We stood silently for a minute, gazing at the dome. It did not change. It didn’t emit a hum, nor majestic music, nor graceful flitting aircraft.

“Oh Stennis, before I forget,” John said. “I found the wheels.”

“Did you?”

“Nice ones.”

“Let’s get them?”

“Come on then.”

John led us past his granddaughter again – his wife had disappeared – and then around the building. He went in, then returned with a pair of spoked wheels. They were handmade, of wood and some rubber which might have come from the same mat that had produced my shoes.

“These’ll work,” Stennis said.

“Yes they will.”

“I want to get these to her right away. I’ll bring back a jar.”

“Fine, that’s fine. Perry,” he said, turning toward me. “Would you want to come back to eat with us?”

“Very much, thank you.”

“And Louise should be –” he said; and then his wife appeared, holding a pair of folded overalls.

“Are you sure, John?” I said. “I – ”

I was going to protest that I was just fine wearing the blanket, but I realized that was ridiculous and possibly insulting. I changed into the overalls inside the big storage room that held his wares.

*

Stennis’s house lay across several fields. My shoes held up well for the walk. Stennis held the wheels one in each hand as he led.

One field he identified as further Council land; the last two belonged to his family, although I noticed that he said they were “farming” it rather than that they “owned” it.

“So,” he asked me, “do you intend to travel more? In that case? After you’ve seen whatever you want to see?”

“It’s not a vehicle I had any control over,” I told him.

“But do you want to get back in?”

“No. Stennis, I think I may have been placed in there when I was very sick, or maybe even worse. That would be my guess.”

“You were sick?”

“I don’t remember. But that would be my guess. I think people in my time may have – frozen me. Frozen me because something had happened to me. To see if I would have better luck in the future. And now here I am.”

“I never heard of anything like that. Not even from our capital people. Anyway, would you mind if I used it? To go somewhere?”

“Where do you think you would go?”

He raised his shoulders.

“I suppose you can’t tell? But I might try. Anywhere away from here. Somewhere different. Do you think it has to be full of all that wet stuff?”

“Stennis, I just can’t imagine it would work that way. If you want to take all your clothes off and get in, well, I’m not closing that lid on you.”

“Would you have to be naked?”

“Again I don’t know, but I would assume so. If it wasn’t necessary, I think they would have left my clothes on. I certainly would have if I got in there myself.”

“And you don’t remember?”

“I just don’t.”

“Well then,” he said. He walked some distance in silence, and then said:

“I suppose it might not work.”

He sounded very disappointed, as he said this, and I swear he actually deflated a bit, or slouched. He didn’t say anything more. His reaction sort of roused me from something, and I felt bad for him. I had been thinking just about myself, which I hope I might have been forgiven for doing, given the day I’d had; but I realized now what he must have been thinking about the case. He was a young man who had apparently grown up in this weary town, never far from that elite domed whatever-it-was where he wasn’t welcome, and presumably bogged down here with few opportunities. And then the stream had coughed up a vehicle with an exotic foreign traveler who had just lay down and then woken up in a new world. And maybe that machine was waiting for another passenger . . . but now I had ended that illusion for him.

I asked him:

“Have you been outside of Trenton Thurning?”

“Near here. The other side of the capital, and a bit farther. Just to trade. I’ve been out to the shore a couple times. But it’s hard to travel if you don’t have something to do. If you’re just a – wanderer, hoping to be put up. I mean, people do it, but it’s hard. You see them through here once in a while, but no one’s glad to see them. I don’t want to do that.”

“Almost sounds like what I’m doing,” I said. I realized that maybe I shouldn’t have put it that way, but he looked back at me:

“Well now you may not want to really say that, Perry. Maybe tell people you’re from another capital and are heading toward ours. Something.”

He added:

“And I don’t want to tell my mother exactly how I found you, either. She has enough to worry about. And the fewer people know about that case, the better. For you.”

*

The wheels turned out to be for a wheelchair that Stennis’s mother used. She was seated on a bench outside their house, when we arrived. She was thin, but seemed well, apart from being unable to walk.

“This is Perry,” Stennis told her. “He’s passing through. On his way to – the capital, I think?” he asked me.

“That’s right.”

“He’s had a little – incident by the creek and was doing some trading at John’s. We’re going back there in a bit. John invited him back.”

His mother nodded to me and said hello. She looked to be in her early forties; it looked like she must have had Stennis young.

Their house was much smaller than John’s, but had the advantage of not looking like it doubled as a trading post. It was made of wood planks and was set up on posts.

The planks were uniform, smooth, obviously milled. I had been wondering how advanced, exactly, their technology was – or, I suppose, how stunted it was – but they weren’t living in log cabins or mud huts.

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Stennis had gone into the house and returned with the wheelchair. It was made of wood, basically looking like a comfortable porch chair on wheels; except it was on just one wheel at the moment. He lined up one of the new ones next to it.

“These will be perfect,” he said. “I’ll put them on tonight.”

*

I was back at John’s before dark. Stennis had walked there most of the way with me and then pointed me across the remaining fields.

Louise was there, this time with three grandchildren, not just the one girl I had seen earlier.

“Our son and his wife don’t live far,” he told me. “These kids are here and there, you never know. So we cook extra. And we have a bed for you, in the shop. Let me show you while it’s light enough.”

The bed was along the wall of the storage room where I had changed, earlier in the day. It was tucked in between a large barrel at one end and a stack of chests by the other.

They did have a lamp; it was on the table where we ate, which was just off the kitchen. They served me a lentil soup and bread. The kids – two girls and a boy, the youngest – had multiple bowls of it. John and Louise seemed to go easy on me with the conversation, politely not prying about things I wasn’t remembering. We spoke in generalities about Trenton Thurning and other villages around. They didn’t seem to be suburbs of the dome; it was just a coincidence, apparently, that John could see it from his back yard.

The children kept their eyes on me as we talked, but they didn’t stop eating.

One of them had especially dark eyes, and held them on me for a moment a certain way.

And then I remembered Araceli, and Jen.

We had been talking about the Underground Railroad. Ara had been small. Too small to understand the term at all? Well, I had pressed ahead.

“So it wasn’t really underground,” I had told her.

“But they would hide people.”

“Yes.”

“And sometimes in basements? Cellars?”

“Yes, basements and cellars, sometimes. The slaves might spend the night there. And then the next day, they would travel some more.”

“So part of it was underground. At least a little.”

She had kept her eyes on me closely, and I knew she really wanted the railroad to be truly underground.

“A part of it,” I said. “A little. Hiding places.”

“And you’ll look at them?”

“That’s one thing I may see when I go away for work, yes.”

“And not far from here?”

“Not too far, no. Plenty of slaves ran not too far from here. They would go up to Pennsylvania and Ohio.”

“Do you think you’ll find something new?”

“I never know, Ara. A lot of times, we don’t find anything, you know.”

I knew she was a little entranced with my field, or her idea of my field; but I was always – right or wrong – reluctant to encourage her to follow in my footsteps. I had been so lucky to secure my job. So many of my friends in the program had had such rocky careers if they had been able to find one in the field at all.

“I often feel like I need to shatter her dreams,” I had told Jen.

“Oh, let her dream. She doesn’t have to pick her major anytime soon.”

And Jen had said this because Ara, at the time, had been – how old? Six? Eight? But I had – known her – when she was even older than that? Right? My mind raced.

I realized I had been sitting there at the table silently, detached.

“Long day,” John said. “I’ll lead you back to the bed.”

*

The next day John put me to work smoothing out a spare shovel handle with a fat shard of glass. One of his daughters walked off down the yard, out of sight, holding a basket, and later returned with eggs. Louise and the grandson walked hand in hand down the dirt path before the house, off past a bend, apparently visiting neighbors. The guinea hens wandered the yard, making their rounds.

Stennis eventually returned. He carried a large jar of honey and handed it over to John. They chatted in low voices and eventually turned to me.

“Stennis and I think you may as well head to the capital today. No use waiting.”

“You think so?”

“You sound like you don’t want to?”

Stennis added:

“I didn’t think anyone who was able to get in there would pass up on the chance.”

“Why would they want to deal with me?” I said. “What would I do – tell them I’m from the past? They won’t believe me. They’ll just think I’m crazy.”

“Well, we dress you a little better,” John said. “And we get that case. We put it on a cart. Stennis and I here help you push it. We take it up there, to one of their gates. They’ll come out. I’m sure they’ll let you in. At least for a while to talk.”

The two of them looked at me. Both seemed surprised I wasn’t jumping at the chance.

“Let me think about that,” I said. “If nothing else, I could use another day to rest. If I can impose on you for another night.”

John just motioned toward the inside of the shop, letting me know the bed was still mine if I wanted it.

*

I ate another dinner with John’s family – four grandchildren were there, this time – and spent another day trying to not be in the way in the shop, and wandering around a bit.

They had a school, a long wooden building that didn’t look too much different from John’s house and store. They had horse carts, and wagons; I saw those moving up and down the main dirt road.

I walked down toward the creek again, not in the same spot where the case was, but close to it, and saw that the area looked more – ruinous. Where the people had built their houses, it was more pleasant with no heaps of rusting metal or concrete around.

Further down the creek, around a bend, there was an expanse of overgrown rubble. Piles of broken concrete, in blocks and slabs, rose up ten and twenty feet high but were covered with vines, trees, grasses. It reminded me of old Nineteenth Century drawings I’d seen of obscured Mayan temples before they had been cleaned off.

The children were still around the house when I returned. They didn’t seem very busy; for a time in the morning they played marbles out by the road. I wondered when the school was open.

Talking more to John, I learned that many of the people of the town spent some time tending the crops on the community land. It sounded like I’d have an opportunity to hoe out some weeds and make myself useful, if I stuck around. There were carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths. I didn’t know how to do any of those, but I could learn.

*

The next day Stennis again came to visit in the morning. He and John spoke to me.

“Well, what do you think? Should we walk you to the capital in the morning?”

“Let me ask you,” I said. “There will be work to do in these communal fields you have, soon?”

“There’s always some work,” John said. “Plenty of weeding to do.”

“And – you know, I walked down to the stream again today, near where my case came up. Little different direction, though, more upstream. And there was one field with old iron in it, big fallen iron structures, rusting. Big ones. Old towers or something.”

“Sure,” he said.

“And I saw a shed there. It didn’t look like anyone was living in it.”

“I know the one. Metal one?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if you’re looking for a place of your own, there are better things around than that.”

“Okay. You know, gentlemen, if I’m welcome here, I don’t think I want to try to get into that dome. I’ve seen this movie before.”

They were silent a moment. John then repeated:

“This – movie.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I suppose I take your meaning. Just as well. We can help you find a place. I don’t imagine the capital is going anywhere.”