by C. L. Moore
I looked around the clearing. The Henkens lay on blankets under the trees, their playbox singing tiny tunes between them. Polly and Roy had disappeared into one of the trucks, and Cressy was talking to Guthrie on the steps on the sound truck. Nobody seemed to have noticed the fat man but me.
I got up and strolled along the path. The man was waiting for me on the far side of one of the big sequoias with a fire-eaten chamber hollowed out of its heart.
"Harris sent me," the fat man said. "Got a job for you."
"What now?" I asked. "I haven't very much time. We open tonight in San Andreas."
"Not unless you do the job for us, you don't."
"Damn Harris," I said with sudden anger. "He told me——"
"He said maybe you could open before you helped us. No yes or no. Maybe."
"Listen," I said wearily. "I've worked like a dog for three days rehearsing. I was up night before last fighting off looters with strings of human ears around their necks. Tonight I've got a play opening and I not only act but direct. There's a limit to what flesh and blood can do. You go tell Harris——"
"You want me to tell him you aren't putting on the show?" He had little reddish-brown eyes in a heavy face and I think he rather liked pushing me around.
"After all," he said, "now we know what the show's really on the road for, there's some of us feel more like stringing up the bunch of you than playing along."
"We know that, do we?" I asked, trying to guess whether this was bluff or not, excitement stirring in me in case it wasn't.
"We do. You don't. Yet." He grinned broadly. "Tell you what, Rohan. You do the job and maybe Harris will tell you why you're really here." He was tantalizing me, and the reddish eyes watched for a response.
I sighed. "What's the job?" I wasn't giving him any satisfaction.
He leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Seems like the organization could use an extra 'hopper now. You're going to pick one up for us, Harris tells me."
I said, "All right." I was feeling resigned by now. "I just walk up and drive off with the first one I see, right?"
He grinned. "You got a Comus cop in your outfit. When does he leave camp tonight for town?"
"About an hour or so before we do."
"All right. You name the time. When you say so, there'll be a commotion up at the truck station. After that it's up to you."
"And if I get it?"
"You'd better get it. Cut through the woods toward town. You know the farmlands down at the foot of the valley? There's a brown barn farthest of all down toward the bottom. Door's unlocked. Leave the 'hopper there. We'll pick it up in the morning. Okay?"
I nodded. "Oh, sure," I said.
"What time you want the trouble to start?"
I thought it over. "Six-thirty."
"All right. Remember—no 'hopper, no play. I'll see you later." And he went off up the path swaggering a little, cigarette smoke pluming back over his shoulder.
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CHAPTER XV
GUTHRIE AND ROY loaded up the sound truck at six. Just before they left I beckoned Guthrie aside. "After the other night," I said, "I don't feel so good going outside the camp unarmed. I want a gun."
He gave me a speculative look, nodded, and went over to the truck. Coming back with his hand out, he laid into mine a small, snub-nosed automatic, cool and heavy in my palm. I slid it into my coat pocket, the weight dragging it down a little on that side. I liked the feel of it.
Ten minutes after the truck had vanished up the trail I said to the nervously silent group waiting on the benches, "I've got some business to attend to. If I'm not back by seven, go on without me. I'll meet you in town."
They nodded without interest, too wrapped up in their opening-night jitters to care whether they ever saw me again.
I strolled up to the station trying to look casual, trying to control my quickened breathing. I didn't know what the penalties would be for stealing a 'hopper, but the state the country was in now the chances were they'd shoot first and ask questions afterward. I wasn't sure I was going to do it even now. All I intended to commit myself to was looking things over, evaluating my chances.
There were about twenty hedgehoppers in the parking area. I stood on the edge a minute, then pulled a handkerchief from my pocket, dropped a half dollar noisily, and watched it roll. Hunting it among the 'hoppers, I went on stooping and peering until I had located two vehicles with keys left in the ignition.
Then I went inside the restaurant for a beer I didn't want. I kept an eye on my watch, and five minutes before the critical moment I went out again, strolling slowly, lit a cigarette, looked up at the treetops leaning together away up over head. I walked around the side of the station toward the laundry lines in the rear where sheets and towels fluttered in the breeze. I stopped in an angle of the building to shake a rock out of my shoe, taking my time about it.
The commotion, when it came, was terrific. I hadn't known just what to expect, and the noise of the explosion on the far side of the station rocked the ground and me. I heard glass breaking. There was a moment of stunned silence. Cautiously I put my head around the corner. A truck which had just pulled off the highway was heaving on its big tires, reverberating thunderously and belching fire through its ruptured sides. Then the silence broke, and the yells and the thud of running feet began.
Stooping low, I made straight for the nearer of the two 'hoppers I'd spotted. I slid into the low bucket seat and felt the springy cradle of the machine throb to life as I switched on the motor. It seemed no different from any other car, except for that queasy bouncing. I backed it out and ran it recklessly down the slope toward the river, trusting to the laundry lines to screen me and to providence in case I was overestimating how steep a hill a 'hopper can take and stay upright.
I wasn't. I realized halfway down the slope that I was crossing the battleground of two nights past. About here, on this quickly passing spot, I had killed three men and their blood must still be a little moist deep down under the layers of fallen needles. Then the terrifying speed of my rush downhill blotted out all other thought. I crossed the rocks and the river in a bouncing burst of spray, and sheer velocity carried me up the opposite bank. River water ran down the glass shell in streams as I went bucketing along through the trees, steering the responsive little car frantically to cut around thickets and weave figure eights among the sequoias. Ferns streamed against the glass in strong green currents and parted to let me out again. I was going too fast and I knew it, but a sort of panic was on me now and I couldn't stop.
Suppose somebody at the station had seen me go? Were they after me now? I hunched low over the wheel, expecting the thin scream of a bullet from behind. And the renegade gangs—they'd prowled the woods here only a little while ago. Did stragglers still linger? My ears stung at the bases as if the knife were already shearing them off my head.
Once I frightened a little herd of deer and saw them start to go bounding off, heads turned sidewise to look at me out of big startled eyes, but I was gone before they were and the trees seemed to move in behind me to shut us off from each other. And once—I think—I passed two dead men lying face down among the ferns. Maybe they were casualties from the fighting. Maybe they were sleeping woods prowlers, except they didn't stir when I went by. Maybe they were only shadows or hallucinations that whipped past too quickly to focus on. I'll never know now.
About halfway in my trip the voice box on the panel before me coughed and spoke, and the sound of a human voice pulled me out of the panic a little. I think it was real panic in the original sense of the word, the woods terror the Greeks named after Pan won't like the way the trees closed in behind me or the sense of not being alone. Hearing another man's voice broke up the terror for me and the trees stopped closing in.
The voice box said thinly that a hedgehopper had been stolen from Station 12-101 and traced across the river. It seemed to be heading for San Andreas and would all hands please be on the lookout. I had more to worry about now, but
I felt much less frightened. My heart had slowed down almost to normal by the time the fields I was heading for came into sight between the trees, and if there were pursuers behind me they had lost the trail.
The voice box kept up its thin complaint about having been stolen as I bounced across another little stream and burst through a screen of tall weeds into the lower San Andreas valley.
Up out of the grass ten feet away rose a man's head and the two steel-rimmed eyes of a shotgun looking straight into mine. I drew my nervous car up trembling in the grass.
"Harris sent me," I said quickly. "I'm looking for a brown barn."
The man looked me over, listened, waited a minute or two and, evidently deciding I wasn't the vanguard of an invasion, waved me on.
"Your barn's down that way about half a mile. Get going—I'll kick over your tracks." He grinned as the voice box announced all over again that it had been stolen. I left him industriously erasing tire marks and drove off down a sandy lane between high walls of corn. It was quiet here except for the soft throb of the motor and the complaints from the voice box. Twilight was deepening and a few stars had begun to wink uncertainly overhead.
The barn loomed up dark in the failing light. I got out and opened one of the big double doors. The warm, dusty smell of alfalfa breathed out in my face as I ran the nervous little 'hopper in.
Then, because it was very quiet in this cathedral-shaped place, I shut the door, got back into the 'hopper, and gave myself one cigarette's worth of rest and stillness, switching on the 'hopper's single headlight so I could see where I was. Dust shimmered and sank in the beam. The gray-green alfalfa was packed deep in the mow, and all around ranged empty stalls which had once, by the ghost of a rich, strong smell, held cows. On the wall hung a cracked leather collar which a horse must have worn a long time ago. There was a yellowed remnant of a poster nailed to the wall and I looked at it idly and wondered what was going to happen next.
The moment I sat still and let my mind go fallow the questions I hadn't yet had time for came clamoring into it. "Now we know what the show's really on the road for ..." I remembered the thread of brown wool caught on the hinge of the sound-truck door. "There's some of us feel like stringing up the bunch of you than playing along." I remembered Ted Nye's voice cutting across the fat man's voice in my mind like words spoken in an echo chamber. "Just say I need a large-scale diversion in California ... People have to be distracted while something else—something big—gets done."
One thing was sure. We were part of Comus still. And the presence of an elaborate sound truck with a play that didn't need much in the way of lighting and sound effects added up to something pretty obvious. It hadn't taken the man in the brown sweater long to find out what he came for—it couldn't have, for he hadn't much time. And now the rebels knew, and maybe I would know, too, when I saw Harris next.
The question—what do I do then?
Warn Guthrie that our little traveling trap, or whatever it turned out to be, is discovered? Warn Ted? Time enough to decide that after I knew what I'd been lured into.
A sudden and overpowering desire for alcohol made my throat constrict for a moment. The problems were coming at me too fast. I needed a refuge from reality. I hadn't bargained for anything as hard as this when I let myself be roused back into life. I thought maybe if I could get into town fast enough there might be time for a quick drink or two before the show.
I patted the nervous 'hopper's flank, switched off the voice box in mid-complaint, killed the motor, dropped the key in my pocket to clink against the automatic.
"Good night," I said. "Take it easy." And I left it there alone with the ghosts of the horses and cows.
The evening crowds in San Andreas were bigger than I'd expected for a Friday night. The lights were bright, many of the stores were open, women in bright print dresses and men in denims and wide hats moved up and down the street noisily. I didn't like the feel of the crowd somehow. There was an undercurrent of tension, almost hysteria, in the pitch of the voices and the quick, nervous motions of the people. I wasn't surprised, considering what San Andreas had been through lately, but I didn't like it.
I still wanted the drink, but now I was afraid to take it. Yet, anyhow, I hadn't counted on a crowd with a temper like this. To find the troupe all I had to do was follow along with the majority, and the current carried me right up to the bright new glint of steel bleachers looming over the heads of the crowd. Guthrie had set the things up across a street just this side of the square, and Raleigh's stern marble face gazed resolutely out into the night above us. The monument shaft wasn't floodlit any more, but you could see the pale, noble jaw swimming above the roofs in dramatic shadows.
The bleachers faced each other across an expanse of street that was going to be our stage. Left and right were the store fronts that were part of our scenery. I noticed with admiration how Guthrie had strung his lights overhead to shine into the eyes of anybody who tried to watch from upper windows and outsmart the paying customers.
The sound truck was parked behind one set of stands and I saw Guthrie had left a narrow space between the seats through which he could watch the stage from the back door of the truck. The two other vehicles stood at the curb, and from certain nervous pitchings of the truck bodies I inferred the cast was inside now, dressing and making up, worrying as everyone worries on an opening night. I had to dress and make up myself, but I wanted to check with Guthrie first.
I found him under the bleachers, peering up and testing supports. He looked worried, and he had plenty to worry about. The crowd around him was full of noisy young fellows, most of them wearing paper triangles with the red 93 scrawled inside the blue star. We seemed to have more than our share of the young and reckless around us, yelling and laughing, shoving each other and catcalling for Guthrie. He was ignoring them, but his jaw was set and his face red. I noticed he kept his shoulder immobile, but other than that he seemed surprisingly spry for a man who had been through all he had.
He looked glad to see me. "You're late," he said. "I thought you had the town set up for us. What do you think now?"
As he spoke a little knot of overgrown adolescents burst out of the crowd to hurl themselves shouting against the supports of the bleachers. The whole row of seats staggered and the metal sang on a complaining note.
Guthrie said angrily. "This has been going on ever since I set the thing up. It's getting worse. What do we do now?"
I started to say something, but a hollow, booming sound like a sheet of tin shaken drowned out my voice. There was an outburst of yells and heavy laughter. The crowd parted and a little mob of men who looked like Croppers came laughing and staggering up the street carrying huge slabs of something bright crimson and very thin. It reverberated when they shook it. The red was Comus color. (A quick, involuntary thought flashed through my mind. What's bright crimson and thunders when you strike it, but it's thin enough to put your fist through when you see it disassembled? A riddle. And the answer?)
I knew what the red stuff was. Sheets of molded plastic ripped off the side of the Comus check station near the highway. One of the Croppers stooped over, yelled with drunken laughter, and sailed the big sheet toward us level with the street. It smashed into the steel legs of the bleachers and splintered with a booming crash, fragments flying into the crowd. People screamed and laughed protestingly.
Guthrie looked at me.
"Wait a minute," I said. I glanced around the bright, crowded street behind us. As I'd expected, I saw one face I knew. I sauntered softly across to the sidewalk and stood at the corner of a grocery for a minute or two surveying the crowd. Then I turned left and went down the alley between stores. Looking back, I saw after a moment a dark figure shutting out the light, coming after me.
"Harris?" I asked quietly.
"Hello, Rohan," he said.
"What's going on here?" I demanded, hearing my voice rise a little.
"Nothing yet," Harris said placidly. "We just want to make sure you kept
your end of the deal. Got what we sent you for?"
"I got it. Didn't your boy with the shotgun report in?"
"Not yet. Want to prove you delivered the goods?"
"How the hell can I? I haven't got it in my pocket."
"Haven't you?"
"If you want the key you can say so," I told him irritably, plunging my hand in my pocket. "Is that it? Here."
He accepted it, nodding. "Good enough. I'll have the thing picked up sometime tomorrow. All right then, give me ten minutes and you can start your show."
"Wait a minute," I said. "I hear you've got some news for me about the reason we're here."
He hesitated, but only briefly. "We think we know. I guess you have a right to. You're working with us. Seems you've got a kind of portable mine detector in that truck of yours. Only it isn't looking for mines."
"What is it looking for then?"
He didn't answer me directly. "Comus has a lot of probing apparatus set up around the country. This gadget probes too. But it's sensitive, very sensitive. It's looking for a special kind of radiation, and there's only one kind of radiation Comus could be hunting in California."
It didn't take long to think that one over. The Anti-Com would be what Comus was worrying about. So we were traveling with an Anti-Com detector. If Harris was right. If the man in the brown sweater had known enough to dope it all out from the one quick glance which was all he might have had time for. It occurred to me to wonder if Ted Nye might have thought of some such search as this and planted a red herring device to cover the real facts. But there's such a thing as being too devious. I only nodded.
You don't seem very much worried," I said. "You going to call off our tour?"
"Not yet. Not for a lot of reasons."
