Sunburst

by Phyllis Gotlieb

* * * *

  Up the ladder and down the wall,

  A half-penny roll will serve us all.

  You find milk and I’ll find flour,

  And we’ll have a pudding in half an hour!

  * * * *

  The Pack ran down the main street toward the town’s center at the crossing. They had no name for themselves, but they were a single entity, and, except for the oddments, very much of a piece. The older ones had powerful shoulders, but they were all wiry and strong, the girls stringy. Their narrow faces tapered like the muzzles of wolves, shapes that marked patterns on the graphs of sociologists, along with the poverty, the hate, the heritage of crime and drunkenness, and the turbulence of movement that for once was dedicated to a single purpose.

  Where do we start?

  Start at the middle and work out. That’s nice and tidy.

  Civvies’ll be comin’ in a minute.

  Ya scared mumsyboy? Hide under the bed. Hey fellas, lookit Doydoy! Hey Doydoy, flap your wings!

  Jeez, I can’t fly. How come he can?

  Who cares? Here—take a look around, you guys! You’ll never see it like this again!

  Beinwinder’s Emporium: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight plate-glass windows…bye-bye!

  Now melt it, Scooter—hey, you missed one! Yeah…now make the fire green and blue…

  I never knew you were artistical, Buttsy.

  Vogeler’s Antique-y Shoppy—yeah, yeah—let’s stick old Vogeler in there first—“Gitcher filthy mitts offa that stuff!”

  Never mind him—wow!

  Here, Nolan’s Marketeria…them cans’ll pop if y’ git’m hot…that’s it, boy!

  Who’s that?

  Sergeant Fox?

  “Hel-lo, Foxy, ain’t this a beeyootiful quiet evening? Hey, Foxy-loxy, don’t touch the gun, you’ll burn your hand!”

  Gee whiz, he done it. Ain’t he a nut? Look Ma, no hand!

  Noisy, isn’t he?

  “You broke my wrist bringin’ me in, Foxy, remember?”

  Too damn noisy. Shut him up, La Vonne.

  There’s the sirens. Th’ civvies’re comin, hooray, hooray!

  Okey-doke, La Vonne, just goo up the road a little.

  “I’ll stop their noise, too,” said La Vonne. “I like things quiet.”

  Sunburst: 4

  “I saw it all—I heard it all.” Jason Hemmer twitched and sweated in his bed. “I went in the house and crawled in bed, told my mother I’d been sleepwalking, and she didn’t ask any more questions. My God!” He shivered. “I was lying there—and I knew everything—and I wanted to be with them. I had to be with them!”

  “Why weren’t you?” asked Shandy.

  “It’d be terrific if I could say I was too moral…but I think I just wasn’t strong enough—not to do all the things they were doing. And I hadn’t the hate gathering up in me all those years…ordinary kids are full of fight and fury but they don’t usually grow a cancer out of it.”

  “Doydoy?”

  “He was scared—and he had too many powers for them to dare let him go. He doesn’t really belong with the rest.”

  “He shouldn’t be in the Dump, in that case.”

  “What would you do with him, Shandy? He’s one of the strongest as far as psi goes.”

  “Mmm—and La Vonne?”

  “Ugh!” Jason grimaced. “Listen, nobody’s ever claimed the Dump was the perfect, or even a decent, solution.” He lit another cigarette. “So I was lying there, watching it all like a movie, scared to death and wanting to be with them at the same time—and the police came up. At least they managed to run up on the sidewalks when the cars were bogging down in melted asphalt. The MP was on its way, too, by then. The kids were waiting. They’d already found Old Foggy sleeping in a doorway and burned his clothes off, and they had some dinky plans for the civvies—oh boy!—but just as they were about to start the fun one of those burst cans popping out of the store hit a kid in the neck—it was Billy Phipps—sliced the jugular and killed him. When they saw their own blood, they stopped.”

  “I’d have thought they’d be tougher than that,” said Shandy.

  “Not then. The extent of their power at the beginning depended on the Pack’s being at full strength. When one of them died they weakened and separated. Gee…a lot of them were kids my own age…a couple of girls in nightgowns and braids…all scrunched together and scared to death. Doydoy was trying to crawl away on his hands…” He swabbed his head with a corner of the sheet and it came away wet.

  “You knew him?”

  “Yeah. I used to call him names when I saw him wheeling around the corner for a bottle of milk and a pound of tomatoes.”

  “You were only a little kid then, though.”

  “Yeah. I know. I—I tried to get him away… I knew he wasn’t one of them, and even if I wanted to be with them I knew it wasn’t the kind of thing I ought to want.”

  “But that’s just where Urquhart would separate the sheep from the goats, I bet.”

  “Sure—I was a sheep then and I’m a sheep now. I had a very low pk range, not in their class at all. But I’m glad I tried.

  “Anyhow, the civvies came up with stunguns and knocked them over. Then they carted them off to the morgue and laid them out like logs, all unconscious, and tried to figure out what had hit Sorrel Park. That was twelve-ten a.m. The whole damn thing took less than an hour, and the middle of town looked like a baby A-bomb hit it.

  “Prothero took over right away—of course, he had Colin in the thing, too. He dragged out all the doctors in Sorrel Park, got them cleaning up Foggy and Sergeant Fox—and boy, they were a mess—and got Washington on the phone, all within two hours after the bust.”

  “He looks like the type,” said Shandy.

  “Yeah, but he’s not stupid, and he’d had plenty of experience with emergencies after the Blowup. This place has been a top-secret-emergency deal for a long time.”

  Marczinek added, “Sorrel Park hardly belonged to the Union after twenty-two years of isolation. With the whole country on nuclear power the news of a serious accident, rare as it was, might have turned everything awry.”

  “I can’t believe it was right to hide it,” said Shandy.

  “I won’t argue, my dear, but the suppression was supremely efficient. I had only the vaguest recollection of the trouble when I was called upon to come here.”

  “When was that?”

  “The day after it happened. I was testifying before a subcommittee investigating un-American activities when the summons came. It was only a few steps down the hall. However,” he sighed, “I occasionally regret being trusted so quickly and extensively with classified information. I am afraid my friends must believe I have been wantonly suppressed by the government—and my enemies that I have gone over to the Chinese.”

  “You didn’t have to come, though. They didn’t force you?”

  “No, I must do them justice. They gave not the slightest hint of force. They begged.”

  “Why’d they pick you?”

  “At that time I was fairly prominent in the field of quantum electrodynamics.”

  Jason laughed. “Prominent in the field! He shared a Nobel Prize with Brahmagupta for a Unified Field Theory!”

  “I see,” said Shandy, and continued to watch Marczinek.

  Jason slapped his thigh. “She doesn’t even know what a Nobel Prize is!”

  “I know what a Nobel Prize is,” said Shandy.

  Marczinek said softly, “Brahmagupta died of cancer of the liver at thirty-five… I was with him to the end, and it was a foul death. I am seventy-two years old and I have eleven grandchildren. I haven’t seen them for eight years, and one or two of them not at all, but I have them.

  “Well. I was sent for. I was told only that it was an emergency, and that if I accepted
I must stay until the problem was solved. Now,”—he knocked his pipe on his heel—“I know everything and I am too dangerous, like everyone else here…” His face was bleak. “I am not strong enough to go through with the brainwash the soldiers here are given when their terms end—and too old to want to lose an hour’s worth of memories, even…

  “Oh, I remember how I first saw them when I arrived here…lying on their cots in the hospital, sleeping children. Deeply drugged children. Urquhart and Grace Halsey had taken encephalograms—perhaps you know that they still have the brainwaves of children even today.”

  “Yes, but their type has a kind of burnout in the thirties, don’t they?” Shandy asked. “I’ve heard their brainwaves change then too.”

  “True,” said Marczinek dryly, “but that prospect at that time was twenty-five years in the future, and we had to do something immediately.

  “I had to work from nothing, you understand. Who knows the mechanics of psychokinesis and teleportation? No-one, yet. But there must be some kind of wave between telepathic sender and receiver, the object moved and the mover, the teleport and his destination.”

  “And you built the Field to scramble them.”

  “In the simplest terms, yes. I still hardly know what I am scrambling, but the Field covers a wide range.”

  “Is there a way to break through it?”

  Marczinek hesitated. “Theoretically, yes. A bare possibility. Not a thing I’m free to discuss.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to know your secrets,” Shandy said hastily.

  “Ho, ho,” said Jason. “Anyway, it’s like breaking into Fort Knox, and I’m the only other person who knows about it. I’m not sure I understand it, so I guess it’s safe.”

  “I can see why you needed those blocks of Urquhart’s,” said Shandy. “Do you have brainwaves like a little kid?”

  Jason grinned. “That’s also classified information!”

  She said thoughtfully, “Suppose I were in the Dump and decided to make a good deep hole and tp myself up to the surface at an angle, from under the Field?”

  Marczinek shook his head. “The Field’s a long narrow torus, shaped like a drinking-straw. It goes down into the eternal fires, and up beyond the limits of the atmosphere.”

  “I’ll have to think of something else, then.”

  “You’re not in the Dump yet, so don’t worry,” Jason retorted. “But you ought to think up something better than that trick you played with the bathroom window at Jake’s.”

  She was sheepish. “That was embarrassing, but I haven’t had much experience with psi.”

  “It wasn’t even psi, it was radio!”

  “Well, I do a lot better dodging civvies. Dr. Marczinek, how long did it take you to build the Field?”

  “Build! They wanted to give me three days to invent it! Three days.” He clucked resignedly. “To invent a toroidal white-noise field that would scramble everything but light radiations—because growing children need light, even if their souls are dark…but it took a week. An old man; a tired brain without the elasticity of youth…and I had no Brahmagupta.” He began to fill his pipe. “Out in the world it has some use as a cosmic-ray shield for interplanetary vehicles…it hasn’t my name on it…”

  “It will,” said Jason.

  “I think… I care less about that every year. It’s a pleasure of growing old. Now—on the eighth day we began to build, using components from the old power plant. In the morgue and in the labs we set up here we had a microcosm within the microcosm of Sorrel Park. And confusion. Citizens descended on us in fury, parents screaming: Not my Joey! Not my Frankie! Not my—no, I wouldn’t want to go through that again.

  “We showed them. We had Old Foggy with second-and third-degree burns over fifty percent of skin area, and he died, eventually, without ever becoming lucid. Sergeant Fox—La Vonne shut him up for good, and he hasn’t spoken since.” He waved his pipe. “The rage and fury we still have with us. But we simply could not let those children go.

  “So we worked quickly. The first Dump was a prefab barracks surrounded by barbed wire immersed in the Field. It was escape-proof even then. We laid them out in there with supplies of food and clothing and allowed them to waken. We felt they might be weak enough to be tractable. It was two weeks after the event by that time.

  “We had Sorrel Park at our heels and we wanted them to know what we were up against, so we let them watch. Only adults.”

  “It was not really a sight even for adults. Those children were growing stronger instead of weaker. They couldn’t hurt anyone outside, but in two hours they reduced the installation to charred beams and twisted bedsprings.

  “At least after that Sorrel Park began to understand. Our supplies of prefabs and bedsprings were limited, so Urquhart decided to use the classic method for subduing juvenile psychopaths. He left them alone in the mess. Luckily, it was a warm September. When they were crying from hunger we gave them a little food. When they cried for more, we gave them a little more…some of them were crying for their mothers.

  “…When it became too hard to sleep on the bare ground and they begged for beds, we told them we would give them whatever was necessary—but they must swear not to harm whoever went in to give it to them. And they swore, for what their honor is worth…and that is roughly how it has been for eight years.”

  Jason touched a bruised cheekbone. “Except sometimes they forget.”

  Shandy said, “It’s odd: when you think of psi it looks so terrific, but when you think of the types that have it—”

  “Yeah,” said Jason, “But you better not let Prothero—ow!” He clapped a hand over his mouth.

  “What—”

  “Let my mind wander, dammit! Ouch, it’s too late now!”

  He was right. Three sharp steps brought Prothero into the room. He was as extreme a mesomorph as Jason, and his shoulders filled the doorway. A clashing red complexion sometimes comes with ginger hair, and Prothero was in full clash.

  “Why is that girl out of her room? Who’s on duty here? Davey!”

  Jason sighed, but his voice was calm and steady. “She’s not unguarded, sir. Marsh and I have been keeping tab on her, and besides, she isn’t trying to get away. Don’t blame Davey. I bamboozled him.”

  “He shouldn’t have allowed himself to be bamboozled,” Prothero said coldly.

  “It’s all right, Steve,” said Marczinek gently. “I was only telling Shandy all about the horrors of the Dump, so she’ll be good.” He clicked his tongue, realizing suddenly that he had said the wrong thing, and Jason muttered under his breath. It seemed to Shandy that it would be impossible to find a right thing to say to Prothero.

  But he only grunted, pulled out a khaki handkerchief and swabbed the back of his neck. The skin there was red and crosshatched; it puckered under his touch. He was very nearly an old man. He sat on the bed and put his hand on Jason’s shoulder. “How are you, boy?”

  “I’m okay, thank you, sir.”

  “Who was responsible for the brannigan last night?”

  “The Kingfish started it, but most of the others chimed in.”

  “Anybody try to stop it?”

  “Not much anybody can do when a lot of them get together on a thing.”

  “Any change in the status quo?”

  “I think the Kingfish’ll try taking over from Quimper, soon. They’re spoiling for a fight.”

  “I’ll stop that.” He rubbed his hard jaw. The fingers rasped faintly over microscopic stubble. He stood up to go, adding harshly, “Have to have a talk with somebody from in there.”

  Marczinek said, “Steve, sit down a minute.” He took a deep breath. “Jason, will you please tell Colonel Prothero—and me too—honestly and unequivocally whether Colin had anything to do with this mess?”

  “No,” said Jason immediately. “He did join in after a while when most
of the others were in it, but he wasn’t anywhere near starting it.”

  Prothero said wearily, “All right, I believe you. Just don’t be so damn careful about sparing my feelings next time—only there won’t be a next time.” He turned to Shandy. “Now. What do I do about you?”

  “I only wanted to find things out, sir. Why I’m here…”

  He blinked and rubbed eyes reddened with sleeplessness. “Yeah. I guess that’s not the worst thing in the world. Urquhart says an Imper’s the kind of talent we need to help control the Dump, but don’t ask me how he expects to do it.” He stood up. “And why I’m here, in the big garbage heap…thirty years…a nice new shiny lieutenant playing a game of blues-and-grays around the power plant. Then bang! blooey! and we had real blood and read dead men to play with. Broke out Geiger counters and dickey-suits, and yanked volunteers out of the county jail.” He pointed out the window where antennas glittered under the morning sun. “Those volunteers were their fathers. And they’re dead. General Kirsch too…Colonel Paterson.

  “We cleaned it up, whoever was left of us; we got over the r-sickness. All I could think of afterwards was, thank God! thank God we’re still alive. Yeah, thank God.”

  He turned on his heel and went out, and they heard him bellowing down the hall, “Davey!”

  Shandy hissed. “Jason! You’re not going to let him chew out the poor guy for nothing! Quick! Do something!”

  Yawning, Jason stretched out under the covers and folded his arms in back of his head. “Something for who?”

  “Davey, you nut!”

  “Oh,” he yawned again, “I already done that. I knocked off his hangover.”

  Sunburst: 5

  Urquhart battled papers on his desk and glanced across at Shandy, who was staring out of the window. They were in his office after a supper she had shared with him and the others in a small dining-room. “What’s the matter, Shandy? Why so moody? You’re not cooped up in your room any more, and I thought you’d be happy about it.”

  “I’m still not free.” She kept looking out at the soft evening sky. “Do we have to go through all that stuff again, like yesterday?”