Sunburst

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  “Nope. Different stuff every day. Are you scared I’m going to ask you searching questions about the bootlegging business?” She hunched her shoulders. “Ah, Shandy, you think we’d pull them in and lay charges on the strength of what you’d say? We’re not civvies here!”

  She turned back to him with a set face. “They were all I had for ten years…you didn’t get anything new from me.”

  “No, and I didn’t want anything of that kind from you. It’s not my business.”

  “What do you want, then?” she whispered.

  “Your mainspring, Shandy! Only the shape of your living spirit. And you’re sitting there all shriveled up looking like an old maid who’s just discovered the Oedipus complex.”

  She smiled in spite of herself. “I haven’t got one.”

  “How old did you say you were when your parents died—about three and a half? From what you seem to have remembered up to that time I’d say you had a fully developed personality by then, so I wouldn’t count on your not having one. But it’s something everybody has, like a navel, nothing to worry about. Trust me. The tape recorder’s off; nobody will know your private business.”

  “Jason knows everything,” she said.

  “Does it matter?” He took off his glasses and whirled them by one earpiece. “I imagine Jason has his secrets too…and if I know anything that shouldn’t be told I’m not telling it. To you or anyone else. All right, I know you weren’t asking!” He grinned. “Are you the same person I was talking to yesterday? I could have cheerfully wrung your neck then. Not the picture of a good psychiatrist. Now I’ve calmed down and you’re flaring up. Why?”

  “I was playing a game yesterday.”

  “Then why have you stopped playing?”

  She looked out the window again. The sky was dark, and noise rose from the Dump, a wilderness of sound. “I have some of the same feelings they do. If there’s bars around you, you feel you have a right to try to squeeze through them, and if there’s guards in front of you, you have to outwit them. Doesn’t matter how much people feel they have a right to put you there. From your point of view they have no right at all. Ever.

  “I saw Ma Slippec beaten up. And you dragged me here. It didn’t seem to me there was much choice between you and the civvies. But last night, Jason—and he doesn’t have to be here. I and the rest of Sorrel Park are stuck, but he could use psi and get out. And he’s here.” She faced his intent eyes again. “You came of your own will, and Marczinek too. You’ve all suffered for it: you, Marczinek, Prothero—nobody’s been able to duck it. And the reason and shape of it underneath the surface is something I’ve got to learn yet.”

  “That’s the only reason?”

  “I’m interested in my future! My guess is you want the Dumplings handled by somebody they can’t use psi on, who can’t read their minds either—kind of a supplement for Jason. It’s what you wanted me for, isn’t it? So maybe they’d get to trust me, and so on? But I’ll tell you it doesn’t sound like a workable idea to me.”

  “It was the general intention, though,” said Urquhart.

  “Okey-doke. It’s kind of a scary idea, but let’s forget that for the minute. I’ll even forget you aren’t giving me much choice.”

  “It’s magnanimous of you.”

  “But if the Sore’s going to be opened up you need help right now, not four or five years from now. And you said I’m too young. If I’m no use soon, when you need help so badly, will you keep me on indefinitely and train me?”

  Urquhart put his glasses back on and folded his arms. “No. We’ll have to let you go, then.”

  “That’s what I thought! And look what you’re doing: you’re trying to scrape me down to the raw. It hurts me to see Jason beat up, Dr. Marczinek with his family outside, Prothero…and then you have to know what makes me tick—and I like talking to you, I never had anybody to talk to. I used to get all my emotions from books, and I never thought I had any of my own, so nothing bothered me.

  “If I stay around here for a couple of months and then go out there again I’ll be a fish out of water and get picked up by the civvies and end up in Juvenile Detention scrubbing floors with some scruffy old bag yelling in my ear and waving a billy around my head.”

  Gnawing his lip, Urquhart twirled his chair round once, and said finally, “Shandy…we don’t have sinecures around this place. But we care—for everybody, in the Dump or out. I can’t make fancy promises, but I can say that much…and Shandy,” he added gently, “you’ve only been here two days and the armor’s crumbling. It seems your ideas of what you are and what you ought to be are tremendously different from what you really are…don’t you want to find out?”

  “Yes.” She snuffled and rubbed a hand under her nose.

  “Then you’d better throw away the armor. You don’t want to keep up your membership in the Bootleggers’ Association; it’s not a going concern. Have you decided what you’re going to do when you grow up?”

  “Get out of Sorrel Park.”

  He smiled. “That’s all right to start with.”

  “After that it depends on what kind of person I turn out to be.”

  “I think you’ve a much better chance to find that out now. But don’t be afraid of being vulnerable. Out there”—he nodded toward the window—“nobody’s been able to hurt them—to reach the deep center of their emotions…and look where they are.”

  * * * *

  Next morning, savoring her limited freedom, she found the library. The small book-lined room was as uncomfortable as the rest of the building. Two-thirds of its shelves were stuffed with discards from public and lending libraries, donated for the edification of the military and cringing in faded covers with titles as flat as stale beer. The remaining third had been brought in by Urquhart, Marczinek, and Grace Halsey. She could have continued her study of Rorschach’s Test, but instead she pulled down books indiscriminately.

  She skimmed and leafed quickly, sitting on a hard chair (there was no other kind), heels on rung, elbows on thighs, head on hands, as intently as she had exercised her intellectual suction pump for years on illegally borrowed books at midnight in the small back room above the cigar store: about Jimmy Valentine, Burstad’s first landing on Mars, a day at the seashore spent by a dreadfully sweet little girl named Honey-bunch, a Welsh town by Milk Wood, complicated abdominal operations beginning invariably with a midsection down the midline, distant nebulae, the ragged men waiting for Godot—and Jason stuck his head through the doorway and yelled that it was time for lunch.

  After lunch she picked up Klinghoffer’s Chemical Psychotherapy, hefted it thoughtfully, and put it down; she had caught sight of Urquhart’s collection on criminal anthropology.

  She plowed in, skipping tables of statistically significant percentages, and slowly began to build up a picture of Delinquent X, the bad boy in the street.

  X was occasionally a girl, but much more often a boy; growing out from crowded and dirty tenements, though at odd times he came from surprising places and ended up in tenements. A father drunk or decamped, a mother more careless than evil; hampered more by dislike of education than by lack of intelligence. A muscular, tapering, rough-cast body, strong and vital, the ideal of the artist and the girl in the street—it belonged to a boy who was restless, irritable, childish: he seriously intended to be a mountaineer, space pilot, bullfighter when he grew up—if he could do it without hard work. He ran with birds of a feather, and more gracefully than the gangling bookish boy or the cheerful fatso. He wanted things on the minute, and was ready to take them, regardless of what got broken or who got hurt when he did it: served them right, because everybody was against him anyway. But he was going to be something big: maybe a hero, maybe a gangster.

  But this was not his future; not to be the giant of crime and destruction—a different breed—but the miserable inadequate, the petty criminal shuffling in and out of co
urt and jail with his record hung round his neck like an albatross.

  Shandy put the books aside and rested cheekbones on knuckles. There was something missing in the picture: X had no face. She thought of the groups she had seen over the years at Jake’s and Fitch’s Joint and all the other joints. The back-room types were usually hurried and furtive workingmen, but there were also clumps of kids who worked off the evening on a cup of coffee and a dollar in the jukebox, eyeing the back door enviously. They were noisy, sometimes scuffling, wore fantastic clothes and had plenty of greasy hair growing way down the neck—but their faces were blurs. That was natural, because they were all so much alike; but that told her nothing about the Dumplings.

  There were two good ways of finding out what she wanted to know. One was to go into the Dump, an idea she rejected out of hand; the other was to get a look at the Dump files…and the Dump files were in Prothero’s office.

  Ha.

  Colonel Prothero, I’d like to see the Dump files, please.

  Certainly, dear. Just pull out the drawer marked D.

  She giggled. It was a delightful picture. Well, she could ask Urquhart, or Jason…but even if they approved she suspected they would want Prothero to approve as well.

  …But if she went in quietly and inconspicuously, and took them…

  * * * *

  At supper she was mooning out the window, vaguely conscious of the pleasure of being able to see grass and flowers while she ate.

  “For the third time, Shandy,” Urquhart said, “will you please pass the butter?”

  “What—oh, I’m sorry.”

  “What were you reading today that’s made you so absentminded?”

  “All sorts of stuff—but I was thinking about humors.”

  “Hm?”

  “You know, the old idea that your character depended on what type of liquid you had most of in your body: blood, bile, or phlegm. And you turned out sanguine-humored, or choleric or phlegmatic. Or else it depended on which planet was in the ascendant when you were born, and that made you saturnine or jovial or mercurial. I don’t know if the two systems were supposed to work in the same person at once.”

  “What are you applying them to?”

  “Well, you’re using the work of Sheldon, the Gluecks, Kaplanski, Cosgrove and the rest to classify every kid in Sorrel Park by body types: endomorph, mesomorph, ectomorph, or mixtures. That’s saying their characters depend on whether they’re mostly fat, muscular, or skinny, and—”

  “Hold on, you’re going too fast. Personality and temperament may depend to some extent on body types, but nobody said anything about character. Endomorphs are fat and love food and affection; mesomorphs are muscular and vigorous—and sometimes pushy; ectomorphs are lanky and have a sensitivity that might have something to do with the relationship between skin surface and body mass. Those categories are extremes, of course, and though his shape might add to the factors developing a person’s character, no type has an edge on brains or morals.”

  “Well, however you put it, it all sounds like astrology sometimes.”

  “Not when you find that almost eighty percent of the kids in the Dump are almost pure mesomorph. If we put every mesomorph in the country in reform school it would be silly—and dangerous. But if you measure all the kids in reform school and find eighty percent are mesomorphs, it’s not.”

  “But kids in reform school are not eighty percent mesomorph. Only a big enough percentage to set people thinking.”

  Urquhart smiled. “You’re right. I got off the deep end there. But here in Sorrel Park we’ve skimmed off the cream”—the cream jug rose from the table and set itself into Jason’s hand without a ripple—“or rather, the psi skimmed it for us…well, if we ever get to open this place up, it ought to be a hive of scientific interest—but I don’t think I’m going to hang around and watch it buzz.” He turned to Prothero. “When are you leaving, Steve?”

  Prothero gulped a mouthful of cake. “Tomorrow.” He tossed down his last half-cup of coffee. “Excuse me. Got some things to do first.” He pushed back his chair and left.

  “Where’s he going?” Shandy asked.

  “Washington, by helicopter,” said Jason.

  She looked at their glum faces. “What’s the matter?”

  “He’s going to talk about the Grand Opening.”

  Urquhart added, “We’ve got a few private doubts about whether the world and Sorrel Park are ready for each other.”

  “You mean, about the Dump?”

  “Partly. But is Sorrel Park ready to go back on thermonuclear power? For thirty years we’ve been the only place in the country operating a power plant on coal. Is the world ready to learn what can happen when a thermonuclear plant blows up? What about municipal government? Sorrel Park’s been hidden for thirty years, and has the laws and morals of a frontier town of a hundred and fifty years back. Also, there’re seventy-five lawsuits against the plant sitting in the books waiting for the day when they can get to federal court—most of the plaintiffs are dead—think of sorting out the descendants! And this isn’t counting the Dump, the publicity, and the foofaraw in every country in the world.”

  “But Prothero seems—”

  “Oh yeah,”—they brushed themselves off and stood up—“he’s for it, all right. It’s his baby.”

  * * * *

  It put a different complexion on things. She was repelled by the idea of going after the files while Prothero was away. He had trusted her enough to allow her the run of the place. If she took them and were caught it would be bad enough with Prothero here; but if he were away, and some officious lieutenant had a report ready for him—not that she was afraid of Prothero, but… It looked as if she would have to ask him. If she were going to be useful there were things she had to know, and she might as well learn them honestly.

  Jason walked down the hall with her. “What have you got planned for this evening—more reading?”

  “I don’t know,” she said guiltily. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask if he thought Prothero would let her look at the files. And it was becoming harder and harder to visualize Prothero letting a kid mess around in his file-drawers. And Jason would laugh at her. Don’t be afraid of being vulnerable, Urquhart had said. Sure, but she’d seen him when he wasn’t too keen on being vulnerable.

  Jason was looking at her closely. She was able to read his mind for once: he was wishing he could read hers. “You up to mischief?”

  “N-no…no mischief.” She noticed his clothes for the first time. “What are you doing in uniform?” He was very much of a young Prothero in tans.

  “I’m in the army,” he said. “I’m of age…but I’ve always worn it since I’ve been here.”

  “How long?”

  “Four years.” He grinned. “Those crazy shirts are all right for Marczinek. He could wear a monkey-suit and still look like a professor.”

  She looked down at her long narrow shape and said wistfully, “I’d like to wear dresses, but I don’t think they’d look any better on me than this stuff.”

  “You’ll just have to put on some years, Shandy.… I’m going to visit my folks now.”

  “I didn’t know you had any.”

  “My parents and a sister…” He seemed a little embarrassed, as if, having given up all other privacies, he wanted to keep one intact. She would never ask how or if he managed to protect his family from his own stigma—but she wondered.

  “Well,” he said, “so long,” and disappeared. Now he would be outside the barbed wire…and home. She sighed and wandered down along the hall.

  She stopped at Prothero’s office, heart quickening. The door was open, no-one was inside. She slipped in. The door was open as well to the other small room where she had seen the men bringing Jason. Both rooms were accessible to the hall, but the office also led to the outside, and a waft of sweet evening air ble
w in through the screen door.

  She looked around, and for the first time felt guilty at being where she shouldn’t. Desk, chairs, hat rack with army cap—and filing cabinets. Here was the perfect opportunity; but she screwed up her courage, sat down on a chair, and crushed her hands together in her lap. She was almost too scared to laugh at the consciousness of her own nobility.

  Then she heard murmuring and footsteps; clattering and the crunch of wheels on gravel. Prothero’s voice called, “All right! In here!”

  Her nerve failed her in an instant. She turned wildly toward the doorway, but there were noises in the hall too. She dashed into the next room; there was a dark figure at the door. Someone had taken up a post there. She crouched down and squeezed into a shadow beside the couch. Prothero turned on the light in his office, and she got a good look at what the men were wheeling into the room.

  It was a cage of heavy wire mesh, so swathed in knobs, rods, wires, dials, antennas and aerials that it was almost opaque. But there was something huddled inside it.

  “I don’t need you now,” Prothero told the men. He moved into the doorway. There was an unlit cigar in his mouth. Fire flamed between his hands and he bent to suck it, his face scarlet in the light, but expressionless. He pulled a chair over near the cage and straddled it, resting his arms on the back, and waiting.

  After a few moments the cage creaked and stirred, and the thing inside it sat up and stretched. It was a boy, as undistinguishable as the X Shandy had found in the books. He was no older than Jason: his fair hair was thick and wild, pushed back rather than combed; his face was smudged with dirt. There was a light beard growing on his chin, or perhaps only more dirt. Prothero did not look at him; he sat there puffing at the cigar.

  The boy folded his arms around his knees and said with perfect good humor, “Hell, Pop, you didn’t have to use the stun gun on me. You know I’m a good boy.”

  Without turning his head Prothero said, “Stand up!”

  The good humor faded and the boy stood up sullenly. Shandy saw that he was dressed in the classic prisoner-of-war uniform: a gray coverall with a red target on the chest. Here it must have been worn with a sense of irony; no bullet would hit an escaped Dumpling.