They went first-cabin.
Manhattan Sporting Goods was locked, but Larry broke a hole in the show window with a long iron pipe he had found. The burglar alarm brayed senselessly into the deserted street. He selected a large pack for himself and a smaller one for Rita. She had packed two changes of clothes for each of them - it was all he would allow - and he was carrying them in a PanAm flight bag she had found in the closet, along with toothbrushes. The toothbrushes struck him as slightly absurd. Rita was fashionably attired for walking, in white silk deckpants and a shell blouse. Larry wore faded bluejeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
They loaded the packs with freeze-dried foods and nothing else. There was no sense, Larry told her, in weighting themselves down with a lot of other stuff - including more clothes hen they could simply take what they wanted on the other side of the river. She agreed wanly, and her lack of interest nettled him again.
After a short interior debate with himself, he also added a .30-.30 and two hundred rounds of ammunition. It was a beautiful gun, and the pricetag he pulled from the trigger-guard and dropped indifferently on the floor said four hundred and fifty dollars.
"Do you really think we'll need that?" she asked apprehensively. She still had the .32 in her purse.
"I think we'd better have it," he told her, not wanting to say more but thinking about the monster-shouter's ugly end.
"Oh," she said in a small voice, and he guessed from her eyes that she was thinking about that, too.
"That pack's not too heavy for you, is it?"
"Oh, no. It isn't. Really."
"Well, they have a way of getting heavier as you walk along. You just say the word and I'll carry it for a while."
"I'll be all right," she said, and smiled. After they were on the sidewalk again, she looked both ways and said, "We're leaving New York."
"Yes."
She turned to him. "I'm glad. I feel like... oh, when I was a little girl. And my father would say, 'We're going on a trip today.' Do you remember how that was?"
Larry smiled a little in return, remembering the evenings his mother would say, "That Western you wanted to see is down at the Crest, Larry. Clint Eastwood. What do you say?"
"I guess I do remember," he said.
She stretched up on her toes, and readjusted the pack a little bit on her shoulders.
"The beginning of a journey," she said, and then so softly he wasn't sure he'd heard her correctly: "The way leads ever on... "
"What?"
"It's a line from Tolkien," she said. "The Lord of the Rings. I've always thought of it as sort of a gateway to adventure."
"The less adventure the better," Larry said, but almost unwillingly he knew what she meant.
Still she was looking at the street. Near this intersection it was a narrow canyon between high stone and stretches of sun-reflecting thermopane, clogged with cars backed up for miles. It was as if everyone in New York had decided at the same time to park in the streets.
She said: "I've been to Bermuda and England and Jamaica and Montreal and Saigon and to Moscow. But I haven't been on a journey since I was a little girl and my father took my sister Bess and me to the zoo. Let's go, Larry."
It was a walk that Larry Underwood never, forgot. He found himself thinking that she hadn't been so wrong to quote Tolkien at that, Tolkien with his mythic lands seen through the lens of time and half-mad, half-exalted imaginings, peopled with elves and ents and trolls and orcs. There were none of those in New York, but so much had changed, so much was out of joint, that it was impossible not to think of it in terms of fantasy. A man hung from a lamppost at Fifth and East Fifty-fourth, below the park and in a once congested business district, a placard with the single word LOOTER hung around his neck. A cat lying on top of a hexagonal litter basket (the basket still had fresh-looking advertisements for a Broadway show on its sides) with her kittens, giving them suck and enjoying the midmorning sun. A young man with a big grin and a valise who strolled up to them and told Larry he would give him a million dollars for the use of the woman for fifteen minutes. The million, presumably, was in the valise. Larry unslung the rifle and told him to take his million elsewhere. "Sure, man. Don't hold it against me, you dig it? Can't blame a - guy for tryin, can you? Have a nice day. Hang loose."
They reached the corner of Fifth and East Thirty-ninth shortly after meeting that man (Rita, with a hysterical sort of good humor, insisted on referring to him as John Bearsford Tipton, a name which meant nothing to Larry). It was nearly noon, and Larry suggested lunch. There was a delicatessen on the corner, but when he pushed the door open, the smell of rotted meat that came out made her draw back.