Inside the church they went. But it was no longer used as a church. The interior was long and narrow, with a high, sharply pointed ceiling and heavy old wood beams holding it together. Down on the wooden floor, benches and pews were gone. There were only a few folding chairs scattered around.
Up where the altar had once stood, there was a big carved wooden chair. Empty. Off to one side of it was a cluster of desks all pushed together. Four black guys sat there, their backs to Ron and his burly escort. They were talking to each other.
The driver nudged him, and Ron walked down the length of the church and up the three broad steps that led to the desks. Then he stood there, silently, waiting, while the blacks at the desks kept up their hushed conversation. Ron was just starting to wonder how long they’d keep him waiting, when one of the guys at the desks turned and noticed him.
“They got him,” he said simply.
The others turned and looked at Ron. It was hard for Ron to tell what they were thinking. Three of the four were openly frowning. The fourth stood up and grinned.
He walked down the steps slowly toward Ron. He was tall, but very lean, spindly. His face was thin and bony. His eyes had a funny shape, almost oriental. His smile was wide, toothy. He looked friendly enough. He wore a simple outfit—vest, slacks, sandals—all sky-blue.
“They call me Timmy Jim,” he said in a mild, slightly scratchy voice. “That ain’t my real name, but it’s what everybody calls me.
Ron blinked at the leader of the Muslims for a moment. “I’m Ron Morgan.”
“I know. Know all about you. You got a good friend down in th’ market—that ol’ man Dewey. He got word to me you was in trouble. Tol’ me I could use you. Says you’re a freak with machines.”
“I fix machines,” Ron said.
Timmy Jim’s grin got even bigger. “Okay. Great. You can fix ’em for the Muslims. More’n that, you teach some of my kids how to fix ’em.”
Ron felt confused. “I didn’t know the Muslims took in white people.”
The grin vanished. “The Muslims do what I say. We ain’t takin’ you in as a member. We’re gonna let you work here, boy. We’re savin’ your ass—but only because that ol’ man down in the market claims you can help us. If you ain’t as good as he says you are, you’re goin’ right back where we got you. ’Stand?”
Ron heard himself say, “In other words, I’m a slave.”
Timmy Jim’s mouth dropped open. Then he broke into a wild, high-pitched cackling laugh. “Yeah, baby, that’s just what you are!” He laughed and laughed. The others all laughed too.
Ron stood there, feeling their scorn bite into him. Then he thought about what Dino was going to do to him. I don’t really have a choice, he realized.
It wasn’t too bad. Most of the blacks treated him fairly. But they made it clear that he was white in a world where only black can be beautiful. The Muslims had many different shades of black, though. Some of them were the tannish brown of Latin Americans. Some were so deeply black that their skin shone with an African heat. Most were some shade between those two extremes. A few even looked like Indians.
There were more old people among the Muslims, although Ron saw little of them. Like Timmy Jim, most of the Muslim warriors were Ron’s own age, or slightly older. The mechanics that Ron worked with were all in their early teens. Some of them resented taking orders from a white, but they did what Ron told them to with skill and speed.
Timmy Jim quickly set Ron up in the afternoons with even younger kids, whom he was expected to teach. They were fun. Young and eager and burning to learn about machinery. They learned fast. Ron soon had them fixing refrigerators and furnaces and even automobiles.
Once or twice some of the black warriors who always stayed near Ron gave him trouble. One guy clubbed Ron with a pistol butt once, for some reason that Ron never found out about. Two other warriors pulled him away, and Ron never saw that one again.
Timmy Jim himself was hard to figure out. Whenever Ron saw him, he seemed to be different. Sometimes he was quiet and friendly. Other times he seemed hard and mean. He could smile at Ron, talk pleasantly with him. Or he might call Ron “whitey,” or “paleface,” or “nigger’s slave.”
Slowly Ron began to understand. Timmy Jim was tough with him whenever there were other blacks watching. When they were alone, he was almost friendly.
As the weeks went by, Timmy Jim called Ron up to his private office more and more. It was in the building next to the old church. The office was bare, like a field general’s tent. No decorations on the walls, except for a street map of Manhattan. No furniture, except a desk and its chair, plus a stiff wooden chair for a visitor.
“So tell me more about what it’s like Outside,” Timmy Jim would say.
Ron couldn’t determine why he wanted to hear so much about the world outside the Dome. But he told Timmy Jim all about it, time after time.
“Wish you was back there, huh?” Timmy Jim asked Ron once.
“I guess so.” Ron was surprised that he didn’t feel more strongly about it. His parents, his friends, his whole life was Outside. But that was so long ago, so far away. It felt strange even to think about it. As if that life belonged to somebody else, some other kid, not Ron himself.
The winter passed slowly. Ron lived in a single small room in a building that had once been a school. In fact, it was a school once again, because the Muslims used its large downstairs rooms for Ron’s “classes” in mechanical repair. At least once a week, Timmy Jim had Ron up to his office to talk about the world Outside. The rest of the time Ron spent teaching the kids how to fix machines, or how to build new machines. He hardly did any fixing on his own now.
Ron taught, he worked, he ate, he slept. Outside of the kids he was teaching, and Timmy Jim, the only other people he knew were the young warriors who never let him far out of their sight and a few of the girls who brought him his two meals each day. He had struck up a conversational acquaintance with one of the girls, an olive-skinned Puerto Rican named Liana.
But Ron’s only real amusement was his weekly visit with Timmy Jim. The Muslim leader was relaxed and happy when Ron saw him; they shared sandwiches and drinks each visit. Gradually, as the weeks turned into months, Ron began to see that Timmy Jim was always asking questions about the weapons that the police Outside carried, what the roads were like, how electric cars operated, how many police each Tract had, where the Army bases were located.
Then one afternoon, as Ron sat in that stiff-backed chair in front of Timmy Jim’s desk and talked about the turbo-train system, it all clicked into place.
“You’re going to invade the Outside!”
Timmy Jim laughed. “Been wonderin’ how long it’d take you to tumble to it.”
“But that’s crazy! You can’t—”
“Sure I can’t. Not now. Got to take over all th’ gangs under the Dome first. That’ll take a few more years. We start next fall, soon’s the gates close down after the summer season. Then we hit the gangs between here’n the market. Gonna be tough making white gangs see things our way, but in four to five years we’ll have every gang under the Dome workin’ together—all under one leader. Me.”
Ron felt staggered. “And then?”
“Then Outside. That’s where all the real loot is . . . that’s where we’re goin’.”
“My God.”
Timmy Jim leaned forward in his chair and pointed at Ron. “See . . . the only way I can keep all the black gangs together is t’ make ’em dream of takin’ over the whole City. The only way I’ll be able to make all the gangs work together without killin’ each other is to turn ’em loose on the Outside.”
“But it’ll never work,” Ron answered. “There’s hundreds of millions of people out there.”
