by C. L. Moore
I nodded. “If I think about it I’ll get too scared to go,” I told her frankly. “How soon can I start?”
“Five minutes,” she said. “Maybe less. They’re boxing it for you now.”
I said, “What is the Anti-Com, Elaine? How does it work?”
She started to shake her head. Then she laughed unsteadily. “I’m so used to keeping it a secret,” she said. “Actually it doesn’t matter now. Either we get the fuse to Corby in time or we don’t. Nothing else matters. Rohan, all the Anti-Com has to do is operate thirty seconds, and every Comus mechanism that uses a transformer goes dead all over the nation.”
“Thirty seconds!” I said.
“It’s awfully simple. We’ve found a way to induce permanent resonance in practically every transformer in the country.”
ÜPermanent resonance?”
“I don’t understand it completely, of course. The Anti-Com will broadcast two particular frequencies in a certain order that will set up a sort of circular process in the transformers. Energy input and energy output rates will be identical, and no outside force can break the cycle. When it happens the transformers are no good at all. And that means that everything using electricity will stop dead.”
I said, “Everything? But——”
“I know. Hospitals and homes, planes in the air—there’ll be casualties. But not for long. Our people all over the country are ready and waiting. Comus is spread pretty thin in man power because it’s so well organized. You know how intricate its system of communications is. And all its power depends on the network of communications and transportation. Knock out that organization and—well, there’s a lot mote of us than them.” She drew another of those deep, unsteady breaths. “That’s the story,” she said. “Now you know.”
I started to say, “Elaine——” but I stopped again, because she couldn’t hear me. She had closed her eyes and she was shivering uncontrollably from head to foot. I closed my arms around her and she leaned her forehead against my shoulder and let the deep, strong shudders go over her unresisted. I stood there holding her fast.
The fit didn’t last long. Then she laughed with a sound more like grief than amusement and pushed herself back from me.
“It’s just reaction,” she said. “It’s such a relief, Rohan, to pass the responsibility on!”
“You’ve done a fine job,” I told her. “Now your part’s done. I’ll get the fuse to Corby if anybody can. If I can’t—what’s your guess, Elaine? Will the crew turn on the Anti-Com anyhow and take the chance of its blowing?”
The bright, dark eyes met mine levelly. “I think they will. I think maybe I would if I had to make the decision. There’s never been a chance against Comus before. There may never be again. Either way it’s a terrible decision to have to make. But I think they’ll turn it on.”
Down the hall the sound of hurrying feet came nearer. Two men rounded a corner, carrying between them a square case about the size of a portable typewriter box, with handles on two sides. I looked at it dubiously.
“How am I going to smuggle that thing into the sound truck?” I asked Elaine. Then I realized I hadn’t explained to her how I expected to pass the Comus cordon, and I told her the story in quick sentences.
She frowned a little. “It isn’t really heavy,” she said. “But it’s clumsy. And conspicuous, unless there’s someplace you can put it in the truck where it might seem to fit in. Will they search the truck?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. So far I don’t think they know there’s anything vital to search for. You say Beardsley didn’t know about the safety fuse?”
“That’s right.” She thought it over briefly. “Go on back to the truck then. Some of the boys will go with you. We’ll manage a diversion just before you reach the line-up at the check station. Be at the back of the truck and we’ll hand the box in to you. I can’t think of anything better, can you?”
I said, “It ought to work. Okay then, let’s go.”
She held out her hand. It was cold and still unsteady in mine. I said, “Elaine there’s going to be a bad time in Carson City tonight. Now that Raleigh’s dead the safety controls are off Nye. You realize that?”
She nodded.
“Keep under cover, will you?” I said. “If we ever come out of this——” I paused, smiling at her. “I’ll come back and find you.”
“I’ll expect you,” she told me quite impersonally.
We let it go at that. Maybe it was as far as it would ever go. Who knows?
CHAPTER XXVI
GUTHRIE GLANCED AROUND the anxious faces in the truck for one last time. His eyes lingered for a moment on Cressy’s face.
“You’ll be okay,” he said reassuringly. “Rohan, I’ve made all the arrangements. Once you’re outside, head for Truck Station 33, north on the highway about ten miles. They’ll be expecting you. They’re fortified well enough and you’ll be safe. Okay?”
Cressy smiled at him. “Stop worrying,” she said. “We’ll live to tell our grandchildren about it.” She was sitting on the floor with her feet tucked under the bright pink skirts of her last-act costume. The make-up was smeared a little on her face and the mascara had run down to streak her cheeks, so I thought she must have cried. Maybe when the mob bombarded the truck and a lynching seemed like the next thing the troupe might expect. Whatever it was, she had got her courage back now.
Polly said, “Guthrie, you’re sure we’ll get our pay and the bonus? We only gave three performances, but——”
“You’ll get it,” Guthrie told her. “We did our job. Don’t worry.”
Polly nodded and gave Roy a cold glance. He sat beside Cressy, examining the pistol Guthrie had handed him, and he didn’t meet his wife’s look at all. They were not, apparently, on speaking terms this evening.
Pod Henken said, “Good luck, Guthrie. Look out for yourself. You sure you won’t come with us?”
“I’ve got my orders,” Guthrie told him.
Mrs. Henken, sitting on the floor beside Pod, her feet out straight before her, reached up and removed from her wild tangle of white curls a single carnation which she must have picked from somebody’s garden on the way to the theater tonight. She twirled it between her fingers and in some perfectly mysterious way managed to rivet every eye in the truck upon it. Her old scene-stealing techniques were flawless, as usual, even when there seemed neither need nor point.
She said to me calmly, ignoring everyone else, “Rohan, do you remember The Mouse-trap?“ and before I could answer, went smoothly on into the familiar lines from Hamlet.
“I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that …”
She broke off. “How does it go, do you remember?”
Guthrie said hastily. “You’d better get moving. I’ll see you all later on. Good luck. Good-by.” He swung down to the ground and the door closed behind him.
I grinned at Mrs. Henken and shook my head. I wondered how long she had known the theater was akin to Hamlet’s Mouse-trap. It didn’t matter now, but I wondered.
“Pod,” I said, “will you drive?”
The distraction I’d been expecting came right on schedule. A block away from the tail of the line-up at the check station a thrown rock bounced thunderously off the front wall of the truck. An outburst of yells and flung stones drew every eye to the road before us. Pod threw on the air brakes and stopped us with shattering suddenness. I never did know why. Maybe a log thrown across the street.
The moment we stopped I opened the door at the rear of the truck very quietly. Hands out of the darkness held up a square case, the handle ready for my grasp. I had it inside the truck and set down in the spot I’d picked out for it while the shouts and reverberations of rocks on the metal walls still echoed deafeningly in our ears.
It was over in thirty seconds. Pod started the truck again. The shouts faded behind us. We all let out the tightly
held breaths we had drawn and looked at each other with shaky smiles.
At the check station we all showed our regulation Comus passes. They matched us up carefully with the photographs on our cards. Someone came in and cast a very cursory series of glances around the truck. What they seemed to be looking for was stowaways. Nothing else interested them much. The whole thing was over in less than five minutes.
Pod swung the truck up the ramp toward the highway. He turned right swung into a suitable lane, and set he controls for automatic. Then he leaned over the back of the cab and grinned at us.
“We’re on our way,” he said.
“Look in the map compartment, will you?” I said. “I’d like to see what the layout is. I’ve got something to tell you.”
The highway ran straight between Carson City and the Corby turnoff. The truck stop where we were expected lay about five miles beyond the turnoff. Corby was at the end of a winding twenty miles of mountain road. I looked at the map. When we came to the spot where the Corby road left the highway we would stand at the branching of a Y, down one leg of which the troupe might find safety—of a sort. If the Anti-Com didn’t blow California sky-high. But there wasn’t going to be time enough to spare for that trip down the far leg of the Y.
I had to get to Corby as fast as the truck would take me. Every second counted from now on. The troupe was going to need the truck to reach their refuge. I was going to need it to get to Corby. We couldn’t both have it.
I stood there balancing against the swaying of the floor and frowning down at the map. This was a problem I hadn’t thought of. Back there in Carson City it had seemed enough to get the Swann Players out of town before the fighting began, before the townspeople returned to their lynching. But what was I going to do with them now? I couldn’t take them with me, I couldn’t leave them to walk the five dark miles through renegade-infested country.
“Set her at high speed, Pod,” I said. “We’re in a hurry.” I looked from face to face around the familiar little group. I thought how well I’d come to know them in the past week. I remembered how willingly they’d worked under my harsh direction. I remembered how they’d backed me up on the night when I got my old magic back again, and how they’d rallied round to keep the show going the night I froze. The responsibility I felt for them was a very real thing. But I had a bigger responsibility now.
They would have to know what we were all up against. They’d have to make their own decision. I couldn’t do it for them.
“Pod,” I said, “watch the road, will you? I want to know when we reach the Corby turnoff.” I glanced around the group. “All of you,” I said, “there’s something you’ve got to know. We aren’t out of the woods yet, cast. I think there’s a bad time ahead. Here’s the setup.”
I told them briefly, keeping my voice calmer than I felt. I told them about the Anti-Com and the probability of a blowup. “If that happens,” I said, “we’ll never know what hit us.” I told them where the Anti-Com was. That had stopped being a secret now. “And Nye will bomb Corby right off the map the minute he decides it’s that or risking the Anti-Com’s knocking Comus out,” I said. “Corby has two chances out of three of going up in a cloud of smoke within the next hour. So now you know where we stand.”
They had been watching me with frozen attention all the time I spoke. There was a deep silence when I finished.
Then Roy said, “What’s the third chance, Rohan?”
“Comus gets knocked out for good and the country moves into a whole new phase,” I said. “The rebels take over.”
“The Second American Revolution,” Roy said. “Is that it?”
I nodded. “That’s about it.”
Silence again. I measured them with a quick glance. I dropped my hand casually into my coat pocket and closed my fingers around the little gun. Still casually I moved toward the back of the truck until I had my shoulders against the far corner and faced the rest of the troupe gathered toward the front around the television screen. Pod watched me without blinking from the driver’s seat. I couldn’t see his hands.
“There’s one thing more,” I said. “I’m going on into Corby. I’ve got to get there fast. That means I’ve got to take the truck. I’m sorry, cast. I’ll have to drop you at the Corby turnoff.”
It took a moment for the import to sink in. Then Pod Henken said sharply, “Rohan, you can’t do it!”
I took the gun out of my pocket and rested it across my left wrist.
“I’ve got to. Believe me, if there were any other way—”
“But it’s only an extra five miles,” Polly said in bewilderment. “I don’t see——”
“An extra ten, there and back,” I told her. “I haven’t got the time.”
Pod Henken said, “But Eileen can’t walk five miles, Rohan. And it isn’t safe! We don’t know what kind of men are on the roads tonight.”
“I can’t help it,” I said stubbornly. “I’ve tried every way I know to think of an out, but——”
Pod looked at me over the seat back. “There are five of us against one,” he observed in a mild voice.
I jerked my gun a little to remind him. “I thought of that,” I said. “Maybe you could jump me, but I’d get two at least before——”
Pod Henken said, “Sorry, Rohan,” still very mildly, and over the back of the seat a star of blinding light seemed to explode right in my eyes. I heard a singing sound and the gun in my hand gave a metallic wail and jumped with paralyzing violence backward out of my grip. I thought for a moment it had taken my fingers with it. I felt a line of ice-cold force rip straight across my forearm, and the double impact sent me back hard against the truck wall. My head struck with a hollow-sounding thud.
Everything in front of me blurred. All the faces swam in a haze of gray. Very dimly I saw Polly swoop to snatch up the fallen gun. I thought, I can’t black out now. I can’t! Everything’s done for if I do. I felt my knees sagging and the floor of the truck seemed to tilt upward.
Very fast, before I could fall forward, I pressed my back to the wall and skidded to a sitting position. I bent forward until my head was between my knees, and with my good hand I hit my forehead, little jolting blows to keep the blackness from settling over me. Stay here, stay here! I pleaded silently with myself.
It wasn’t easy. My head was ringing and I couldn’t be sure whether there was an interval of black-out after all, but the next thing I knew I was looking up into Polly’s astonished face as she stood over me holding the gun. Pod was speaking from the cab.
“… mentioned I used to run a sharp-shooting act before the carnivals shut down, did I?” he seemed to be saying.
I blinked at him witlessly.
“Guess I’m losing my grip,” he said. “All I aimed to do was knock the gun out of your hand. I never went for your arm. That was an accident. How you feeling, Rohan?”
I straightened and leaned my head back against the jolting wall to keep from folding forward again. “Was I out?” I demanded.
Polly, still more bewildered than hostile, said, “I don’t think so. How’s your arm?”
I looked down, aware for the first time of a heavy, throbbing pain. Blood was spreading bright red across my shirt sleeve in two rapidly broadening wet spaces that made the cloth stick to my arm. Shakily with my left hand I pushed the sleeve up. On the underside of my forearm and in the middle of the back of it two neat bullet holes pumped bright blood.
Polly said in exasperated voice, “Oh, for God’s sake, Rohan!” She dropped to her knees, laid the gun on the rumbling floor of the truck, and took my arm in firm, competent hands turning it to look.
“No broken bones, anyhow,” she said. “But I think you got the artery, Pod.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Roy let’s have your shirt. Cressy, come over here and hold your thumb tight where I’ve got mine. Good. Keep it there.”
Over their bent heads I looked up at Pod Henken. I drew a deep breath. “Pod, where are we now?”
He glanced out at
the dark road. “Coming toward the Corby turnoff,” he said without expression.
Polly was ripping cloth into strips with long tearing sounds. I said, “Pod, are you a Comus man?”
/div>
There was a little shocked pause. Pod said indignantly, his red face redder than ever, “Hell, no! What do you take me for?”
“You’ve done a Comus job,” I said.
It was Roy, pulling his coat back on over his undershirt, who said, “What do you mean by that, Rohan?”
Cressy was looking into my face from very near, the stains of mascara and recent tears giving her a childish look. Polly paused with two ends of half-torn cloth in her motionless hands. Even Eileen Henken, the carnation between her fingers, gazed questioningly at me. It was Pod I looked at.
“The odds just dropped on the chances of a Second American Revolution,” I said. “I can’t give you orders now. But I’m asking you. Get out at the crossroads and let me take the truck on into Corby.”
After what seemed like a long pause, Roy said, “Why?”
“Crossroads,” Eileen Henken murmured in a meditative voice.
“That’s right,” I told her. “A bigger crossroads than you know. I can’t explain it, cast.” I hitched myself a little higher against the wall. Automatically Cressy’s hands moved with me, maintaining the pressure on my artery. I pulled myself together inside, throwing all the persuasion I could find in me into my voice. “You’ve got to do it,” I said. “I know it’s dangerous. Maybe you’ll get robbed on the road. Maybe you’ll get killed. But you’ve got to go. And I’ve got to have the truck.”
Polly said in a strained voice, “I think you’ll have to explain, Rohan.”
But before I could speak, Roy spoke for me. I looked up with astonishment at the sudden violence in his voice. His sullen look had lightened amazingly. For the first time I saw life and excitement in his face. He was reacting hard.
