Oceanmouth’s car shop was corrugated tin painted dull red. Three bright garage doors stood open in the cool evening, and Jim walked across the oilstained driveway pulling out two hundred dollars in cash.
The garage was dim, and smelled sensuously of disassembled engines, of oily cylinder heads and crankshafts and lifting rods. Jim took in the hundreds of shapes hanging from the walls and ceiling‑‑hoses, tires, wires, and wrenches. A boy pulled himself from under the brightly lighted hood of Jim’s Mato 455 GLX and pointed at the dark green semi-truck parked in the alley.
“Hey, Jim, I’ve already got our first job lined up,” Oceanmouth said. “That is, if you’re still up for it. There’s this TV shop over in North Zarreich that’s moving to South Zarreich. We’re gonna load up the whole thing and drive it down there for six hundred bucks. Think that’ll be enough?”
“Well … whatever you think,” Jim said. “I mean, we have to find out the mileage that thing gets and make sure we’re getting a profit …”
“For sure,” Oceanmouth said. He wore a blue mechanic’s shirt and a blue baseball cap. His big round face was smeared with grease, and under the bar of fluorescent light his skin looked green. The kid’s eyes were huge, dilated, and bloodshot. “Course we hafta learn how to drive the damn thing first,” he went on. “I’m sure we’ll get some practice before the night’s over. This TV shop guy says there’s all sorts of shortages of truck transportation down in Drulgoorijk. We could head down there right after.”
“But … isn’t that something like four hundred miles?” Jim said.
“Yeah, it’ll be a good long drive, but we really oughta be able to clean up. We could even set up shop there sometime.”
Jim watched Oceanmouth make a few adjustments on the Mato, unhook the portable light, turn it off and let the hood slam shut.
“That oughta hold ‘er, for now,” Oceanmouth said. “Till we get those new pistons in next week, anyway.”
I can’t believe he’s just a KID! Jim thought. Christ, he’s still in high school! How can a kid DO all this? Own his own shop, make all these plans?
Oceanmouth set the light on the floor and pulled a set of keys out of his pocket. “Let’s get going, Jim. Really, this is gonna be so much fun.”
*
In the low-ceilinged shop Jim hauled another heavy box off a hand truck and swung it onto the rows of boxes stacked five high. There were so many of them, and each was so heavy, that Jim had long ago stopped caring whether he was breaking the damn TV sets when he slammed them to the floor. Loading the van had taken past nine PM, he and Oceanmouth were so new to this business. Then they’d driven to South Zarreich and spent two more hours unloading.
The front of the shop was a glass wall showing low black buildings, a couple lampposts sticking into the empty night, and the dark shape of their giant semi-truck, its diesel rattling noisily against the asphalt. Oceanmouth was wheeling in their other hand truck.
“This is the last one, man,” Oceanmouth said, running his grimy fingers through thin sweaty red hair. “Thank God!”
“Here‑‑” Jim said, yanking one of the two boxes off and throwing it on top of the pile. His arms shook with fatigue and his back was about to snap. Oceanmouth got the other box and dumped it on the floor.
“Well, boys, that’s just fine,” said Garsniyyj, emerging from a tiny office in the rear. Tall and bearded, he spoke with a Middle Eastern accent and wore a white sportcoat over a black turtleneck sweater. What looked to Jim like a knife scar went from his upper lip past his right nostril. His eyes were dark and cold. “Here’s your six hundred, and thanks a lot.”
“Hey, man, thanks,” Oceanmouth said. “Anytime you need anything trucked in, just give us a call.”
“For sure, boys,” said Garsniyyj, surveying the rows of boxes. The rest of the shop was brown-paneled wall and pungent new green carpet. “You’ve done a great job.”
Why does this jerk keep calling me BOY? Oceanmouth I can understand‑‑but is this guy so stupid he doesn’t know I’m twenty-three? Hell, I’m a college graduate! I’m a goddamn ARCHITECT! I’m just doing this job because–because–
Why AM I doing it?
And why on earth did Garsniyyj pick this location anyway? Who in their right mind would drive down here to this CESSPOOL?
Railroad tracks sliced across the broken street and made this intersection look like a freight yard. For square miles around there was nothing but unending urban blight. A few of the giant warehouses might still be doing business, but most had been abandoned and looked like the sort of places where contract killings were negotiated. An hour ago Garsniyyj had driven them in his sports car to a donut shop two miles away, but in the blackness all Jim had seen was empty streets, low telephone wires, ancient factories and warehouses, and freeways that strode over the area, cutting it to pieces. The few streetlamps showed only little circles of cratered asphalt. In North Zarreich Garsniyyj’s shop had been located in a pleasant and accessible shopping center, and even at nine PM Jim had seen twenty or thirty customers poking around. He’d tentatively mentioned all this to Garsniyyj, saying: “Think you’ll do any business down here?” And Garsniyyj had just shrugged and said: “Never can tell, can you?”
“Let’s get out of this place,” Jim said when Oceanmouth climbed again into the driver’s seat.
“Yeah, I’m beat,” Oceanmouth said. “Wanna learn to drive this thing now?”
“Uh … no, not now … let’s just get out of here. This place is getting to me …”
Oceanmouth shrugged and began moving through the dark warehouse streets. “Listen, you still wanna drive down to Drulgoorijk and check out the place?”
“You mean now? Tonight?”
“Sure‑‑didn’t we talk about going right after the TV run?” Oceanmouth had the engine flat out, the truck straining up a ramp marked “Doomboat Freeway‑‑South.”
“Well, yeah, but … I didn’t think you were serious.”
Oceanmouth grinned. “C’mon, man, relax. It’ll be fun. The Doomboat’s a great road‑‑especially at night. You’ll love it down south.”
“I don’t know, man. I’m pretty wiped out as it is …”
“C’mon, man, we’ll have a fantastic time, man. Just sit back and relax.”
Just to be riding and not slinging boxes was such a relief that Jim had trouble focusing on what Oceanmouth was saying. The truck rose and entered the broad plain of a ten-lane freeway floating in blackness. Tiny scattered lights drifted to the sides of the road.
I can’t THINK! I’m so zonked I can barely SEE! Yeah, maybe let Oceanmouth do whatever he thinks best. While maybe I sit back and grab some sleep‑‑
Up ahead a sign read “Leaving Zarreich. Entering Village of Hurgtzeit, Pop. 1,500.” But from the road it was the same black ocean to either side. The only difference was that the elevated freeway finally lowered itself and became part of the ocean, rising and falling on the black waves. Ahead, the truck’s headlights kept showing the next part of the path to hurtle through.
“I feel better now that we’re out of that damn city,” Jim said.
“You know, man,” Oceanmouth said, “I think you’re right. I’ve noticed you don’t take to Zarreich very well. A lot of people just don’t get along there, I guess. Something about the place, maybe.”
“It’s a goddamn nightmare. Gives me the creeps. Like one big ghetto.” Jim shuddered. “Like Garsniyyj’s stupid TV store. What’s with that guy anyway? That store’s going nowhere in South Zarreich‑‑”
Oceanmouth shrugged. “Yeah, I know what you mean, man.”
“The whole damn city’s like that,” Jim said. “Doesn’t make any sense. Maybe I should just never set foot in Zarreich again. Get it totally out of my system.”
“Wow …” Oceanmouth said. “So where would you go?”
“Well … we’re going to this Drulgoorijk place,” Jim said. “Aren’t we gonna set up shop there? You were telling me about the beer gardens, and the parks and the colleges, and all that‑‑”
Oceanmouth grinned. “Well, I really just planned to stay a few weeks and make a bundle. Course, I suppose we could open a branch office there. If we make enough, we’ll just buy another truck and you work out of Drulgoorijk and I’ll work out of Zarreich.”
“You mean … you wouldn’t stay with me there?”
“C’mon, man, my home’s Zarreich,” Oceanmouth said. “I’d never leave it. We’d just hafta stay in telepathic communication and all, man. Ya know?” He punched Jim on the shoulder and grinned.
“I don’t know … I just can’t go back there …”
There was a long silence. “Besides, I’ve got my shop back there,” Oceanmouth said. “And your car is back there waiting for your pistons to come in.”
Jim nodded slowly. Why am I doing this? Just to cover the Mato overhaul? He would’ve LET me pay the damn $200 bucks a month for as long as it took!
Wouldn’t he?
God, why am I going into BUSINESS with him?
Is that what I’m doing?
“Hey, man, just sit back and enjoy the ride,” Oceanmouth said. “Think about all this later. We’ll need about six or seven hours to get to Drulgoorijk, and we can just take turns driving and have a good time.”
The truck went deeper and deeper into the black land. There were no more lights were at the side of the road, just the truck headlights carving out sections of space. Jim had his window partway down and could smell the fields, the earth, the land in darkness.
Are you an idiot, to throw in with a sixteen year-old KID?
“Yeah … I need to think about … a lot of things,” Jim finally said.
*
Diesel roars, giant trucks shuffling around. Jim put on the brakes and crawled through the mess. He’d been driving for two hours and his head was shot. A highway patrolman waved at the cab. “I said get those damn headlights off, mister!” he snarled. Before Jim could react Oceanmouth reached over and snapped the headlights off. Gone was the gray rear of the truck in front‑‑gone were the countless semi-trucks and automobiles milling over two lanes and two shoulders. Instead there was total blackness. Jim was terrified. He couldn’t see a thing.
“Move it on over to the side of the road!” the cop yelled.
“What the hell?” Jim shouted back.
Are we being arrested? All these trucks and cars being arrested? Is the penalty to have to drive without headlights? How can anyone see where he’s going?
“Don’t talk back to me, mister! Move that pile of crap over now!”
“Do as he says, man,” Oceanmouth said. “This is damn serious.”
“What the hell …” Jim protested. “I can’t see‑‑where that truck is‑‑” But he hauled the sluggish wheel over and got the semi onto the shoulder. Jim couldn’t even see the steering wheel he held in his hands.
Jesus God, has something happened to me? Have I gone crazy? Have I been killed? Something wrong with my spinal cord? Epilepsy? Brain damage?
Jim sat with his heart hammering. He was cut off from everything except that cop voice: “Turn the engine off and stay put. Your life may depend on it.”
Jim felt the engine shut down, then realized Oceanmouth had done it. “What’s the problem, officer?” Oceanmouth said. “Got a strike going here?”
“Yeah, that’s right‑‑and this is the worst one we’ve seen,” said the cop. “They’ve stopped all work on the interchange to the Drulgoorijk road. It’s a total mess‑‑it may take all night to straighten this one out. You people stay put and don’t honk your horn like all these idiots are doing. Might attract some gunfire.” Behind them, a car approached with its lights on high beam, and Jim heard the cop walk away to deal with that vehicle.
“What’s going on?” Jim said. “What’s all this? Why are we stopped here?” But then he could see again. The car coming up was splashing light across parked semi-trucks and cars up and down the side of the road‑‑and then Jim saw the barricade.
It was a sloppy set of poles, wire, and parked cars and trucks strewn across the roadway. It looked a hundred feet deep to Jim, occupying the entirety of a bridge surface across a stream. No one could get across the steep banks of that stream. “My … God!” Jim moaned. “What on earth …?”
“Strikers,” Oceanmouth said. “You read about them in the papers every so often. I was caught in a road strike a few years ago. We just have to be patient.”
“Why? What’s going on?” And now the car’s headlights went off, and Jim heard it scrunch off onto the shoulder and park, engine shutting off.
“I’m not sure,” Oceanmouth said as everything went solid black again. “Let’s check this out.” Jim heard the passenger door open and then Oceanmouth’s feet stamping on the gravel.
“Hey!” Jim cried. “Stay put, man. Or that cop‑‑”
“Don’t worry about him. We’ll just sweet-talk him. C’mon, man, let’s see what’s going on.”
Up to this moment encountering dozens of slowing trucks, putting on brakes and downshifting, hassling with the cop, turning off the lights and the engine, had all been a simple adrenaline rush. Now Jim realized that something was wrong here. To open the door and jump to the ground took more courage that he thought he had. For all he knew the ground down there had ceased to exist. But he found his feet striking the gravel, and he came around the hot front of the truck.
“So it’s construction workers this time, huh?” he heard Oceanmouth saying.
“That’s right,” came the cop’s voice again. “And that’s never happened before. We get a strike and a roadblock every few months, but it’s usually factory workers, or else a trucking company. We’ve never had road builders go on strike. We’re trying to get negotiators out there now to ‘em, but they won’t talk‑‑”
“Wow …” said Oceanmouth. “Construction workers‑‑that is new. They’ve always been against anyone who went on strike on the roads.”
“On strike …?” Jim said.
“Who’s that?” said the cop.
“That’s my partner‑‑Jim,” Oceanmouth said. “Don’t worry, he won’t crack.”
“Hello, Jim,” said the cop. “I’ve just been telling people to stay in their cars or trucks so we don’t have people going insane out here from the darkness. But if you’re like Oceanmouth here and won’t crack, it’s okay to come on out and stretch your legs.”
“What’s happening?” Jim cried, aware of the hysteria in his voice as he launched his question into the unknown, still unable to see Oceanmouth and the cop who stood only a couple feet away. He also knew Oceanmouth was wrong about him. The total absence of light, of any means of judging space and distance in the familiar visual ways, was about to make Jim start screaming.
“The workers on the interchange a couple miles up went on strike,” the cop said, obviously reassessing Oceanmouth’s appraisal of Jim’s sanity. “They’ve stopped all work and they’ve roadblocked this highway at the bridge here, and all the other highways leading in here.”
“But‑‑why are the lights out?”
“The lights always go out in a strike,” the cop said. Here Jim felt a pat on his arm. He knew the cop was three feet away, so this had to be Oceanmouth, trying to reassure him. Jim began to have a sense of himself, the cop, and Oceanmouth as volumes in this blackness. Yes, their voices belonged to actual volumes. And though Jim couldn’t even see his own body, and had been feeling that his own voice had no real point of origin, Oceanmouth had confirmed that his own volume did exist.
“See, Jim,” Oceanmouth said, “strikers always make these roadblocks at night and demand the headlights be put out. If they strike near a town they’ll put out all the lights out in the town. And they want all the engines turned off, too.”
“But‑‑we need light‑‑”
“Well, it’s usually a better idea to comply,” the cop said. “Some of these strikes have gone on for hours at night, and if you burn your lights you’ll just run down your battery. So we’ve got to conserve energy. We’re too far from the nearest town as it is‑‑about a hundred miles.” Jim realized that the cop himself was edgy and was glad for a chance to shoot some bull with truckers.
“Can’t one truck put some lights on for a few minutes, then another one, then another one?” Jim said. “That way you could see what you were doing.”
“There’s nothing to see,” the cop said. “We’re not doing a damn thing here but waiting. How long it’ll be nobody knows. Highway construction workers, that’s new. Never been done before. They’ve always been the best paid of anyone. Might take weeks for all I know.”
“Besides,” Oceanmouth put in, “didn’t you see the strikers in the roadblock? The guys with rifles? Man, they’ll just shoot out your headlights. It’s happened before. When I got stopped that time I saw a car get its lights shot out.”
“God …” Jim gasped. “No, I didn’t see anyone in the roadblock‑‑” Were angry men with guns standing amid the tangle of wire and parked cars and trash up the road? “God‑‑they could pick us off by the sound of our voices‑‑”
“Could be,” the cop said.
Jim drew back, resolving to be silent and stay away from this noise-producing cop. He stumbled into something monstrous. “Jesus …!” he groaned.
“What the hell, man?” Oceanmouth said.
“God‑‑nothing‑‑just the truck‑‑I just banged up against the truck …” Jim felt the metal sides of the semi. So another volume existed in this blackness, claiming a large chunk of universal space as its own. Jim felt himself well-balanced on the ground, which was a plane upon which all these ongoing events rested. And there were other trucks and people here. Men with guns …
We’re VOLUMES! All of us! Volumes in the BLACKNESS! I can FEEL all of us!
From behind, far away, a pinpoint of light. Jim turned to it in relief. The headlights grew as the engine sound increased. Light began accumulating at the scene. Jim first saw the cop’s legs in ghostly outline, then Oceanmouth’s‑‑then, painfully, as his pupils contracted, he took in the shapes of parked trucks and cars, a few drivers standing around, a few other cops. The light kept growing, the first cop already leaving to take care of the new vehicle. It was a car, its headlights illuminating a path straight down the empty pavement between the parked cars and trucks.
“Hey, man, look!” Oceanmouth said.
Jim turned. So fresh and smarting was his vision that he was only seeing the sharp outlines of objects. He wasn’t able to consider the color, texture, or overall shapes. He couldn’t get any sense of volume from what he was seeing‑‑everything was two-dimensional. Volume was something he had learned to feel with his body, and now that sight had returned he could no longer understand the volumes around him.
But while he looked he began to feel with his body at the same time. He had a sense of the roadblock in front him‑‑the jagged wires and poles, the cars and pickups parked sideways, plus garbage cans, oil drums, boards, plastic bags, and signs that Jim could now read: “Keep Out.” “Go to Hell.” “On Strike.” Behind some of the boards Jim could see riflemen. Men in leather jackets with caps and beards, men in overalls and T-shirts, with beer bellies and bags under their eyes. Glowering at the bright car lights, shifting their rifles …
Behind him Jim heard the cop yelling: “C’mon, get those damn lights off!”
“Listen, I’m not about to put up with any strike,” the driver said, with an accent Jim thought came from a different section of the country. “I’m just going to turn around and drive back the way I came. I’ll just detour over to‑‑”
“Forget it, mister! Those strikers want the lights off and the engine stopped!”
“I will not turn my engine off! I will not turn my lights off!”
“Screw you, jerk! See this .38 here? Believe me if you don’t have those lights off before I count to three‑‑”
“You can’t intimidate me, pig!”
The car’s headlights continued to stretch over miles of distance. To the left and right the black fields glowed dully in the rays. Beyond the reach of the headlights Jim had a sense of flat emptiness running for hundreds of miles.
But ahead and to the left rose something Jim couldn’t explain. It defied everything about this land‑‑it defied the flatness‑‑it even defied the blackness. It was level upon level of lines and shapes, and Jim felt its impossible massiveness in his gut. It was a giant freeway interchange, fifteen levels of crisscrossing freeways, with construction cranes striking up and then sideways into the black sky. Cement trucks and pickups were parked on the various levels. Jim could see gaps in the ramps leading from level to level. The structure was incomplete. The workers were abandoning it.
“It’s too bad,” Oceanmouth whispered. “Now we’ll never get to Drulgoorijk.”
“What?” Jim cried. “There’s no other way?”
Oceanmouth shrugged in the glare. Jim turned back to the interchange. That incredible structure … being abandoned … it would have tied so much together, it would have synthesized so many forces … roads would have come together there, cities would have been joined. Somehow Jim knew this was the only road south and that the strikers would never return to work. The incomplete interchange would stand for centuries like a pharaoh’s tomb. Jim had come as far south as he ever would.
“Listen, mister, you are under arrest, do you hear me? Got that? Got that?”
“I don’t recognize your authority! You can’t arrest me and you know it!”
“Hey‑‑get those damn headlights off!” came a cry.
“Get the headlights off!”
“Get ‘em off! Now!”
The shouts came from within the tangled mess of the deep roadblock. The sullen bearded men were shouldering their rifles.
“Get ‘em off!” came another shout. “We give you too much light as it is!”
The cop dove to the shoulder as shot after shot exploded from tiny stars down the road. Jim felt bullets whistling through in the air, cutting slender deadly volumes past him and Oceanmouth. In a moment the headlights were out, and Jim reeled with afterimages of colors superimposed on the volume of the car he could still feel with his body. The engine cut out. The firing ceased. Jim heard the car door open, then running on the asphalt.
“They shot my car! They shot my goddamn car!”
Now Jim could see flames. The front of the car again came into visual existence. Shapes were rushing about it. Hissing. Fire extinguishers. Darkness returned.
“And keep your damn lights out!” came a shout. “We’ve got enough ammo to put all your lights out!”
The afterimages dissipated. All was again solid black. But Jim could still feel the volume of every object.
“Man, why are these cops so cowed?” he asked Oceanmouth. “They could easily get out their guns and wipe those strikers right out.”
“I don’t know,” Oceanmouth said. “Let’s find out. C’mon.”
Jim followed Oceanmouth up the road. Then he realized where he was headed. “Hey‑‑are you crazy?” he said, losing balance and putting a hand out to a truck to steady himself. But of course he’d known the truck was right there. He knew the volumes of all the cars and trucks, all the people. He knew how to negotiate the solid black, and now he confidently followed Oceanmouth to the barricade.
“Hey!” Oceanmouth called. “Strikers! What’s going on?”
“Who’re you?” came the reply. “Damn cops?”
“No, man, truckers,” Oceanmouth said. “What’s happening?”
“We’re on strike, whatcha think?” came the voice. “Got any cigarettes?”
“Hell, no,” Oceanmouth said. “You couldn’t light one, anyway.”
“I suppose that’s right. Two of you there?”
“That’s right,” said Oceanmouth. “I’m Oceanmouth. This is Jim here.”
“Hi,” Jim said.
“What’s happening?” said the man.
“I don’t know,” Jim replied. “We were just driving to Drulgoorijk to set up business there.”
“You’ll never get there,” said the man. “Road’ s closed forever.”
Jim began to see that getting to Drulgoorijk was not the important issue. What was important was this conversation, the present moment. “So … why are you people on strike anyway?”
“C’mon,” said the striker. “Under that wire there.” Oceanmouth and Jim each lifted the barbed wire and scooted under it, then followed the striker past a pile of cardboard boxes and cars. Jim could feel other men standing around here, could feel their rifles and their anger.
They came up to a large volume, a huge cube in the middle of the road. Jim didn’t remember seeing it in the car’s headlights. He felt aluminum siding.
“It’s … a shack …” he whispered to Oceanmouth. “A shack in the middle of this roadblock …”
“Wow …” Oceanmouth said.
“In here,” said the striker. Jim felt the door open, felt the space within. The man left. Jim felt three more volumes inside. Three more strikers. Jim and Oceanmouth entered and Jim heard the door shut behind them.
A red cone of light shone on cement floor‑‑shone on the roadway itself, Jim realized. Then a flashlight rose to a bearded face surmounted by frizzy hair.
“Garsniyyj …” Jim gasped. “You‑‑you use light here …”
“Of course,” Garsniyyj said, shining the flashlight around the little room where a man and a woman sat crosslegged. The light hurt Jim’s eyes. Oceanmouth sat on the concrete and made himself comfortable. Jim sat too. “We use light in construction,” Garsniyyj said. “We normally keep the interchange blazing with light.”
“But not now,” the woman said.
“Why not?” Oceanmouth said. Jim stared, astonished. For the ever-resourceful Oceanmouth to ask a question, to not already know the answer, was definitely unsettling.
“We’re through with light,” the woman said.
“Except for this flashlight here,” Garsniyyj said. “We still need it for finishing up our business here.”
“What sort of business?” Oceanmouth asked.
“You mean‑‑you don’t know?” Jim gasped.
“No,” Oceanmouth said mildly. “Do you?”
“No! I thought you did!”
“Well, I don’t,” Oceanmouth said. “Not really. It’s all a mystery to me.”
“God …” Jim said. He turned to Garsniyyj. “Oceanmouth doesn’t know …”
Garsniyyj smiled. “Well, he can’t be expected to know everything. He can only know himself.”
“That’s right, man,” Oceanmouth said happily.
“I‑‑I’ve got to get out of here!” Jim cried, standing. “I just can’t‑‑I mean‑‑this is all crazy! I don’t belong here!”
“That’s right!” Oceanmouth laughed, also getting up. “Jim and I don’t belong here!”
“Yes, you boys had best be heading back to Zarreich,” Garsniyyj said. “There’s really no other place for you. We’ll have one of our men help you get your truck turned around and get you out of here.”
“Yes, we’re going to kill everyone else here and confiscate all their vehicles,” the woman said. The other man, Jim noted, was thin, dry, and remote, with deep expressionless eyes. Jim wanted to think of him as a jazz musician or a heroin addict. Now he understood that this man would be their guide out of the roadblock. He would negotiate with the police and free just one truck. He certainly didn’t seem to be a construction worker. Then again, neither did the woman or Garsniyyj.
Jim was so confused that he lashed out: “Garsniyyj, you murdered your TV shop, you know that?”
Garsniyyj smiled. “It’s time for you boys to escape.” He turned off the flashlight and Jim again felt the volumes in his body. “Now, Jim, I want you to understand what we’re doing down here in the south. I’m sure you’ve seen what happens on a dark and cloudless night in the country. I’m sure you’ve seen that before.”
“No‑‑seen what?”
“The stars. Countless stars. In the city, in Zarreich, you can only see five or six, but out here you should be able to see tens of thousands. The entire sky should be ablaze with stars‑‑” Garsniyyj flung the door open and Jim stepped out of the shack.
There was nothing but blackness. Up, down, sideways, the same blackness. But high up there Jim could feel tens of thousands of speck-sized, massive volumes.
“Goddamn, what have you people done?” Jim cried.
“Run along home,” Garsniyyj said, and Jim could feel the volume opened up by the rebel leader’s smile.
copyright 2010 by Michael D. Smith