He improvised. “I’m Commander Lister. Just in from Iceland aboard atom sub Taft. They didn’t tell you in case it got turned down, but I was sent for authorization to give you citizenship. You know how unusual it is for a woman.”
“Who’s this child? And why did you get me up in the dead of night?”
He dipped deeply into Martha’s probings of the past week. “Citizenship’ll make the Guard Intelligence gang think twice before they try to grab you again. Naturally they’d try to block us if we administered the oath in public. Ready?”
“Dramatic,” she sneered. “Oh, I suppose so. Get it over with.”
“Do you, Lee Bennet, solemnly renounce all allegiances previously held by you and pledge your allegiance to the North American Government?”
“I do,” she said.
There was a choked little cry from Martha. “Hell’s fire,” she said. “Like breaking a leg!”
“What are you talking about, little girl?” Lee asked, coldly alert.
“It’s all right,” Charles said wearily. “Don’t you know my voice? I’m Orsino. You turned me in back there because they don’t give, citizenship to women and so your de-conditioning didn’t get triggered off. I managed to break for the woods. A bunch of natives got me. I busted loose with the help of Martha here. Among her other talents, the kid’s a mind reader. I remember the triggering shocked me out of a year’s growth; how do you feel?”
Lee was silent, but Martha answered in a voice half puzzled and half contemptuous: “She feels fine, but she’s crying.”
“Am not,” Lee Falcaro gulped.
Charles turned from her, embarrassed. In a voice that strove to be normal, he whispered to Martha: “What about the boat?”
“Still there,” she said.
Lee Falcaro said tremulously: “Wh-wh-what boat?”
“Martha’s staked out a reactor-driven patrol speedboat at a wharf. One guard aboard. She—watched it in operation and I have some small-boat time. I really think we can grab it. If we get a good head-start, they don’t have anything based here that’ll catch up with it. If we get a break on the weather, their planes won’t be able to pick us up.”
Lee Falcaro stood up, dashing tears from her eyes. “Then let’s go,” she said evenly.
“How’s the C.Q.—that man downstairs, Martha?”
“Still sleepin’. The way’s as clear now as it’ll ever be.”
They closed the door behind them and Charles worked the lock. The Charge of Quarters looked as though he couldn’t be roused by anything less than an earthquake as they passed—but Martha stumbled on one of the rotting steps after they were outside the building.
“Patrick and Bridget rot my clumsy feet off!” she whispered. “He’s awake.”
“Under the porch,” Charles said. They crawled into the dank space between porch floor and ground. Martha kept up a scarcely-audible volleyfire of maledictions aimed at herself.
When they stopped abruptly Charles knew it was bad.
Martha held up her hand for silence, and Charles imagined in the dark that he could see the strained and eerie look of her face. After a pause she whispered: “He’s using the—what do you call it? You talk and somebody hears you far away? A prowler he says to them. A wild man from the woods. The bitches bastard must have seen you in your handsome suit of skin and dirt, Charles. Oh, we’re for it! May my toe that stumbled grow the size of a boulder! May my cursed eyes that didn’t see the step fall out!”
They huddled down in the darkness and Charles took Lee Falcaro’s hand reassuringly. It was cold. A moment later his other hand was taken, with grim possessiveness, by the child.
Martha whispered: “The fat little man. The man who kills, Charles.”
He nodded. He thought he had recognized Grinnel from her picture.
“And ten men waking up. Charles, do you remember the way to the wharf?”
“Sure,” he said. “But we’re net going to get separated.”
“They’re mean, mad men,” she said. “Bloody-minded. And the little man is the worst.”
They heard the stomping feet and a babble of voices, and Commander Grinnel’s clear, fat-man’s tenor: “Keep it quiet, men. He may still be in the area.” The feet thundered over their heads on the porch.
In the barest of whispers Martha said: “The man that slept tells them there was only one, and he didn’t see what he was like except for the bare skin and the long hair. And the fat man says they’ll find him and—and—and says they’ll find him.” Her hand clutched Charles’ desperately and then dropped it as the feet thudded overhead again.
Grinnel was saying: “Half of you head up the street and half down. Check the alleys, check open window—hell, I don’t have to tell you. If we don’t find the bastard on the first run we’ll have to wake up the whole Guard Battalion and patrol the whole base with them all the goddam night, so keep your eyes open. Take off.”
“Remember the way to the wharf, Charles,” Martha said. “Good-bye lady. Take care of him. Take good care of him.” She wrenched her hand away and darted out from under the porch.
Lee muttered some agonized monosyllable. Charles started out after the child instinctively and then collapsed weakly back onto the dirt. They heard the rest.
“Hey, you—it’s him, by God! Get him! Get him!”
“Here he is, down here! Head him off!”
“Over there!” Grinnel yelled. “Head him off! Head him—good work!”
“For God’s sake. It’s a girl.”
“Those goddam yeomen and their goddam prowlers.”
Grinnel: “Where are you from, kid?”
“That’s no kid from the base, commander. Look at her!”
“I just was, sarge. Looks good to me, don’t it to you?”
Grinnel, tolerant, fatherly, amused: “Now, men, have your fun but keep it quiet.”
“Don’t be afraid, kid—” There was an animal howl from Martha’s throat that made Lee Falcaro shake hysterically and Charles grind his fingernails into his palms.
Grinnel: “Sergeant, you’d better tie your shirt around her head and take her into the O.N.I. building.”
“Why, commander! And let that lousy little yeoman in on it?”
Grinnel, amused, a good Joe, a man’s man: “That’s up to you, men. Just keep it quiet.”
“Why, commander, sometimes I like to make a little noise—”
“Ow!” a man yelled. There was a scuffle of feet and babbling voices. “Get her, you damn fool!” “She bit my hand—” “There she goes—” and a single emphatic shot.
Grinnel’s voice said into the silence that followed: “That’s that, men.”
“Did you have to shoot, Commander?” an aggrieved Guardsman said.
“Don’t blame me, fellow. Blame the guy that let her go.”
“God-dammit, she bit me—”
Somebody said as though he didn’t mean it: “We ought to take her someplace.”
“The hell with that. Let ‘em get her in the morning.”
“Them as wants her.” A cackle of harsh laughter.
Grinnel, tolerantly: “Back to the guardhouse, men. And keep it quiet.”
They scuffled off and there was silence again for long minutes. Charles said at last: “We’ll go down to the wharf.” They crawled out and looked for a moment from the shelter of the building at the bundle lying in the road.
Lee muttered: “Grinnel.”
“Shut up,” Charles said. He led her down deserted alleys and around empty corners, strictly according to plan.
The speedboat was a twenty-foot craft at Wharf Eighteen, bobbing on the water safely removed from other moored boats and ships. Lee Falcaro let out a small, smothered shriek when she saw a uniformed sailor sitting in the cockpit, apparently staring directly at them.
“It’s all right,” Charles said. “He’s a drunk. He’s always out cold by this time of night.” Smoothly Charles found the rope locker, cut lengths with the sailor’s own knife and bound a
nd gagged him. The man’s eyes opened, weary, glazed and red while this was going on and closed again. “Help me lug him ashore,” Charles said. Lee Falcaro took the sailor’s legs and they eased him onto the wharf.
They went back into the cockpit. “This is deep water,” Charles said, “so you’ll have no trouble with pilotage. You can read a compass and charts. There’s an automatic dead reckoner. My advice is just to pull the moderator rods out quarter-speed, point the thing west, pull the rods out as far as they’ll go—and relax. Either they’ll overtake you or they won’t.”
She was beginning to get the drift. She said nervously: “You’re talking as though you’re not coming along.”
“I’m not,” he said, playing the lock of the arms rack. The bar fell aside and he pulled a .45 pistol from its clamp. He thought back and remembered where the boat’s diminutive magazine was located, broke the feeble lock and found a box of short, fat, heavy little cartridges. He began to snap them into the pistol’s magazine.
“What do you think you’re up to?” Lee Falcaro demanded.
“Appointment with Commander Grinnel,” he said. He slid the heavy magazine into the pistol’s grip and worked the slide to jack a cartridge into the chamber.
“Shall I cast off for you?” he asked.
“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “You sound like a revival of a Mickey Spillane comedy. You can’t bring her back to life and you’ve got a job to do for the Syndic.”
“You do it,” he said, and snapped another of the blunt, fat, little cartridges into the magazine.
She cast off, reached for the moderator-rod control and pulled it hard.
“Gee,” he gasped, “you’ll sink us!” and dashed for the controls. You had seconds before the worm-gears turned, the cadmium rods withdrew from their slots, the reactor seethed and sent boiling metal cycling through the turbine—
He slammed down manual levers that threw off the fore and aft mooring lines, spun the wheel, bracing himself, and saw Lee Falcaro go down to the deck in a tangle, the .45 flying from her hand and skidding across the knurled plastic planking. But by then the turbine was screaming an alarm to the whole base and they were cutting white water through the buoy-marked gap in the harbor net.
Lee Falcaro got to her feet. “I’m not proud of myself,” she said to him. “But she told me to take care of you.”
He said grimly: “We could have gone straight to the wharf without that little layover to pick you up. Take the wheel.”
“Charles, I—”
He snarled at her.
“Take the wheel.”
She did, and he went aft to stare through the darkness. The harbor lights were twinkling pin-points; then his eyes misted so he could not see them at all. He didn’t give a damn if a dozen corvettes were already slicing the bay in pursuit. He had failed.
XVI
It was a dank fog-shrouded morning. Sometime during the night the quill of the dead reckoner had traced its fine red line over the 30th meridian. Roughly half-way, Charles Orsino thought, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. But the line was straight as a string for the last four hours of their run. The damn girl must have fallen asleep on watch. He glared at her in the bow and broke open a ration. Blandly oblivious to the glare, she said: “Good morning.”
Charles swallowed a mouthful of chocolate, half-chewed, and choked on it. He reached hastily for water and found the tall plastic column of the ion-exchange apparatus empty. “Damn it,” he snarled, “why didn’t you refill this thing when you emptied it? And why didn’t you zig-zag overnight? You’re utterly irresponsible.” He hurled the bucket overside, hauled it up and slopped seawater into the apparatus. Now there’d be a good twenty minutes before a man-sized drink accumulated.
“Just a minute,” she told him steadily. “Let’s straighten this out. I haven’t had any water on the night watch so I didn’t have any occasion to refill the tube. You must have taken the last of the water with your dinner. And as for the zig-zag, you said we should run a straightaway now and then to mix it up. I decided that last night was as good a time as any.”
He took a minute drink from the reservoir, stalling. There was something—yes; he had meant to refill the apparatus after his dinner ration. And he had told her to give it a few hours of straightaway some night.…
He said formally: “You’re quite right on both counts. I apologize.” He bit into a ration.
“That’s not good enough,” she said. “I’m not going to have you tell me you’re sorry and then go scowling and sulking about the boat. In fact I don’t like your behavior at all.”
He said, enormously angry: “Oh, you don’t do you?” and hated her, the world and himself for the stupid inadequacy of the comeback.
“No. I don’t. I’m seriously worried. I’m afraid the conditioning you got didn’t fall away completely when they swore you in. You’ve been acting irrationally and inconsistently.”
“What about you?” he snapped. “You got conditioned too.”
“That’s right,” she said. “That’s another reason why you’re worrying me. I find impulses in myself that have no business there. I simply seem to do a better job of controlling them than you’re doing. For instance: we’ve been quarreling and at cross-purposes ever since you and Martha picked me up. That couldn’t be unless I were contributing to the friction.”
The wheel was fixed; she took a step or two aft and said professorially: “I’ve never had trouble getting along with people. I’ve had differences, of course, and at times I’ve allowed myself displays of temper when it was necessary to assert myself. But I find that you upset me; that for some reason or other your opinion on a matter is important to me, that if it differs with mine there should be a reconciliation.”
He put down the ration and said wonderingly: “Do you know, that’s the way I feel about you? And you think it’s the conditioning or—or something?” He took a couple of steps forward, hesitantly.
“Yes,” she said in a rather tremulous voice. “The conditioning or something. For instance, you’re inhibited. You haven’t made an indecent proposition to me, not even as a matter of courtesy. Not that I care, of course, but—” In stepping aft, she tripped over the water bucket and went down to the deck with a faint scream.
He said: “Here, let me help you.” He picked her up and didn’t let go.
“Thanks,” she said faintly. “The conditioning technique can’t be called faulty, but it has inherent limitations.…” She trailed off and he kissed her. She kissed back and said more faintly still: “Or it might be the drugs we used.… Oh, Charles, what took you so long?”
He said, brooding: “You’re way out of my class, you know. I’m just a bagman for the New York police. I wouldn’t even be that if it weren’t for Uncle Frank, and you’re a Falcaro. It’s just barely thinkable that I could make a pass at you. I guess that held me off and I didn’t want to admit it so I got mad at you instead. Hell, I could have swum back to the base and made a damned fool of myself trying to find Grinnel, but down inside I knew better. The kid’s gone.”
“We’ll make a psychologist of you yet,” she said.
“Psychologist? Why? You’re joking.”
“No. It’s not a joke. You’ll like psychology, darling. You can’t go on playing polo forever, you know.”
Darling! What was he getting into? Old man Gilby was four-goal at sixty, wasn’t he? Good God, was he hooked into marriage at twenty-three? Was she married already? Did she know or care whether he was? Had she been promiscuous? Would she continue to be? He’d never know; that was the one thing you never asked; your only comfort, if you needed comfort, was that she could never dream of asking you. What went on here? Let me out!
It went through his mind in a single panicky flash and then he said: “The hell with it,” and kissed her again.
She wanted to know: “The hell with what, darling?”
“Everything. Tell me about psychology. I can’t go on playing polo forever.”
It was an h
our before she got around to telling him about psychology: “The neglect has been criminal—and inexplicable. For about a century it’s been assumed that psychology is a dead fallacy. Why?”
“All right,” he said amiably, playing with a lock of her hair. “Why?”
“Lieberman,” she said. “Lieberman of Johns-Hopkins. He was one of the old-line topological psychology men—don’t let the lingo throw you, Charles; it’s just the name of a system. He wrote an attack on the mengenlehre psychology school—point-sets of emotions, class-inclusions of reactions and so on. He blasted them to bits by proving that their constructs didn’t correspond to the emotions and reactions of random-sampled populations. And then came the pay-off: he tried the same acid test on his own school’s constructs and found out that they didn’t correspond either. It didn’t frighten him; he was a scientist. He published, and then the jig was up. Everybody, from full professors to undergraduate students went down the roster of the schools of psychology and wrecked them so comprehensively that the field was as dead as palmistry in twenty years. The miracle is that it hadn’t happened before. The flaws were so glaring! Textbooks of the older kind solemnly described syndromes, psychoses, neuroses that simply couldn’t be found in the real world! And that’s the way it was all the way down the line.”
“So where does that leave us?” Charles demanded. “Is it or isn’t it a science?”
“It is,” she said simply. “Lieberman and his followers went too far. It became a kind of hysteria. The experimenters must have been too eager. They misread results, they misinterpreted statistics, they misunderstood the claims of a school and knocked down not its true claims but straw-man claims they had set up themselves.”
“But—psychology!” Charles protested, obscurely embarrassed at the thought that man’s mind was subject to scientific study—not because he knew the first thing about it, but because everybody knew psychology was phony.
She shrugged. “I can’t help it. We were doing physiology of the sensory organs, trying to settle the oldie about focusing the eye, and I got to grubbing around the pre-Lieberman texts looking for light in the darkness. Some of it sounded so—not sensible, but positive that I ran off one of Lieberman’s population checks. And the old boy had been dead wrong. Mengenlehre constructs correspond quite nicely to the actual way people’s minds work. I kept checking and the schools that were destroyed as hopelessly fallacious a century ago checked out, some closely and some not so closely, as good descriptions of the way the mind works. Some have predictive value. I used mengenlehre psychology algorithms to compute the conditioning on you and me, including the trigger release. It worked. You see, Charles? We’re on the rim of something tremendous!”
The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack Page 47
