sec men, you mean?” Ryan asked.
Doc nodded, idly brushing a hand through his white hair as the serving girl returned with two more bowls of the aromatic stew. “Thank you, my dear,” Doc said to the girl. The bowls steamed as she set them down on the table before Doc and Ryan.
“If ya’s need anything else,” the girl said, “j’st holler an’ I’ll come right over.”
Jak was already working a spoon through the thick gravy in his bowl, and he looked up at the girl with his unearthly smile. “Good,” he said. “Meat’s good.”
Disconcerted, the girl thanked Jak and the others before scurrying back to her nook at the side of the bar. She stood there, her eyes on the strange young albino, watching him warily.
“What sort of meat is it, Jak?” Krysty asked as she pushed the contents of the bowl before her around with a fork.
Jak chewed for a moment, working the spiced meat around his palate. “Goat,” he decided, grinning contentedly.
Once the companions had started on their own bowls of stew, Doc continued relating Croxton’s request. “They have got a two-day journey ahead of them,” he said, “or so Croxton thinks. They have been on the road over a day, hard going, too, I should think.”
Ryan peered up from the contents of his bowl. “Where are they heading, Doc? Did he say?”
“A little ville called Baby,” Doc said.
Ryan’s eye flicked across the table to J.B. the custodian of the group’s maps and navigation equipment. “Heard of it, J.B.?”
After a few seconds thought, the Armorer shook his head. “Name like that would surely stick in my craw tighter than dynamite in a pesthole,” he said. “New villes are popping up and falling down all the time, Ryan. Just ’cause I haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
Ryan nodded. “I didn’t say it wasn’t,” he agreed, before turning his attention back to Doc as the old man picked his way carefully through his stew with a bent-handled spoon. “So what’s your angle on this, Doc? They putting up a lot of jack?”
“No,” Doc said between mouthfuls, shaking his head. “Something far more interesting than money. They’re promising youth.”
“Youth?” The word came from three people at once, as Mildred, Krysty and Ryan all uttered it with incredulity.
“The pretty little blonde girl over on the left-hand side of the table there…?” Doc said, looking up but not pointing. “Says she’s seventy-six years old. Came out of Babyville to spread the word. Seems they have the secret of eternal youth there.”
J.B. barked a short laugh at Doc’s words. “And you believe this horseshit they’re feeding you?”
Doc looked at the glistening sheen of grease on top his half-full bowl before slowly replying in a considered, deliberate voice. “I neither believe nor disbelieve, my dear John Barrymore. My natural inclination is to disbelieve, of course, for such a thing would seem fanciful, not to say impossible. But the old fables are full of youth-giving potions, immortals and the rejuvenating effects of such-and-such mixture of herbs. The fountain of eternal youth may very well be a story, but might we suppose that it could have been rooted in fact?”
J.B. shook his head in disbelief, while Ryan and the others sat considering the white-haired man’s words.
Krysty was the one who finally broke the silence. “We have seen some mighty strange things in our travels,” she said, “most of them not a blamed bit of use to anyone. Who’s to say that Doc’s youth fountain doesn’t actually exist somewhere?”
“It’s impossible,” J.B. observed. “Doc just said so himself.”
“Implausible, perhaps,” Mildred said, “but not impossible. Back in the days before skydark there were drugs, antiaging creams, hormonal injections, numerous ways to make people look and feel younger. In my day there was a lot of emphasis on appearance and youth.”
“But a girl,” Ryan said in a low voice, “of, what, sixteen saying she’s really seventy-something?”
“There are chemicals in the atmosphere,” Mildred considered, warming to her subject, “that can strip a man to his bones in a shower of rain. You don’t realize how upside down the world is right now, because it’s all you’ve ever known, Ryan. And Krysty’s right. We have seen an awful lot that is more unbelievable than what Doc’s friends have described to him.”
A moment passed in silence as the companions considered Mildred’s words. She was talking about a world they had never known, a world they could scarcely imagine. But they knew that she was also an educated woman, a trained doctor with a mind that was attuned to scientific inquiry, not flights of fantasy.
Pushing thick gravy around her bowl, Krysty spoke thoughtfully, her words slow and deliberate. “There are plants, too, that make people healthier,” she said. Krysty’s knowledge concerning the properties of plant life was almost encyclopedic, although she rarely had cause to call upon it. “Isn’t being healthier really just another type of being young?” she asked.
Several of the group around the table muttered their agreement, but to Ryan’s ears Krysty sounded like she was trying to convince herself; he knew her so well.
Doc looked earnestly around the table at his companions. “The usual fee for entering Baby is much of an individual’s worldly possessions, I am told. If we were to go there in the capacity of bodyguards, Mr. Croxton and his people would vouch for us, perhaps allowing us indulgence in the operation for free.”
“Which would still be too damn high a price,” J.B. grumbled.
Doc turned to the Armorer, rising anger turning his face a darker shade. “Might I enquire, John Barrymore, how old you are? Might I ask how long you have lived in that body?”
J.B. looked at Doc, taken aback by his question.
“Is it perhaps forty years, mayhap forty-five?” Doc continued. “Forty years of bones forming and hair and nails growing, of skin tautening and cracking and repairing? Of eyes growing slowly dim behind your spectacle frames?”
J.B. looked emotionless as he replied, “Hurry up and pull the trigger, Doc.”
“What you see before you, my friend,” Doc said, “is a thirty-year-old man, give or take a few summers. Yet, I am stuck in this creaking set of limbs because some morally repugnant scientific scrutinizer decided it would be beneficial to shunt a man through time, to shunt me through time. I lost my dear wife and my two sweet children, and everything that meant anything to me, and those wounds, I assure you, will never heal. But this body, this old fool I see every time I look in the mirror to shave his white whiskers from his wrinkled chin—this is something I was cursed with to make that cruel joke all the more bitter.”
“Doc—” Ryan began, but the old man held up his hand to halt him.
“Allow an old man time to gather his thoughts, if you would,” Doc said, a bitter edge to his voice. “Oftentimes have I dreamed of returning to my home, to hold my dear Emily, Rachel and Jolyon once more, and every time I have been there in my mind’s eye, it has been in this wretched old man’s frame. It has been something I have resigned myself to, something I believed could never be changed.
“This opportunity,” Doc continued, “however slight it may be, is a fleeting glimpse of something I thought I could never have. Something that was stolen from me most cruelly.”
J.B. leaned close, looking Doc square in the eye. “And if it turns out to be a bust, do I get to say ‘I told you so’?” he asked, the trace of a smile forming at the corners of his mouth.
Doc felt his rage subside and he glanced at his other companions before meeting J.B.’s fierce stare once more. “If it turns out to be a bust, John Barrymore, I will royally insist that you do.”
Ryan