Sunburst

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  He had not bothered to ask her whether she had read up on Wechsler-Bellevue, Stanford-Binet, Charlebois, Porteus, because Jason Hemmer was useless as a lie detector in her case, and with psi in question no-one took anything on trust; he had been obliged to make do with whatever methods he could devise on the moment. His manner was not bland; she had stripped the tools from his hands and he was not in a mood to forgive her for it.

  She herself was beginning to wonder if she had been so smart. It might have been a great deal simpler and safer to take the tests cold and perhaps learn more at the outcome. But she was interested. She had played one round of the game with Jason Hemmer and lost, without resentment; she was ready for the second.

  Some crazy chance had decreed that when the psi mutation hit the human race it would choose the type of child most likely to develop the delinquent type of psychopathic personality, and every one of the forty-seven Dumplings had been through Urquhart’s mill, psi and all. He could marvel that he was still alive. She felt that dealing with an absolutely non-psi, and an Impervious as well, could be a welcome change of pace for him.

  Psi is for psychopath, what I am not, and don’t you forget!

  Urquhart unplaited his fingers and leaned down to switch on the tape recorder. “You feel justified in labeling the Slippec grandchildren as dull normal?”

  She was taken aback, but answered, “As long as I’m not handing out the Prognostic Indexes.”

  “Do you have any evidence for this kind of judgment?”

  “Three years of close observation; I did a lot of babysitting.”

  “What did you observe?” The words might have been assumed sarcasm. The tone betrayed some genuine interest.

  “Co-ordination, speech and play-patterns, vocabulary, group interaction,”—she shrugged—“what you look at in kids.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why. I just wanted to know.”

  “Anything in particular?”

  “Only whatever there is to find out.”

  “That’s why you took this—” He thumped the Rorschach with his elbow.

  She reddened. “Partly. Mostly I wanted to know how to keep out of the Dump.”

  “Every child in Sorrel Park has been here—except you, and most of them have gone home again. Why did you think we might want you particularly?”

  “I didn’t want to take any chances. I admit now that taking it wasn’t such a bright idea.”

  He humphed and built his long fingers into a steeple. “You say here, about your father: ‘I don’t know what he saw in my face.’ I wonder about that.”

  She waited.

  “I think you do, you know. You say what you realized about your mother, when she became sick. I think you might try to remember what you thought when you were looking at your father’s back.”

  She admitted, “Maybe I can, but I don’t know that it’s not a false memory.”

  “Why should it be?”

  “Because it still doesn’t seem reasonable, even to me, that a three-year-old, no matter how bright, could look at that thing and know that a man was going to die from it—and that it could show so clearly in my face he could read it there.”

  “Why not reasonable even to you?”

  “Because once you’ve lived with psi you can accept a lot of other unreasonable things.”

  Urquhart shifted in his chair, and the man in the corner brought out a pipe and tobacco-pouch.

  “Don’t you think it’s more likely that what shocked your father was your calm—after the initial shock of finding you looking at something he normally concealed? The fact that you didn’t cry at the sight?”

  Shandy said calmly, “The only time I ever cried was when my hands or my body wouldn’t work the way I wanted, or I couldn’t find out something I wanted to know. I could throw tantrums over those things, but not sorrow or fear.”

  “Pain?”

  She smiled. “Not from being smacked. I went into a rage if the pain was the result of my own clumsiness.”

  Urquhart pinched his lower lip and looked at the sheets again.

  Shandy folded her hands in her lap and said gently, “Try Rorschach?”

  As Urquhart raised his head, glaring, there was a subdued rat-a-tat-tat from the corner, and both turned their heads. The thin old man who had been sitting so silent and immobile was now trying to bite the pipestem to keep from laughing. He had a narrow ascetic hawkface and a thick quiff of white hair. Though he was wearing army trousers, his shirt was a gaudy cotton emblazoned with palm trees and sunsets, a duplicate of which Shandy had seen Mrs. Pyper retailing for $2.49.

  Early in the morning, through the window of her room, she had heard a resonant bass voice singing “Many Brave Hearts Are Asleep in the Deep,” and when she stuck her head out she saw the bent back of the old man in his colored shirt; he was digging in a small flowerbed beneath the window. He complemented the flowers in his shirt, and his selection of plants was as wayward and eccentric as his taste in clothes. Wild, blowsy poppies straggled in and out madly among ragged tulips with dropping petals, colors crazily mixed. Alternately he hummed, bellowed, or swore as he rubbed a callused thumb. She had wondered what his place was in the scheme of things here.

  Urquhart, glancing at him, said, “Come off it, Marsh.” His tone was tolerant, almost bantering, and Shandy for the first time looked thoughtfully at the man himself. He was wearing a tweed suit, not tans. Perhaps to emphasize a difference, as the older man had done with the loony shirt. But the latter had succumbed to army pants, while he… I’m only here as a temporary consultant, thank you, so I won’t need…

  Eight years. He had been a lot younger when he first heard of the strange consequences of the Blowup. A rising young psychiatrist? Some older doctor’s Bright Young Man? The suit was frayed. Eight years docked from the prime of learning and earning. Forced as well to learn the techniques for giving and analyzing Rorschach and other tests because it wasn’t feasible to keep a whole battery of psychologists and psychiatric social workers for forty-seven children with whom it was almost useless, as well as dangerous, to come into contact.

  “Well,” the man in the corner broke his silence. “Sheath the swords and call it a draw.”

  Urquhart smiled. Then he said, “Listen, Shandy, I’ll admit I haven’t the patience and tolerance I once had and ought to have now. I’m not trying to burn you down to the stump. But I like to find out things about people too.”

  “But I have no psi.”

  “You haven’t now. I know that; even if you had some special or superior kind I don’t believe you would have been able to conceal it all these years. But even with your height and age you haven’t reached puberty yet—and I’ve seen how these things work. Who knows what you might be able to do later?”

  “Then why—”

  “No, I’m not worried about psychopathic or schizophrenic trends. But you are an Impervious. I’ve never seen one, and I want to know how you tick. It’s special and rare, and it might be very useful to us one day.” He sighed. “If you weren’t so young, it’d be a lot of use to us right now.”

  But he would not elaborate.

  * * * *

  She rested her arms on the sill of her window and looked out into the evening. Her room faced away from the Dump; she was glad of that. There was a stretch of lawn around the flower plot, and beyond that, the brick wall with its gate, the asphalt road, and several wooden barracks buildings for the Military. Lights were on in them. She thought of the lamplight she had watched in the dusty streets the evening before, when she was free.

  She had not seen Jason since she arrived. She had sat beside him on the hard jouncing seat of the jeep, grateful that noise and movement had made conversation impossible. She had sensed him becoming glummer and glummer as the ride went on, and finally when they turned into the courtyard and were getting out, he had
looked at her, warily, and said, “You mad?” She had said no, and that was it.

  There were no bars on her window, but it was two floors up. Unless she were willing to break her neck it was useless to climb out. The room was clean; it contained a bed, table, chest of drawers, and chair. There were a closet and a small windowless bathroom off it. She would have considered it luxurious if there had not been a soldier standing guard outside the door.

  She had been interviewed by Urquhart, measured and encephalographed by a white-coated woman doctor in a wheelchair, pumped for minute autobiographical details by a grim Colonel Prothero; she was feeling raw and badly used. Her mind and person, private all her life, had been probed too deeply within the day to suit even her enthusiasm for the acquisition of knowledge.

  What am I? I want to know…but I won’t find out from them…

  Lights were blinking out in the barracks, and even in the other wing of the redbrick ell she was in. Soldiers slept early, and so did their commanders. Her light was out. She got into bed and slept.

  She leaped awake completely disoriented, blinking at the foreign shapes of the cracks of light round the door and the starlit window. She shook her head. There was a racket down below, and the barked commands, door slams, and running about had brought her a rare nightmare: she had crouched in the street with Jason once more, shivering and sick with the terrors of the CP raid. Now wide awake and listening, she felt a small stab of fear.

  Nearly everyone in Sorrel Park shared a contempt that was deep and sincere for both the civvies and the MPs. At the same time they had developed a fear of a Dump escape comparable to fears in other times and places of plague and atomic war. Shandy was aware of the incongruity of these emotions, but she had some share in both of them. Only, she sometimes sensed, to have a bond with humanity…because, when she thought about it, she had little to lose.

  She ran to the window and looked out. All was calm outside; the grounds were tinged with dull yellow light from the windows below. She opened the door a crack. The soldier was gone, perhaps called down by whatever emergency was going on. She could get out of the building now, probably, but the gates would be manned. And there was excitement going on down below. She headed for it.

  The iron staircase was cold to her bare feet; on the lower floor she discovered the source of the noise from the first doorway. The door was ajar.

  She pushed it open a little further and peered in. The room was adjacent to Colonel Prothero’s office, and in its opposite doorway two soldiers were supporting a person almost unrecognizable as human. His head was hanging down and his clothes and skin were covered with blood and incredible filth.

  She glimpsed Prothero snarling and knuckling his yellow-bristled head as though to pull all the hair out. He was in pajamas. Khaki. The woman doctor, crisp, and immaculately white-coated as she had been during the afternoon, swiveled her chair in front of Shandy’s line of vision and said quietly, “Lay him down on the couch there.”

  The spattered thing hanging between the soldiers raised its head. It was Jason Hemmer. One eye was closed and black; he had a bleeding bruise on the cheek below it, and his lips were swollen. He muttered thickly, “Figured they were asleep…they were laying for me…”

  Prothero snuffed like a horse. “You heard what she said! Get him down there!”

  Shandy craned her neck as the men set Jason on the couch. The doctor wheeled over and obscured the view, dabbing with swabs of cotton and antiseptic.

  Jason’s voice ran thickly, broken by groans as the sting of soap and antiseptic hit the raw. “Jocko broke a collarbone, growing—in—ouch, dammit!—all crooked—”

  “He’s a tough one…” the woman murmured, turning momentarily to throw a wad of cotton in a wastebasket, “—don’t know if he’ll let me—”

  “Yeah…Doydoy’s got an open sore on his neck…the Kingfish’s got an—”

  “Hold still, now. This one will hurt.”

  “—ugh—abscessed tooth, been drivin’ everybody else nuts—in fact he started this whole thing with me—”

  “Get it all down, Tapley!” Prothero roared. “What are you gawking for, man?” Tapley fumbled for his notebook.

  “—and La Vonne—she’s hopeless!”

  “Well, you’ll try to sort her out for me tomorrow,” she said cheerfully. “That’s about all for now, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Oh—” Jason raised himself up on an elbow, gasping painfully, and Shandy saw his grimacing face over the white shoulder. “Colonel… Colin’s all right.” Prothero grunted.

  Shandy, unable to restrain herself, had slipped into the room, flat against the wall, in the shadow by the door.

  “And Frankie Slippec?” she whispered.

  Jason turned his head. “He’s okay, he—hey! Who are you? I never saw you before—jeez, I can’t read you! What—”

  “Lie back, Jason dear,” the doctor said, and added without moving, “and you, Shandy, go back to bed now, please.”

  Shandy, suddenly conscious of her threadbare nightgown and her bare feet, cringed and slipped out quickly. But she lingered in the hall long enough to see Urquhart move past the doorway and bend over Jason Hemmer.

  “Lie still now, Jason. Go to sleep, boy, and we’ll start getting rid of those blocks. That’s right, close your eyes. Now I’m going to count down from fifteen, and when I get to one..

  Sunburst: 3

  When the soldier brought the tray next morning, Shandy greeted him with a Pollyanna smile of such sweetness and radiance that it made her innards lurch.

  “There’s something wrong with the thing,” she said.

  The soldier, a lantern-jawed ectomorph suffering from hangover, forced his bloodshot eyes open a little and mumbled, “Huh? Whazzat, little girl?”

  Shandy, five-seven in her socks, folded her hands in her lap and piped, “Please, sir, there’s something wrong with the thing. In there.” She jabbed a finger in the direction of the bathroom.

  “I don’t handle stuff like that, kid. You’ll hafta wait’ll I can get a plumber.”

  “Oh, please! I’m sure you can fix it. I just don’t know how it works.”

  He sighed, rubbed a head that was almost visibly throbbing, and shambled toward the bathroom.

  “Right in there,” she said. She had the chair ready, and once he was inside she slammed the door and rammed the chair back under the knob. She put her mouth against the crack and yelled, “Hey, boychik, soak your head, you’ll feel better!” and was out in the hall with the door closed behind her before the first muffled bellow escaped.

  There was no-one in the hall, but that state of affairs wasn’t going to last long, and she was anxious to discuss a few things with Jason. She tiptoed down the rattan carpet. Most of the doors were closed and she didn’t dare open them; a couple of open ones revealed beds and tables as stark as her own. There were two last doors at the end. If they yielded nothing she would have to go back and face the wrath of her captive, or try her luck downstairs. One room was empty, but from the other a low voice called, “Shandy!”

  He was in bed, wearing a pair of white pajamas with blue arrows that gave him, with his close-cropped head, the look of a Dartmoor convict. His face was black and blue, but most of the swelling had gone down. She wondered if he were able to use his psi on himself.

  “Hi.” His look was still wary.

  “Hi,” she said cheerfully. She struck an exaggerated pose against the doorjamb and said with deadpan insolence, “You look like you forgot to ask yourself what would Margaret Mead have done.”

  He half rose from the bed, and she was about to run, but he lay back and said, “Never mind. Maybe I’ll ask you that one day.”

  She grinned and sat down on a chair by the bed. Jason folded his arms in back of his head, looked up at the ceiling, and said casually, “You know, somebody’s just busted outa the can, and whooee, is he mad!�
��

  At that moment there was a yell of outrage from down the hall, and Shandy was out of her chair and behind the door with the swiftness of reflex. Her eyes were on Jason, but not to beg. He could do as he pleased.

  The voice roared through the doorway, “Hey peeper, you see where that—that goddam brat went?”

  Jason let it hang for a fraction of a second. Then he said quietly, “Why—she’s in her room, Davey. Where’d you think she could get to?”

  “Gee…yeah, I guess you’re right…but I sure thought there was somethin’ funny goin’ on for a minute.”

  She waited till the steps had gone down the hall and sat on the chair again. “Psi’s handy.”

  “I get some use out of it once in a while.” He reached under his pillow and found a crumpled pack of cigarettes.

  She indicated his beaten face. “I thought you were only a talent scout. I—I didn’t realize you had another job.”

  “I don’t advertise.” He shrugged irritably. “Somebody’s gotta find out what they need to have fixed. Did you think we just left them to rot in the Dump?”

  “But you take all these risks—and they hate you in Sorrel Park. If they knew about this—”

  “When they see me they don’t usually want to stop and give me a chance to explain.”

  “You could make them know.”

  “So what?” He blew smoke at the ceiling. “They figure they know all they need to know about me. They know I can read their minds, and make them do what I want. They know I can pick off their kids and get them put in the Dump. Isn’t that enough?”

  “They might understand.”

  “No. Not the kind of people that have that kind of kids. It might give them a snide laugh to know their kids can beat me up once in a while. Maybe I shouldn’t deny them that bit of pleasure—but it’s not a good pleasure, so it won’t hurt them to miss it.”