by C. L. Moore
'That's another thing." He bit his thumbnail, a familiar gesture that had always meant he was under more tension than he cared to have you know. "Could you step up the time a little, too? Open on Friday, say?"
I started to explode.
"All right, all right!" He made soothing motions with both hands. "Try for Friday, Howard. It's important. I've got my reasons. Later on I'll tell you all about it." He sighed, and his narrow shoulders sagged. He looked like death, I thought. More like death than Raleigh himself, perhaps, who must be very near to it now, or this hurry-up interview wouldn't be happening.
I said with resignation, "Oh, sure, we'll open right now if you say so. Who needs rehearsals?"
"It means a lot to me, Howard," he said, watching me anxiously. "If anybody can do it, you can. I know that."
I said, "I'll try."
"Howard——" He hesitated. "Is everything all right?"
A sudden alarm bell began clanging noisily in my mind. I thought, He's heard about what happened today. He's got pipelines to the Freedom Committee, or maybe the Committee itself was only a test to see if I'd—but, no, that was too complicated to follow up. I thought, He didn't take five minutes out of a busy day spent running the United States just to ask how I feel. Or did he? I looked at the sad little wizened face and thought, Maybe he's a lonelier little guy than I ever realized. After all, we've been friends for a good many years now, nearly half our lives.
There wasn't time to think things out and draw conclusions. I had to turn everything over to instinct. Instinct kept my face perfectly straight as I said, "Thanks, Ted, everything's fine."
He searched my eyes with his. Then he wiped his hand across his face like a man in the last stage of exhaustion. "Well, do your best, Howard. I'll see you again in a day or two. Good luck."
"Okay," I said. "Good night, Ted."
The door into New York shrank to a shining sliver and vibrated into nothing. Nye and his office and his slumbering canary shot backward into space three thousand miles and I almost felt the twang as the thread snapped that had linked us together.
Then for a long moment I sat there and shook. Had I made the worst mistake of my life in not telling him everything? Or had I done the smartest possible thing? Or did it make any difference at all?
After a while I got up wearily and went out into the lantern-lit room under the redwoods and the play that meant so much to so many people, though I didn't know how or why.
We rehearsed until midnight. About one o'clock we fell into our bunks, dead-tired but too keyed-up to sleep at first. Outside the vast quiet of the night lay ready to receive us, but it was hard to slip the bonds and glide out into that dreaming oblivion. Pod Henken and Roy talked quietly now and then, and I heard voices sounding desultorily from the womens' truck, but Guthrie and I lay silent, thinking our private thoughts. I wondered about his. An old Comus man, slowed by the inevitable creep of calcium in the joints, the inevitable thickening of the arteries—what would he think about in a country rioting with guerrilla war?
After a while I got out my bottle and took several noisy, defiant swigs, not offering any around the bunks. I wondered if Guthrie was thinking of Cressy. The very nice girl. I had seen him watch her under his grizzled brows as he bent over the prompt book. I hadn't figured him out yet. Anyhow, I knew Roy would be thinking of her. And Rohan?
No, I thought of Nye instead, lying uneasily on the far side of the big upward curve of the continent. I thought of Raleigh, lying in some impressive bed and hardly breathing. I thought of how much depended on just wheal the life flickering in him finally blew out. And for a moment it seemed to me that in the dark around us as we lay on the verge of sleep I could feel the whole state humming with secret motion. Like some gigantic living body striving to assemble inside itself the mechanism of the Anti-Com, rushing the separate parts as they were completed toward some private center deep inside itself, knitting them barely into a whole that might or might not reach viability in time.
I began to feel drowsy. A truck went by on the highway with a noise like thunder, or artillery in the distance. It didn't annoy me. It was Comus, and a sound of reassurance in the night. I thought of Cressy lying warm in her bunk, the lashes gentle on her cheeks.
I thought of Miranda and then took another drink and stopped thinking at all.
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CHAPTER XII
MORNING BREAKFAST at the truckers' restaurant, since nobody invited me to join the yawning little group around the cook fire. I didn't care. It was good to walk into that warm, smoky little segment of Comus again, feeling security fold around me, knowing that, no matter what rioting swept the state outside, in here Comus ruled calm and strong.
And there had been rioting. The truck drivers were getting to know my face by now and the talk flowed a little more freely when I was there. I heard about a raid on Carson City in which a rebel leader had been seized and the rebels fired the town to drive the Comus forces off. What else besides their captured leader they had been trying to protect by such drastic action was speculated on at great length.
Somebody down the counter from me, hunched over bacon and eggs, said he heard the reb forces weren't eating so good to the northeast of here, and a grimy-faced driver with a bandaged jaw said, "Looters are out again in Paradise Valley. They scare even the rebs."
I remembered the notice I'd seen posted in San Andreas on the subject. It scared me, too. And if any of my troupe got wind of it, I probably wouldn't have any troupe left.
When I got back to the campsite Ro was walking up and down the clearing muttering his lines now loudly and now in a hissing whisper, and Polly, hanging a skillet on a nail in the camp table, straightened to look at me challengingly.
"I hear there are looters out," she said. "Really bad ones, deserters from both sides. Maybe we ought to call the whole thing off."
"You can hear anything," I said. "We'll start with Thirteen then, and let's pick up our cues tighter right from the start. There's been a slight change. We open on Friday night, not Saturday. All right, cast on stage."
And in the slanting morning light, in the deep silence of the trees, we pantomimed a city square again and endlessly went over the little episode that had never really happened, but would happen over and over again. Roy and I practiced our fist-fight scene in slow motion, rehearsing the action like a ballet, until it began to look spontaneous. If he was reminded of our clash on first meeting, he didn't show it. His early hostility was gone now and he had retreated to his own little detached existence peopled only by himself and perhaps Cressy, and perhaps a lot of beautiful, impossible dreams. Having spent a good deal of time in a private room of my own, I ought to be the last to object.
In the noon break Guthrie, after spending a good deal of time in his electronic cubbyhole with the door shut, came out and silently moved each of the trucks up to the paved area back of the restaurant, parking them close together. When Pod Henken asked why, he said there was news on the air of a rainstorm moving in from the Pacific and he didn't trust this unpaved ground if it got wet. Polly asked if it wouldn't be noisy up there, and Guthrie said no, the drivers had to sleep too, and I said by then we'd all be too tired to care.
We worked hard all that day and far into the evening. By now any newness had worn off and the job was sheer drudgery, rehearsing and rehearsing every motion and inflection until it becomes first stiff, then mechanical, and finally acquires that strange spontaneity that looks as if no one on earth has ever made quite this gesture or spoken this phrase before.
The personalities of the characters in the play were emerging too, and a new set of qualities began to superimpose themselves over the cast, so that I came to feel Susan Jones was someone I knew better than I knew Cressy Kellogg. And I myself was somebody else entirely, a man who had never worked in an agri-team or seen his name on Broadway or even heard the name of Miranda. A tenuous city square took shape around us, blotting out the redwood holes. Time became a fluid and a solid, something we could s
top or run backward at will, and the lines of the play were the only words man had ever Spoken on earth. Even when we weren't rehearsing I found myself listening critically to Polly saying, "Pass the coffee," or Guthrie asking after a missing hammer, wanting to try a different emphasis and wondering just where this fitted into the play.
Toward evening we were all automatons, moving stiffly through terribly familiar actions, following grooves our rehearsed crossings had worn in the pine needles and feeling grooves in our minds. Coldly, hating each other, we embraced, shook hands, exchanged light banter. Without feeling, we cursed each other, and wearily Roy and I balanced through the motions of our fight, too tired even for enmity.
We had a little brush with Guthrie over the fight. I had to get my hand raised, palm out, at the level of my chin just in time for Roy's fist to smack loudly into it. Timed right, it looks and sounds exactly like a crack on the jaw. But we had trouble with the timing. One way to handle this is to set up a count.
"We can give you a line like, "Why you——'" I said to Roy. "That gives us a count of three, and right after the 'you' my hand will be ready."
We tried it and it worked fine. But then Guthrie looked out of his truck like a cuckoo popping from a clock on the very stroke of something new.
"Sorry, Mr. Rohan," he said, "that throws my timing off. The orders are no changes in the script. No changes at all."
So we cut it out again.
It was a very long day. By eleven nothing I heard or did made any sense to me, and the cast was staggering when they walked. The play looked hopelessly bad and we were all depressed and irritable. I called a halt in a hoarse voice and we moved away from the grooved stage, nobody looking at anybody else.
At this point Guthrie surprised us by bringing out a bottle of scotch and a set of folding cups and pouring drinks all round. When he came to me the bottle ran dry and he got out a fresh one. He poured his own last of all and we drank numbly, and numbly separated and dropped into our bunks.
I noticed only dimly that Guthrie wasn't in his. The trucks going by on the highway made booming noises in the night, crickets sang shrilly in the silences between, and the world faded out around me in a welter of over-rehearsed lines and motions. I ceased to exist.
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CHAPTER XIII
SOMEBODY WAS PULLING cautiously at my foot. I woke with great reluctance. Blue moonlight, artificial as a stage set, fell through the open door upon Guthrie's face bending over me. He made shushing motions with one hand and beckoning ones with the other. I rolled over and groaned. He pulled my foot again. Too tired to be curious, I doubled up and got stiffly out of the bunk. The truck swayed under me but neither Pod nor Roy stirred. Wondering dimly what now, I stumbled out.
As my feet hit the ground, Guthrie smacked something hard, cold, and heavy into my hands. I looked down stupidly. It was a gun, ring-mouthed and dangerous-looking.
"A scatter-gun," Guthrie said in a low voice. "Ever use one?"
"Only impracticals, on the stage," I said. "What's going on?"
"Raiders," he told me tersely. "Maybe. If we're lucky they'll miss us. Even if they don't, maybe the cast will sleep through it. I gave them something in that scotch that ought to help. These scatter-guns are quiet. And you can't miss."
I looked around, bewildered, not yet sure I was really awake. The station lay dark and still in the moonlight, but I saw now what a rough circle of trucks had been drawn up around it, nose to tail, like the covered wagon circles you see in films about the old West. Inside lay the station, several hedgehoppers quivering on bent legs, and our three valuable theater trucks with the sleeping cast oblivious inside. I heard footsteps grate on concrete, and two or three dark figures went by walking heavily, moonlight glinting on the long scatter-guns in their hands.
"Listen," Guthrie said. I listened. Far off to the south a fusillade of distant firecrackers seemed to be going off. It burst out twice, and then was silent. "A farmhouse, probably," Guthrie said. "This is a big gang, scattered out, working south. They won't attack fortified places, but I'd hate to be caught on a farm tonight."
"How do you know about it?" I asked stupidly, hefting the shotgun and wondering if I could handle it. My heart had begun to pump and I knew I was scared.
"We've been getting reports since last night," Guthrie said. "We hoped they'd miss us, but a truck came in about ten minutes ago that saw some of them slipping through the woods this way. The main thing is not to make too much noise when we tackle them, or we'll have the whole gang down on us. Come on."
"Where?" I followed him through the serene blue moonlight. "What are we going to do?'
"Join the line-up. And pray"—he laughed in a low voice—"that the cast doesn't find out. One look at these guys and you couldn't keep 'em in California if you chained 'em up." There was an undernote of exhilaration in him, and I thought, This is what it must have been like when he was new in Comus and things happened fast. I wondered if he remembered tonight that he was past sixty.
A steel behemoth loomed up before us bathed in bland moonlight. Guthrie said, "In here," and we slipped between two trucks and saw the hillside slope away before us down toward the unseen river, shadows lying black and still and the moonlight slanting like smoke between the trees.
A big man in a cap and leather jacket crunched across the concrete behind us and paused to give us a measuring glance and say heavily, "All set? Keep it quiet if you can. If we're lucky they won't even spot us. But if you do fire, don't miss. We don't want a lot of yelling and rifle shots."
"Don't worry," Guthrie said. The man grunted and moved off.
I looked out over the moonlight slope and felt the gun shake in my hands. I was scared yes, but filled up with anticipation, the sense of something new and important happening for the first time in history. To me, anyhow. I told myself I would probably fire a gun at a man and kill him in the next few minutes. I didn't believe it, but my hands were cold and unsteady on the gun, and my hands felt convinced. They were ready, any time.
I'd seen the result when make-up men reproduce (just for a quick-flash at the audience, not too gruesome) what these scatter-guns can do. I didn't exactly believe that, either, and yet I had no reason to doubt it.
Nothing seemed real. It was a stage-set. The silence, the little patch of stars bleached by the strong moonlight, the muffled sounds of men around me, somebody coughing and smothering it, somebody clinking his gun against a truck and swearing—none of it was real. I heard a cricket's strong, measured spurts of sound and wondered what more I would hear out there. How would we know when they came?
And who were they? Followers of Charlie Starr? Men working on the same side I worked on? I wondered which side I really belonged with. Neither, maybe. Except that if Ted Nye loses I lose, so I guess I'm for Comus in the long run. A sudden sense of the vast power of Comus swept over me there in the dark, its immeasurable nerve nets and muscles and steel bones knitting the continent together. And I knew that no matter what I did or didn't do nothing could hurt Comus. Nothing could burst the net.
I was glad, and a little sorry.
Guthrie said, "Listen. Hear that?"
A dry stick had snapped somewhere downhill in the dark beneath the trees. Another a little to the right. Two or three more to the left. A good many men were coming uphill toward us through the redwoods, spread far out, walking slowly. We were very silent now. Nobody coughed or stirred. We were a single encircling fortress of tensity and waiting, every sense strained toward the oncoming men. At that moment I had no awareness of myself as a separate thing at all. I was fully a part of Comus and the defenders of the station, and the fortress of tension we created around us in the night, a closed circle domed over with listening and watching.
Guthrie's voice was a breath in my ear. "Down there—see?"
I couldn't see. Only a shadow that moved fast behind the trees and was gone. Then off to the left a hiss and a sighing cough burst out, and I saw a flash of bluish light and a man under the trees fe
ll backward and thudded to the ground without a single sound except the sound of falling. The hiss and the cough was a scatter-gun in operation. I was abstractly surprised at how silent they were. They only cough and spit blue fire politely—and mince to shreds any surface they strike.
I found my own gun at my shoulder and my cold finger on the trigger. But I didn't see anything to shoot at. I had an instant's vision of Harris's round, balding face, the man in the torn brown sweater. Rebels, sure. But did I really want to mince them with a scatter-gun? Could I?
Somebody down the slope called a hoarse, low question. Somebody else answered uncertainly. Then a man broke cover and started up the hill, and Guthrie's gun beside me sighed and flashed blue fire, and the man's shout was cut off and smashed backward in his throat as he fell.
A rifle cracked among the trees and I heard something whine nasally past and strike fire upon the side of the truck next to me. The sound was like a truck backfiring down by the river and a bullet smacked loud on the resonant steel.
Instantly all along the row of trucks the hissing cough and the fans of blue flame sprang out as if the trucks were one long, segmented dragon wheezing and spitting fire. Guthrie glanced at me irritably, saying, "Go on, shoot, shoot! Wipe them out fast! Sweep the hillside!"
I saw dark shapes drop and lie jerking a little on the slope. I saw the flash of gunfire down there and heard bullets whine. I wondered with some abstract chamber of the mind whether our troupe was still asleep back there, drugged with weariness and dope, thinking the rifle shots were trucks on the highway, perhaps, and the distant shouts truckers going off duty. Or were they awake and cowering?
The whole arc of the dragon was hissing now, spitting blue flame from every joint. And still I could not fire.
I could not take sides.
Beside me I heard Guthrie give a sudden grunt. I had never heard quite that sound before, but I knew what it meant. Maybe some ancestral memory from the great wars of the last century. I knew. I whipped around toward him and saw his face for a moment drained and stark in the blue moonlight. The blood began to seep through the checkered shirt high on the shoulder and he sighed a little and said, looking down, "Not bad—I think. Too high." Then he glanced up and his face convulsed suddenly and he said, "Rohan—shoot, shoot! Over there!"
