"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".
"What'll that be, an ear tag?" Valentine asked.
The woman at the desk unlocked a big paybox, but the man glared at Valentine. "State of birth, United States designation?"
"I'm Canadian", Valentine said, wondering if he should try to imitate the accents he'd heard on the White Banner Fleet in the Great Lakes.
This made the official even madder. He pushed a yellow card at Valentine and passed over the stub of a dull pencil. "We'll be checking that".
Valentine filled out the yellow card, no easy task with a pencil under an inch long. He gave his correct date of birth and listed his birthplace as "Fat Log, Saskatchewan".
"Two days' visitor rations, six hundred seventy-one dollars", the woman said.
"You must run a hell of a cafeteria", Valentine said. The woman tapped a laminated statement on the desk that showed the daily prices along with various taxes, duties, fees, and environmental-impact charges. He reached for his coin belt.
"Keep it. Guest of Senator Bey", Sagamoto said.
"We'll have to clear it with his office", the GAR man said, reaching for a phone.
"An aide is on his way up", Sagamoto said. "I'll sign and put my sosh". Sagamoto didn't wait for approval; he scrawled a signature on Valentine's yellow card.
"I should tear that up in front of you", the GAR man said.
"Want your bulletproof vest back? You do and I'll have the GAO
and the AG on you tonight. You'll be out riding a motorcycle in the boonies, collecting Patriotic War Duties".
"Table it, Barry", the woman said, tearing off a preperforated card from the yellow sheet and handing it to Valentine. "Sag here is engaged to a guy on the AG's staff". She stamped it and handed it to Valentine.
The last checkpoint was a velvet-rope serpentine. Sagamoto lifted a latch and they cut through the empty switchback alleys, and came to a pert, attractive woman in a thick blue blazer with a red, white, and blue scarf. Her smile was almost as bright as the sodium floodlights at the top of the tunnel. She checked Valentine's ID.
"Welcome to Mount Omega", she said, handing him a small, dog-eared book held together with a rubber band. "If you have any questions, this guidebook may assist you. Issuing the guidebook is not an implied contract to provide services. Acceptance of the guidebook places you under all the provisions of the Visitor Security Act".