We must have talked about a thousand things that night and smoked a couple of hundred cigarettes. After a while we started taking little catnaps—we'd gotten too much off our chests and come to feel too tranquil for even our excitement to keep us awake. I remember the first time I dozed waking up with a cold start and grabbing for Mother—and then hearing Pop and Alice gabbing in the dark, and remembering what had happened, and relaxing again with a smile.
Of all things, Pop was saying, "Yep, I imagine Ray must be good to make love to, murderers almost always are, they got the fire. It reminds me of what a guy named Fred told me, one of our boys ..."
Mostly we took turns going to sleep, though I think there were times when all three of us were snoozing. About the fifth time I woke up, after some tighter shut-eye, the orange soup was back again outside and Alice was snoring gently in the next seat and Pop was up and had one of his knives out.
He was looking at his reflection in the viewport. His face gleamed. He was rubbing butter into it.
"Another day, another pack of troubles," he said cheerfully.
The tone of his remark jangled my nerves, as that tone generally does early in the morning. I squeezed my eyes. "Where are we?" I asked.
He poked his elbow toward the North America screen. The two green dots were almost one.
"My God, we're practically there," Alice said for me. She'd waked fast, Deathlands style.
"I know," Pop said, concentrating on what he was doing, "but I aim to be shaved before they commence landing maneuvers."
"You think automatic will land us?" Alice asked. "What if we just start circling around?"