist vegetation, some of them just heaps on the
ground.
    Everyone had questions. Everyone wanted
to meet them or just to talk with them, to offer the troops drinks
and food. They were showered with invitations to stay over, and it
was all he and the others could do to fend them off
politely.
    There was just no way he could have let
one or two troops go off with this or that family, nice as pie as
they might be. They had a schedule to keep, and more villages and
stops along the way. One complication would lead to another, and
another. They were desperate for company, and news, and a
conversation that they hadn’t already had a hundred times
before.
    They wanted to hear about
the Family, and the Empress and all the things that were going on
in the real universe.
    He’d never heard that particular term
before.
    Once Newton mentioned a short stint of
duty on Barker’s World, and some guy asked if he’d ever meet Dale
Freeman.
    As long as they were sticking to the
main northwest highway, more of a track strictly speaking, they
were making reasonable time and might still achieve their goal,
which was a small town called Black Springs about three hundred
kilometres from Capital City. At least it had a more imaginative
name.
    They had just pulled out of Shiloh,
which at least had a white-painted board church going for it and a
population of six hundred. Time hung heavy on everyone’s hands, but
there was nothing he could do about that.
    “ All right.” Newton let off
the microphone button for a moment as he collected his thoughts and
waited for the inevitable chatter to calm. “The next stop, eighty
k’s up the road is a place called Oak River. Apparently they have a
hotel. And a bar.”
    “ Yay.” The cheers and calls
in his headset sounded pretty unanimous.
    “ In the meantime, we have
had, I am pleased to announce, a continuous period of twenty-six
hours without any noticeable precipitation.”
    Jackson looked over from the driver’s
seat.
    “ I was wondering. Something
seemed unnatural.”
    Newton snorted and keyed the microphone
again.
    “ In the meantime, stay awake
if you can. It’s better to sleep in a bed and we should get there
before nightfall. Any questions?”
    They had questions. There were four or
five all speaking at once.
    “ Sorry people, you know
about as much as I do.”
    He shut his