Sunburst

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  Contents

  Copyright Information

  Dedication

  Sunburst: 1

  Sunburst: 2

  Sunburst: 3

  Sunburst: 4

  Sunburst: 5

  Sunburst: 6

  Sunburst: 7

  Sunburst: 8

  Sunburst: 9

  Sunburst: 10

  Sunburst: 11

  Sunburst: 12

  Sunburst: 13

  Sunburst: 14

  Copyright Information

  Copyright © 1964 by Phyllis Gotlieb.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  Dedication

  For Kelly, of course.

  Sunburst: 1

  It was Shandy Johnson’s thirteenth birthday, and she had celebrated by treating herself to a vanilla cone and a licorice stick. Alternately blackening her tongue with one and whitening it with the other, she was about to step up on the curb at Tenth and Main, when a boy who had been holding up the lamppost on the corner favored her with a long low whistle.

  She was startled; first she looked back to see if he meant somebody else. There was no-one there. Then she glanced into the plate-glass window of Fitch’s Joint to see if she had turned within the last moment into something rich and strange; she hadn’t. She was still a very tall crane-like girl, rather sallow, with narrow torso in a navy sweatshirt and long bluejean legs like articulated stovepipes. A high forehead and pointed chin gave her face the look of a brown egg poised on the small end, and her long crinkly black hair was tied in a ponytail with a shoelace.

  She sniffed and rubbed her nose to make sure that it at least was still on the straight and narrow, then took a fast hard look at the young man.

  She would have thought he had escaped from the Dump, if that were possible. He had a boxer-crouching bullethead set on a bull neck, thick arms, and a barrel chest tapering into short legs and small feet. But he was so obviously an extreme of his type she began to wonder if he hadn’t escaped from a zoo. He had a long-lipped chimp mouth, and best of all, one fantastic black eyebrow curling around his eyes and across the bridge of his nose. All he needed was psi.

  He gave her an innocent cheerful grin; she replied with a level surly glare and went past him into Fitch’s Joint, cramming the stuff in her mouth and wiping her hands on her pants.

  “Hey, Fitso, who’s the monk on the lamppost?”

  Fitch put down the glass he was polishing and leaned over to get the view. He jerked back fast. “Hell, it’s the Dumper’s peeper!”

  “Jason Hemmer?” So he did have the psi. She flashed her teeth. “I thought he didn’t look kosher.”

  He regarded her curiously. “How come you didn’t know him yourself?”

  “I keep out of the way.” She admired her black tongue in the mirror. “And I got spies.”

  Fitch picked up the glass again, but his hands trembled. “You better scram through the back.”

  “I don’t think he wants you, Fitso.”

  “If he’s read you he don’t need nothing else. Listen, Shandy”—pursing his rosebud mouth, he rummaged in the cash drawer and tossed her a crumpled bill,—“get on a bus and hole up in the east end.”

  “Me? I don’t need this! Like you say, if he’s read me—”

  “Shut up!” He snapped his flowered armbands and added through his teeth, “Just get out!”

  He turned his back on her and she frowned once at his bald head and wedged the bill in her tight side pocket. She took one more glance through the window. The chimp was beginning to move, and she scudded out the back door without waiting to see if the lamppost fell over.

  She threaded her way among garbage cans, ran down the trucking lane, came out on Tenth, and settled into a gentle ostrich-trot. She looked back once, swiftly. Hemmer had not yet come round the corner and was probably still talking to Fitch. He would know where she was, but his psi range was small; she could keep up a strong, if awkward, loping run and lead him by the nose.

  Just in time she noticed the blue-uniformed man lounging with crossed legs and folded arms in a doorway between stores. She slowed down casually and walked with eyes straight ahead, but not without observing that he was a big ugly customer. He was a member of the Civil Police, and if he decided to stop her she was in for real trouble.

  Jason Hemmer was working for the Military; they only wanted to know if she had psi, and she didn’t. If they caught her she would be measured, psyched, rorschached, and given a Prognostic Index, in itself a safeguard against being put in the Dump. But being pulled in by the civvies meant Juvenile Detention on the top floor of the county jail, a sickening prospect. Civvies played rough, dirty, and for keeps, and she would spend her last breath escaping them.

  The CP gave her a suspicious glance as she went by, but it was four o’clock and he had no excuse to ask her why she wasn’t in school. Then she remembered Fitch’s money in her pocket and broke out in a cold stinging sweat. If he found out about that—!

  She was beginning to have the feelings of a desert animal circled by kites and vultures. Like the town of Sorrel Park itself, a patch of carrion land surrounded by barbed wire: on the one hand at the mercy of a martial law that swooped and seized children to be caged in the Dump, and on the other, victimized by a vicious and rapacious Civil Police.

  But the CP made no move to stop her. She had run these risks every day of her life, and her luck had held once again. She took a deep breath of relief; she was free to waste her day dodging Jason Hemmer.

  * * * *

  The late afternoon sun was slanting as she rose into the lovely mellow light on the rooftop of Pyper’s Drygoods, crouching and silent. Douggy Pyper was there, feeding the pigeons; they were cooing and flapping about his thin freckled neck and he did not hear her.

  She said in a low voice, “It’s Shandy. Jason Hemmer’s after me. You want to take a look down?”

  He was at least half of the spy system she had so impressed Fitch with. For him, as well as herself, espionage was the natural function of a child in an adult world. He nodded, barely turning, and went over to the parapet, a pigeon still clinging to his shoulders. “Nobody there yet,” he announced, and went back to his task.

  She was confused. He should have known where she was. She crouched for a few moments in the shadow of the pigeon-cote, then rose and slipped quickly over to the next rooftop, past chimneys, Tri-V aerials, and skylights like great quartz crystals.

  After three more stores there was no place to go. She sat down in the dirty corner of the roof, circling her arms round her sharp knees and rubbing knobs of licorice off her teeth with her tongue. Let him come and get her, dirty spy.

  Jason Hemmer was the only psi outside the Dump; probably the only free one in the world. The forty-seven psychopaths penned in the Dump possessed more personal powers than had ever been known to mankind; he paid a price for his freedom by scouting the city for new psis as they were born, or more likely, as their powers developed during childhood. No parent could hide a child from Jason Hemmer, and no-one in Sorrel Park considered him a lovable character.

  Shandy wriggled in discomfort on bits of gravel and slivered brick. She was sure if she edged her eyes ever so narrowly over the parapet he would be on the sidewalk among the threading people, facing up with his cockeyed grin. I pspy. Her lip curled. That for you, she spat at the invisible enemy.

  She got up on her knees and poked her head defiantly over the rim, intending to stick her tongue out at him, and pulled back in surprise. He was not yet in the street. Now there was something funny here. He was a tel
epath, he was homing on her—or was he only playing a trick to scare her on an idle afternoon? But Jason Hemmer was not an idler in the street. He was as anxious to avoid the civilians who despised him for a baby-snatcher as he was to keep out of the way of the Civil Police, who loathed him as an arm of the martial law.

  Her knees were too sensitive to rest on for long, and she picked herself up and looked over the rooftops, but there was no-one in sight but Douggy. Arms akimbo, she surveyed the narrow horizon. It was a dispiriting view, limited by barbed-wire ramparts, reaching into the sky, only in grime and smoke.

  Sorrel Park had never made many claims to grace and beauty. A midwestern town on a waterway, supported by grain and, originally, coal, it had grown without planning, and its architecture was Ugly American; but the people were not. At least they had not begun that way.

  America’s “Open-The-Door-In-Eighty-Four” policy had had a noble sound overseas, and a year of quota-free immigration had swelled Sorrel Park, as well as many other small towns. But ten years later all doors to this place were closed. The explosion of the reactor at the nuclear power plant had brought in the Military to place the town under martial law and suppress the news for fear of countrywide panic. Sorrel Park stopped in mid-growth, left with nothing but the dubious distinction of being the only community in the country on coal power.

  The children of its once-hopeful immigrants had not learned the new ways of America, because new ways did not filter through barbed wire, or prosper in an almost nonexistent economy. Outgoing mail was censored, and little of the promised money made its way back to families in Europe. Fifteen thousand men and women who had brought determination and industriousness lost heart, and the place withered and shrank back on itself. A generation had been cheated. With twisted spirits they began to cheat in return.

  For Shandy it was what she had always known—but not necessarily home. She accepted and despised it as she accepted and despised the existence of Jason Hemmer, a living symbol of the second great cataclysm that had hit Sorrel Park. Twenty-two years later when the MPs were about to move out, the powers of psi had awakened in the children of parents who had had radiation damage from the Blowup. Jason Hemmer was the luckiest of those children.

  Shandy knelt at the roof-edge and looked down into the street again. This time she saw him.

  He was trotting round a corner on the opposite side of the street, trying to look unconcerned, and a failure at subterfuge in his new workshirt and clean jeans. He stopped uncertainly, looking this way and that, and people on the sidewalk stepped around him, frowning, but he seemed not to notice them. He crossed the street at a slow run, lumbering, but with a kind of heavy grace, like Neanderthal at his best. She suppressed a flicker of admiration and narrowed her eyes; he fetched up on the sidewalk below her, looked both ways once more, and scratched his head.

  Evidently he didn’t trust his telepathy; he tapped a passing woman on the shoulder. She blinked at him once, bridled, and recoiled. Then she opened her mouth and began to yell, “I don’t know and I don’t—” Two or three men ran up as she got a good grip on a big purse and swung her arm back, and Shandy, watching from only a few yards up, bit her knuckles to keep from laughing aloud.

  Jason Hemmer had cringed like a boxer warding off a blow. After a frozen moment he relaxed and straightened, and moved quietly back against the wall. The man and the woman, dumbfounded, began looking about wildly. Somehow he seemed to have disappeared from their sight.

  “Up to his goddam tricks,” one of the men snarled. “Did he hurt you, lady?” But the woman merely sniffed, shook her fist at the empty air, and went her way.

  The men melted, and Jason Hemmer moved out, and stood silent on the pavement. Shandy could have spat on his head.

  But she no longer wanted to. A cold knot of uneasiness was tightening itself in her belly; she should not have been able to see him once he had decided to disappear. There was something strange going on.

  So far, the chase had not been a matter for concern. She did not want to be caught by the MP but, since she had no psi, she was not afraid of the Dump and once she had taken the battery of tests she would have learned something.

  Now she sensed there was more at stake than a game of cat-and-mouse with a little temporary inconvenience at the end of it. Sure of the outcome before, she had been almost eager to match wits with the Dumper’s peeper. Now she could wait.

  She watched, fascinated, as he shrugged, scuffed his thick shoes on the sidewalk, jammed his hands in his pockets, and shambled down the street.

  That was that. He knew where she lived. She would give him plenty of time to go there and stir up a hornet’s nest with Ma Slippec. It was some comfort that nobody connected with the MPs was likely to give anybody up to the CPs. She rose and crossed the roofs again, prepared for a serious discussion with Douggy Pyper on the depredations of the pip.

  * * * *

  She walked home slowly in the soft evening light; lamps were coming on. She had no intention of holing up in the east end. Fitch was a scared little man and she had better uses for his money.

  When she came within a block of Slippec’s Cigarstore she knew she had made a mistake. There was a stir about the place with plenty of yelling and screaming. Reason told her to jump on the next bus, but she went ahead; seeing the dark-blue CP uniforms milling around she began to run.

  They were dragging a scratching, screeching ragbag out of the store. It was Ma Slippec, a gaunt woman with scraggy black hair, in a torn dress and dirty shawl, and she was thrashing furiously. Her son Karel and her daughter-in-law Rosie were pulling at her from behind, and the civvies knocked their arms down with billies.

  “Lemme go, ya sonsabitches!” she bawled. Crack! went the billy on the side of her jaw, and she subsided in howling and gibberish. From far back came the sound of heavy instruments crumpling the still in the backyard bomb-shelter.

  The thermonuclear blowup had crippled freedom long before Shandy was born. The psi explosion had killed it for good when she was too young to grasp all of the implications, and she had never lost her sense of freedom. After a childhood spent dodging the heavy-handed Slippecs, she still had no fear of violence and no idea how to stop it; she ran in blindly angry.

  A thick hand closed around her arm and pulled. She twisted, striking out, and found herself facing Jason Hemmer.

  “Damn you, you did all this!” She knew this was untrue even as she said it, kicking out in a blind fury. “Let me go!”

  “You nut!” He pulled her down the street and into a dark doorway. “Want to get your jaw bust too?”

  She whispered, close to tears, “They’re hurting her! They’re—”

  “She’ll be back in a week, all wired up. Civvies gotta have their fun.”

  She shivered. He poked his head out for an instant. “They got her in the wagon. Come on!”

  “I got stuff in there, upstairs—” She pulled back. “Clothes and—and books—”

  He looked at her. “You wanta go ask them nicely? Never mind, I’ll get it for you. Get going!” He yanked her down the street and into a deserted alley. “Now that stuff,” he said. “Where?”

  He had let her go, and she rubbed her arm, still trembling with outrage. “Read me and see!”

  “Go without!”

  “All right!” She breathed deeply. “Small back room, upstairs.”

  He closed his eyes. “Yeah, they got somebody tearing up the mattress.”

  “Nothing there. Orange crate by the bed: two pairs socks, two nightgowns, pants,”—she reddened in the dark—“jeans, jersey, khaki duffel…”

  “Okay, busterboy, now you see ’em, now you don’t—”

  Whuck! The khaki duffel looped its drawstring around his wrist, swinging with weight. He opened the neck: pouf! pouf! Two ragged cotton nightgowns puffed and bloomed in the air above him; he held out the bag and they went in. Pop, pop, two pair
s rolled-up socks, pants, etc.

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes—gimme!”

  “Not yet. I had enough goose chase with you. Come on!” He pushed at her. “Git the lead out. You nearly got us both beat up already.”

  “Not you,” she said bitterly.

  “Me? Listen, a guy throws a brick at me, I can keep it off. Two, three, maybe. Ten guys and ten bricks, I get seven bricks.” He laughed shortly. “If I could do any better I might be in the Dump instead of helping MPs shove other guys there. You had supper?”

  They had stopped in front of Jake’s Eat-It-And-Beat-It, and she hesitated. She had been expecting supper at home, but it didn’t look as if she’d get it. “No,” she said finally. She was hungry enough, though what she had seen back there had taken the edge off her appetite.

  As he pushed the door open she said, “Will they serve you?”

  “Sure, they’ll think I’m a gooky red-haired guy with a big nose and an Adam’s apple. You’ll see.”

  She had eaten in plenty of greasy spoons before, including this one, but now the rank stale odors and slopped counters made her long for Fitch, with his crackling clean white shirt and mauve armbands with roses.

  They slid into a booth and the potbellied counterman came over, wiping his wet hands on a filthy apron.

  “Hiya, Shandy. What’s yours, Red?”

  * * * *

  “Why don’t I?”

  “Why don’t you what?”

  “See you as a gooky red-haired guy with a big nose and an Adam’s apple.”

  He shoveled the last of the pie in his mouth and worked his strong jaws around it like a grazing animal, and was silent.

  She said crossly, “All right, keep it a secret. At least tell me what you want me for.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know! That’s a lie!”

  He ignored the insult and said, “I don’t decide any of these things. They tell me, ‘Jason, go get Blank.’ So I get Blank.”

  She looked hard at him. His brown eyes were lazy and amused. Hunger over, she had begun to be aware of herself again. The booth, built to encourage fast turnover, cramped her ungainly limbs. When she thought she was leading him astray, she had felt perfectly competent and self-assured. Now, under the eye of the enemy, she was all odds and angles, a square out of Flatland, and dirty, sweaty and defeated besides. She tried hard to control her temper, waiting till he had filliped a cigarette out of a pack and stuck it in the corner of his mouth, and then she said. “Please give me back my stuff now.”