The end of the world had come and gone. It turned out not to matter much in the long run.
The mail still had to get through.
Harrie signed yesterday’s paperwork, checked the dates against the calendar, contemplated her signature for a moment, and capped her pen. She weighed the metal barrel in her hand and met Dispatch’s faded eyes. “What’s special about this trip?”
He shrugged and turned the clipboard around on the counter, checking each sheet to be certain she’d filled them out properly. She didn’t bother watching. She never made mistakes. “Does there have to be something special?”
“You don’t pay my fees unless it’s special, Patch.” She grinned as he lifted an insulated steel case onto the counter.
“This has to be in Sacramento in eight hours,” he said.
“Medical goods. Fetal stem-cell cultures. In a climate-controlled unit. They can’t get too hot or too cold, there’s some arcane formula about how long they can live in this given quantity of growth media, and the customer’s paying very handsomely to see them in California by eighteen hundred hours.”
“It’s almost oh ten hundred now— What’s too hot or too cold?” Harrie hefted the case. It was lighter than it looked; it would slide effortlessly into the saddlebags on her touring bike.
