Strange Highways

armament manufacturers in the world."
     "Really?"
     "You don't have them here?"
     "Mine's a Smith and Wesson," I said.
     "The hamburger people?"
     I frowned. "What?"
     "You know - the Smith and Wesson golden arches?"
     I dropped the subject. There are some pretty weird alternate realities out there.
     I heard faint strains of heavy-metal music that seemed to emanate from the thin air around us, but when I looked carefully along the walls, I found an old door that we had missed, painted to match the walls. I opened it cautiously and stared into black depths. Thrashing guitars, a keyboard synthesizer, drums. I went down the steps, and Bruno followed.
     "Where's the music coming from?" my bruin friend asked.
     I didn't like his hot breath storming down my neck, but I didn't complain. As long as he was behind me, nobody was going to sneak up on me unawares. "Looks like maybe there's a cellar in this place or in some connecting building where they're playing."
     "Who?"
     "The band."
     "What band?"
     "How should I know what band?"
     He said, "I like bands."
     "Good for you."
     "I like to dance," said the bear.
     "In the circus?" I asked.
     "Where?"
     Then I realized that maybe I was on the verge of insulting him. After all, he was an intelligent mutant, a probability cop, not one of our bears. He was no more likely to have performed a dance routine in a circus than he was to have worn a tutu and ridden a unicycle.
     "We're getting closer," Bruno informed me as we continued down the stairs, "but Stone isn't here."
     The wafer still was not a bright crimson.
     "This way," I said as we reached the bottom of the stairs and arrived at the damp, fetid, trash-heaped basement of the abandoned warehouse. The place smelled of urine and dead meat, and it was most likely the breeding ground of the virus that will eventually wipe out humanity.
     I followed the siren strains of the head-banger music from one cold stone room to another, scaring rats and spiders and God knows what else. Even Jimmy Hoffa might have been down there. Or Elvis - but a strange, walking-dead Elvis with lots of sharp teeth, red eyes, and an uncharacteristically bad attitude.
     In the dankest, most stench-filled room of all, I came to an old timbered door with iron hinges. It was locked.
     "Stand back," I said.
     "What're you doing?"
     "Renovation," I said, and blew the lock out of the door.
     When that hellacious roar finished bouncing around the cellar, Bruno said, "I have subtler devices that accomplish the same thing."
     "To hell with them," I said.
     I opened the door - only to discover another door behind it. Steel. Relatively new. There was no handle or lock on our side. The double-door arrangement was meant to seal off this building from the next, so it was impossible to get from one to the other without people acting in concert on both sides.
     Stepping forward into the beam of my flashlight, Bruno said, "Allow me."
     From a pocket of his voluminous coat, he produced a four-inch-long rod of green crystal and shook it as if it were a thermometer.
     I could hear the instrument begin to ring, way up on the scale where it would soon become inaudible to human beings but bother the hell out of dogs. Weirdly, I could feel the vibrations of the damn thing in my tongue.
     "My tongue's vibrating," I said.
     "Of course."
     He touched the crystal rod to the steel door, and the locks - more than one - popped open with a hard clack-clack-clack.
     My tongue stopped vibrating, Bruno returned the crystal rod to his pocket, and I pushed open the steel door.
     We were in a washroom, alone. Two stalls with the doors half open, two urinals that some of the stoned customers evidently found too stationary to hit with any regularity, a sink so filthy that it looked as if Bobo the Dog Boy regularly took baths in it, and a stained mirror that showed us grimacing like a pair of old maids in a bordello.
     "What's that music?" Bruno shouted. It was necessary to shout, because the heavy-metal band was nearby now.
     "Metallica!"
     "Not very danceable," he complained.
     "Depends on how old you are."
     "I'm not that old."
     "Yeah,