"Don't let it bother you, sir. Just a bunch of papers".
Patterson had the lieutenant sign a piece of paper, and while they were so occupied the sergeant knelt down behind Valentine and checked his bonds.
"Inside, ifs they asks you where you comes from, say Canada. Make up some small place nobody's ever heards of like Moose Dick or Fragileoshus", the sergeant whispered.
The sergeant stood up as soon as the officers turned. "Just making sure I could wiggle a finger through", he said to them.
Valentine's ears picked up a faint whine and wheels turning on the landing strip. A golf-cart-like vehicle emerged from between two fuselages and joined the party, parking next to the autogyro. Like Patterson, the driver was on the lean side. His margarine clothes were thin and seemed hardly enough to keep out the dry wind. They reminded Valentine of the hospital gowns he'd seen at Xanadu.
He had faintly Eurasian features and a growth of beard that made
him look like a model from one of the old magazines trying to look rugged and fresh off a mountain.
"I'm Captain Sagamoto", he said. He nodded to the lieutenant. "Patterson, I don't think this'll concern you. Can the newcomer and I have a moment?" He squatted down opposite Valentine as the others moved away. Valentine ran through the signs and countersigns he'd memorized back at Nancy's in his head.
"Red to blue?" Sagamoto finally asked, extending his left fist.
"Negative negative negative", Valentine said. "Sorry I can't lock knuckles".
Sagamoto smiled. "I can see that. Prefix two oh nine".
"Suffix V April twenty-seven. I'm here to see Senator Bey from the illustrious state of Oklahoma".
Sagamoto stood. "Lieutenant, he's cleared. I'm going to ask you to use your comset. I'm taking him to the Inside. Patterson, aren't you needed in the marshes? I heard a team of Grogs got captured after the fighting. You pedal hard, you'll be there to make sure they're tucked in tonight and get properly exchanged. Might win you that promotion back to the Inside".
"Barbarians", Patterson said.
The sergeant cut Valentine's bonds and he and the corporal lifted him. Everyone watched Patterson bike away.
"I didn't knows about no fighting in the marshes", the sergeant said.
"I could have heard wrong", Sagamoto said, "You know how rumors fly in there".
* * *
It was a fifteen-minute trip to the ridge that sheltered Mount Omega. They drove around a depressed-looking golf course that kept a single hole mowed, plus a putting green. "They cut back and start watering a new hole every couple of months just for variety. Of course even going out to golf is a privilege, Constitution-level officials only".
Sagamoto took his time driving, enjoying the clean, open air and
the sunshine. Valentine found it was a relief from the gloom of the Seattle basin too, though hunger still gnawed at him.
The electric car zigzagged around a small, sloping mountain of brush-covered dirt and came to a wide steel door that looked like it was built to keep in King Kong. It was open wide enough to allow two of the little electric golf carts to pass. Part of it was filled with a trestle of closely packed rollers. Men were taking bins of potatoes and onions off of a beat-up farm truck and its companion trailer and sending them rolling down the track. The hundreds of little wheels spun on their bearings as load after load of produce disappeared Inside, sounding like a cave full of angry rattlesnakes.
Sagamoto beeped the friendly-sounding horn on the golf cart twice and passed through the formidable doors. He showed ID to a trio of bored, blue-uniformed police who intercepted them. There seemed to be two ways into the mountain, an express lane for those who lived and worked within, and a serpentine of desks and examining areas. The only other person being processed in the serpentine was a shaggy-looking man with a big netting bag filled with dead pheasant and chickens. They waved Valentine over to a brightly lit alcove. They let Valentine keep his pistol but put a trigger lock on it.
As they patted him down, Valentine looked down the vast tunnel, big enough for a freight train or a couple of tractor-trailers to pass into the mountain abreast. There were tracks built into the ground, as a matter of fact, and the vegetables were being loaded onto a flatcar.
"What about the damn sword?" the police officer searching Valentine asked as he stood with a thermometer in his mouth while a medical officer checked his blood pressure. "Bells, he's got a knife on him too. You from the bad side of the mountains or what?"
A gray-hair in a wheelchair supervising from a duty desk, an old leather jacket with a capitol police patch draped over his shoulders, glanced at Valentine. "Locker all his gear. Locker, dummies!"
The medical officer stamped his hand with blue dye. After that, they inked his thumb and pressed it on a set of cards. Sagamoto got
something stamped at the desk and returned with a temporary ID bearing his name and thumbprint.
By the time the carload of vegetables was on its way into the mountain, Valentine had the slip for his gear in the locker. Two more officials, in black paper clothing that made their skin look even more pale, met him at the next desk.
"General Accounts and Revenue", Sagamoto whispered. Then to the woman: "Visitor, let's get him a card for two days of food".