by C. L. Moore
"Any news about Callahan?" McNey asked.
"No word for months. There's some plan—maybe a big push in the propaganda field, maybe assassinations of key technologists. I don't know what. I've read no minds that knew the right answers. But I think something's going to break soon; I've found out that much. We've got to be ready for it. We've got to break their code—or get one of our own. The same tune, Darryl."
"I know," McNey said. He stared out at the empty blue sky. "There isn't much I can say now, or even think. The same tune, all right."
"But you haven't failed? In a few weeks you're due back at Niagara."
Linc said, "Look, about this code. I was thinking, the Hedgehounds have got a sort of code. Like this." He imitated a few bird and animal calls. "We know what they mean but nobody else knows."
"Hedgehounds aren't telepaths. If they were, your code wouldn't stay a secret long."
"Guess you're right. I'd like to take a crack at the paranoids, though."
"You'll have your chance," Barton said. "But, meanwhile, it's Darryl's job to find us a new weapon."
McNey said wearily, "I know all about that. No more pep talks, Dave, please."
Barton stood up, scowling. "I've a job to do down south. I'll see you when I get back, Darryl. Meanwhile, take care of yourself. If this business—whatever it is—should break soon, don't run any risks. You're vital to Us, much more so than I am."
With a nod to Linc he went out. McNey stared at nothing. Linc hesitated, sent out a querying thought, and met abstracted rebuff. He went downstairs.
He couldn't find Alexa. Finally he went out into the gardens, working his way toward the brook. A flash of color caught his eye, and he headed for it.
Alexa was sitting on a rock, her flimsy playsuit unzipped to let the slight breeze cool her. The heat was so intense that she had removed her wig, and her bald head was shiny and incongruous, incompatible with her artificial lashes and eyebrows. It was the first time Linc had ever seen her wigless.
Instantly, at his thought, she swung about and began to replace the wig. But her arm stopped in arrested motion. She looked at him, half questionably, and then with pain and growing understanding in her eyes.
"Put it on, Alexa," Linc said.
She watched him steadily. "What for—now?"
"I ... it doesn't—"
Alexa shrugged and slipped the headpiece into place. "That was ... strange," she said, deliberately speaking aloud as if she did not want to let her mind slip back into the channels of telepathic intimacy where hurt can strike so unerringly. "I'm so used myself to Baldies being—bald. I never thought before the sight could be—" She did not finish aloud. After a moment she said, "You must have been very unhappy among the Hedgehounds, Linc. Even more unhappy than you realize. If you've been conditioned against the sight of baldness to ... to that extent—"
"It wasn't," Linc denied futilely. "I didn't ... you shouldn't think—"
"It's all right. You can't help reactions as deeply rooted as that. Some day standards of beauty will change. Hairlessness will be lovely. Today it isn't, certainly not to a man with your psychological background. You must have been made to feel very keenly that you were inferior because of your baldness—"
Linc stood there awkwardly, unable to deny the thought that had sprung so vividly into his mind, burning with shame and dismay at the knowledge that she had seen as clearly as himself the ugly picture of her baldness in his thought. As if he had held up a distorting mirror to her face and said aloud, "This is the way you look to me." As if he had slapped her gratuitously across the cheek with the taunt of her—abnormality.
"Never mind," Alexa said, a little shakily, smiling. "You can't help it if baldness disg... distresses you. Forget it. It isn't as if we were m-married or ... anything."
They looked at each other in silence. Their minds touched and sprang apart and then touched again, tentatively, with light thoughts that leaped from point to point as gingerly as if the ideas were ice-floes that might sink beneath the full weight of conscious focus.
I thought I loved you ... perhaps I did ... yes, I too ... but now there can't be ... (sudden, rebellious denial) ... no, it's true, there can't ever be rightness between us ... not as if we were ordinary people ... we'd always remember that picture, how I looked (abrupt sheering off from the memory) ... (agonized repudiation of it) ... no, couldn't help that ... always between us ... rooted too deeply ... and anyhow, Cas—(sudden closing off of both minds at once, before even the thought-image had time to form.)
Alexa stood up. "I'm going into town," she said. "Marian's at the hairdresser's. I ... I'll get a wave or something."
He looked at her helplessly, half reluctant to let her go, though he knew as well as she how much had been discussed and weighed and discarded in the past moment of voiceless speech.
"Good-by, Alexa," he said.
"Good-by, Linc."
-
Linc stood for a long time watching the path, even after she had gone. He would have to leave. He didn't belong here. Even if nearness to Alexa were possible after this, he knew he could not stay. They were—abnormal. He would be seeing the baldness, the contemptible, laughable baldness he had hated in himself, more clearly now than the wigs they wore. Somehow until this moment he had never fully realized—
Well, he couldn't go without telling Darryl. Slowly, dragging his feet a little, he turned back toward the house. When he came to the side lawn he sent out an inexpert, querying thought.
Something answered him from the cellar-laboratory, a queer, strange, disturbing vibration that clung briefly to his mind and then pulled away. It wasn't McNey. It was—an intruder.
Linc went down the cellar steps. At the bottom he paused, trying to sort the tangled confusion in his mind as he thrust out exploratory mental fingers. The door was open. McNey was lying on the floor, his mind blanked, blood seeping from a red stain on his side.
The intruder?
Who—
Sergei Callahan.
Where—
Hidden. And armed.
So am I, Line thought, his dagger springing into his hand.
Telepathically you are untrained. In a fight you can't win.
That was probably true. Telepathy took the place of prescience with the Baldies. Any Baldy could outguess and conquer a non-Baldy, and Linc was not yet thoroughly trained in the use of the telepathic function.
He probed awkwardly. And, suddenly, he knew where Callahan was.
Behind the door. Where he could strike Linc in the back when the boy entered the laboratory. He had not expected the untrained Baldy to discover the ambush until too late, and even as Linc realized the situation, Callahan made a move to spring out.
All Linc's weight smashed against the panel, slamming the door back against the wall. Callahan was caught. Pressed helplessly between the two metal planes—door and wall—he tried to brace himself, to wriggle free. His hand, gripping a dagger, snaked out. Linc dropped his own weapon, put his back against the door, and planted his feet more firmly. The door frame gave him good purchase. Veins stood out on his forehead as he ground, crushed, drove the door back with all his strength.
What had Dave Barton said once? "Kill them with machines—"
This was a machine—one of the oldest. The lever.
Suddenly Callahan began to scream. His agonized thought begged for mercy. In a moment his strength would fail, he pleaded. "Don't—don't crush me!"
His strength failed.
Linc's heavy shoulders surged. There was one frightful mental scream from Callahan, more agonizing than the audible sound he made, and Linc let the door swing slowly away from the wall. A body collapsed with its movement. Linc picked up his dagger, used it efficiently, and then turned to McNey.
There was a puddle of blood on the floor, but McNey still lived. Callahan had not had time to finish his task.
Linc became busy administering first aid.
-
This was it.
It
was past midnight. In the cellar laboratory, McNey leaned back in his chair, wincing as he felt the pressure of the bandages about his ribs. He blinked at the fluorescents, sighed, and rubbed his forehead.
His hand hovered over the notepad. An equation was lacking. He wasn't quite ready to think of it just yet.
But the job was almost finished. It would give the Baldies a weapon, at last, against the paranoids. They couldn't tap the paranoid's secret wave length, but they could—
Not yet. Don't think of it yet.
Even Linc had helped, unknowingly, by one suggestion he had made. Mimicry. Yes, that was one answer. The paranoids would not even suspect—
Not yet.
Well, Linc had gone back to his Hedgehound tribe and his Hedgehound squaw. In the end, the psychological fixation implanted in the boy's mind had proved stronger than the strong bonds of race. Too bad, because Linc had had something that few Baldies possessed—an innate hardness, a resourceful strength that might prove useful in the dark days that were coming.
The dark days that might yet be postponed, for a while, if—
Marian was asleep. McNey forced his thought from her. After years of marriage, they were so closely attuned that even that casual thought might waken her. And not until she had fallen asleep had he dared to bring his mind to bear on this ultimate problem. There could be no secrets between Baldies.
But this would be a secret—the one that would give Dave Barton a weapon against the paranoids. It was the unbreakable code that McNey had searched for for two years now.
It was a secret method of communication for Baldies.
Now. Work fast. Work fast!
McNey's stylus moved rapidly. He made a few adjustments in the machine before him, sealed its fastenings thoroughly, and watched power-flow develop. After a while, something came out of a small opening at one end of the device, a fine mesh of wire, with a few flatly curved attachments. McNey took off his wig, fitted the wire cap to his head, and donned the wig again. After a glance at a mirror, he nodded, satisfied.
The machine was permanently set now to construct these communicator caps when raw materials were fed into it. The matrix, the blueprint, had been built into the device, and the end result was a communicator gadget, easily hidden under a wig, which every non-paranoid Baldy probably would eventually wear. As for the nature of the gadget—
The problem had been to find a secret means of communication, akin to the paranoids' untappable wave band. And telepathy itself is simply a three-phase oscillation of electromagneto-gravitic energy, emanating from the specialized colloid of the human brain. But telepathy, per se, can be received by any sensitive mind en rapport with the sender.
And so the trick had been—find a method of artificial transmission. The brain, when properly stimulated by electric energy, will give out electromagneto-gravitic energy, undetectable except to telepaths because there are no instruments sensitive to this output. But when the paranoids would receive such radiations, without the unscrambling assistance of one of McNey's little caps, they wouldn't suspect a code.
Because they'd be hearing—sensing—only static.
It was a matter of camouflage. The waves masqueraded. They masqueraded on a wave band that nobody used, for that particular band was too close to that of the radio communicators used in thousands of private helicopters. For these radios, five thousand megacycles was normal; fifteen thousand manifested itself as a harmless harmonic static, and McNey's device simply added more squirts of static to that harmonic interference.
True, direction finders could receive the signals and locate them—but helicopters, like Baldies, were scattered all over the country, and the race traveled a good deal, both by necessity and by choice. The paranoids could locate the source of the fifteen thousand megacycles emanating from the wire caps—but why should they think to?
It was an adaptation of the Hedgehounds' code of imitating bird and animal calls. A tenderfoot in the woods wouldn't look for a language in the cry of an owl—and the paranoids wouldn't be seeking secret messages in what was apparently only static.
So, in these light, easily disguised mesh helmets, the problem was solved, finally. The power source would be an automatic tapping of free energy, an imperceptible drain on any nearby electrical generator, and the master machine itself, which made the communicators, was permanently sealed. No one, except McNey himself, knew even the principles of the new communication system. And, since the machine would be guarded well, the paranoids would never know, any more than Barton himself would know, what made the gadget tick. Barton would realize its effectiveness, and that was all. The list of raw materials needed was engraved on the feeder-hopper of the machine; nothing else was necessary. So Barton would possess no secrets to betray inadvertently to the paranoids, for the secrets were all sealed in the machine, and in one other place.
McNey took off the wire cap and laid it on the table. He turned off the machine. Then, working quickly, he destroyed the formulas and any traces of notes or raw materials. He wrote a brief note to Barton, explaining what was necessary.
There was no more time left after that. McNey sank back in his chair, his tired, ordinary face without expression. He didn't look like a hero. And, just then, he wasn't thinking about the future of the Baldy race, or the fact that the other place where the secret was sealed was in his brain.
As his hands loosened the bandage about his ribs, he was thinking of Marian. And as his life began to flow out with the blood from his reopened wound, he thought: I wish I could say good-by to you, Marian. But I mustn't touch you, not even with my mind. We're too close. You'd wake up, and—
I hope you won't be too lonely, my dear—
-
He was going back. The Hedgehounds weren't his people, but Cassie was his wife. And so he had betrayed his own race, betrayed the future itself, perhaps, and followed the wandering tribe across three states until now, with the autumn winds blowing coldly through bare leaves, he had come to the end of his search. She was there, waiting. She was there, just beyond that ridge. He could feel it, sense it, and his heart stirred to the homecoming.
Betrayal, then. One man could not matter in the life of a race. There would be a few Baldy children less than if he had married Alexa. The Baldies would have to work out their own salvation—
But he wasn't thinking about that as he leaped the last hurdle and ran to where Cassie was sitting near the fire. He was thinking about Cassie, and the glossy darkness of her hair, and the soft curve of her cheek. He called her name, again and again.
She didn't believe it at first. He saw doubt in her eyes and in her mind. But that doubt faded when he dropped beside her, a strange figure in his exotic town clothing, and took her in his arms.
"Linc," she said, "you've come back."
He managed to say, "I've come back," and stopped talking and thinking for a while. It was a long time before Cassie thought to show him something in which he might be expected to evince interest.
He did. His eyes widened until Cassie laughed and said that it wasn't the first baby in the world.
"I ... us ... you mean—"
"Sure. Us. This is Linc Junior. How'd you like him? He takes after his dad, too."
"What?"
"Hold him." As Cassie put the baby into his arms, Linc saw what she meant. The small head was entirely hairless, and there was no sign of lashes or eyebrows.
"But ... you ain't bald, Cassie. How—"
"You sure are, though, Linc. That's why."
Linc put his free arm around her and drew her close. He couldn't see the future; he couldn't realize the implications of this first attempt at mixing races. He only knew a profound and inarticulate relief that his child was like himself. It went deeper than the normal human desire to perpetuate one's own kind. This was reprieve. He had not, after all, wholly failed his race. Alexa would never bear his children, but his children need not be of alien stock in spite of it.
That deep warping which the Hedgehounds had wro
ught upon himself must not happen to the child. I'll train him, he thought. He'll know from the start—he'll learn to be proud he's a Baldy. And then if they ever need him ... no, if We ever need him ... he'll be ready where I failed.
The race would go on. It was good and satisfying and right that the union of Baldy and human could result in Baldy children. The line need not come to dead end because a man married outside his own kind. A man must follow his instinct, as Linc had done. It was good to belong to a race that allowed even that much treason to its tradition, and exacted no lasting penalty. The line was too strong to break. The dominant strain would go on.
Perhaps McNey's invention could postpone the day of the pogrom. Perhaps it could not. But if the day came, still the Baldies would go on. Underground, hidden, persecuted, still they must go on. And perhaps it would be among the Hedgehounds that the safest refuge could be found. For they had an emissary there, now—
Maybe this was right, Linc thought, his arm around Cassie and the child. Once I belonged here. Now I don't. I'll never be happy for good in the old life. I know too much—But here I'm a link between the public life and the secret life of the refugees. Maybe some day they'll need that link. "Linc," he mused, and grinned.
Off in the distance a growl of song began to lift. The tribesmen, coming back from the day's hunting. He was surprised, a little, to realize he felt no more of the old, deep, bewildered distrust of them. He understood now. He knew them as they could never know themselves, and he had learned enough in the past months to evaluate that knowledge. Hedgehounds were no longer the malcontents and misfits of civilization. Generations of weeding-out had distilled them. Americans had always been a distillation in themselves of the pioneer, the adventurous drawn from the old world. The buried strain came out again in their descendants. The Hedgehounds were nomads now, yes; they were woodsmen, yes; they were fighters, always. So were the first Americans. The same hardy stock that might, some day, give refuge again to the oppressed and the hunted.
