Sunburst

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  He shifted in his seat. “You know we want to take the best possible care of you.”

  “You want to get the Dumplings back.” She grinned. “Gee whiz, don’t get guilty. I’ve made a choice and I’m not running away.”

  “You’ll have to do that, too.” He gripped her shoulder. “After you give that code I want you to run like hell to the first police station you can find and stay there until we come for you. Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “We’ll take care of you, I swear it. Now good-bye, Shandy.” He jumped out to the ground and was gone.

  She leaned back. No-one had as yet wished her luck.

  She supposed it was because they were depending—and wanted her to depend—on her brains.

  * * * *

  A pilot and two crewmen ran across the yard, leaped into the cabin, and took their places without a word. She said nothing. Out of the window she saw Jason running, with Doydoy on his back as he had been yesterday when he flew out of the cage. Prester was close behind them. Their eyes were blank; their bodies, in spite of Jason’s burden, moved with fatigueless grace.

  Prester climbed in first, Jason handed up Doydoy, and they settled him with three cushions piled to support his legs. When they had found their places, the helicopter rose.

  She looked at them. Doydoy’s eyes were closed, his glasses had slipped down on his nose, and his hands lay at his sides as though they were as dead as his feet. Prester sat gaping like an idiot boy, hands folded loosely in his lap. Urquhart was right. They gave her the creeps.

  Jason most of all. He sat back with his arms folded; his eyes slid back and forth in their sockets. They did not rest on her, though she was in his line of vision; for him she was simply not there. The muscles of his brow twitched and puckered, and when he shifted his shoulders every once in a while the dogtags slid in sweat on his neck.

  New insight carries new delight. She also had a power, and as she had expected, it weighed her down. She wanted comfort, but there was none she could ask them to give her.

  They were still low in the sky; as soon as Sorrel Park had fallen away behind them, the pilot turned the craft and it seemed as if they were heading back again. She had a moment of panic, but when they swung about in a wide arc she realized they were going to follow the slow course of a widening spiral till they could catch the first trace of the Pack.

  So, she saw Sorrel Park from east, west, north, south; dirty, crammed, jumbled, spirit defiled by barbed wire, smoke from the coal plant staining the pale sky, narrow river carrying detritus out to a distant watershed. The low spiral widened till the town was blued with haze and almost pretty. She thought wryly: at least we’re getting out of Sorrel Park.

  The silence within hung like a weight beneath the noisy rotors. None of the psis stirred, and she had time to consider the implications of Prester Vernon’s black skin. If his grandfather had been exposed to radiation…if Nigeria had a Blowup and a Dump of its own…if the Dumplings were not found soon…

  “Go down here.”

  The voice startled her. It was metallic, toneless, and perfectly articulated—and it was coming from Doydoy.

  “Now?” The pilot’s voice was equally toneless.

  “Yes. A few minutes, please.” Shandy was gaping at Doydoy, unable to believe her ears. After a moment, she realized what had happened. Doydoy, reason divorced from emotions under hypnosis, had been freed of his stutter.

  The helicopter sank into the middle of an overgrown field, and they waited. No-one moved. Shandy aligned her thoughts as best she could with Doydoy’s unimaginable mind: with images in the multifaceted eyes of grasshoppers; with twigs and grasses bruised, stones whose structures had been twisted and distorted, in the wake of the Djinns.

  Doydoy opened his eyes and looked around.

  The pilot called over his shoulder, “Been here?”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  The pilot sent his message to HQ and they rose and began the new spiral around the X of the field.

  Before they had gone round twice Doydoy began to twist in his seat. “He is upset.” The metallic voice startled her once again because it was quivering with an amusement he could not have been consciously feeling.

  “Who?”

  “The farmer. He heard a noise in the chicken-coop and when he went out to look there was nothing left but feathers, bones and heads. It gets him, he says.”

  “Where is he?”

  “On the road two miles west by north, going north with the sheriff in the jeep.” The helicopter turned west and the pilot began to murmur over the radio once again.

  “He is telling his story over and over. What got him, he says, was the smell of roasting in the air.”

  The Dumplings were still too civilized to eat raw meat, but they made their own instant cooking arrangements. Five minutes later the helicopter passed over the head of the farmer gesticulating beside the sheriff in the jeep; swung north, found the farm and circled it. And drew its invisible line between field and farm, an arrow pointing out into the world, toward the Dumplings.

  “The animals are disturbed,” said Doydoy.

  Beyond the arrow, the helicopter began to swing back and forth in a widening fan-shaped course. It swung and swung like a cradle suspended from a tree-branch until, though she was not sleepy, she became numb from rhythm, vibration, weariness.

  It was noon, a fantastic unreal zenith of the day. The sky was empty.

  “Go down here.” A cropped field this time; a flock of sheep scattered bleating for the fence-rails. They had not been eaten—perhaps they had narrowly escaped being slaughtered for fun. “Northwest now.” The incorporated mind drew a new arrow-line between farm and field; again they rose and began a splayed course outward.

  At the peak of the third pendulum-swing, Doydoy cried out. “It’s terrible!” There was no amusement in his voice.

  The pilot turned. “What?”

  “The pain.”

  “Huh?”

  “Woman…left for dead by the roadside. Three miles north of Pineville, Highway 18.”

  Shandy pressed her face to the window; a crumpled shape half-hidden by leaves was down there by the side of the road. But they would not stop. She began to tremble. She wanted to yell Stop! There was life down there, ebbing. She felt the pain and the warm wet of the blood seeping in the pebbled earth, and memories enough to drive one mad. New insight carries new delight. She crammed the knuckles of her forefingers in her mouth and bit down. She was alone.

  The course was now a straight one, due north. Doydoy said, “We are shielding.” Shandy glanced at the watch on Jason’s wrist. Four hours more for the limit in which she must speak the phrase. Left for dead by the roadside, she thought bitterly, would not wake them.

  There was no escape. The course ran north, eating miles, and a blue line threaded itself across the horizon. It looked like the boundless sea to Shandy, but she knew it was Lake Michigan, and the smoky blur before it, Chicago.

  In a brief fantasy she saw the helicopter landing and stopping, herself jumping out without a word to the blind blank figures beside her, and losing herself in the great city, out in the world and free. But she was in no more danger of doing that than of being able to fly like Doydoy.

  The countryside thickened with houses and gas stations, planes appeared overhead, noise drowned out by their own; further away, gnat swarms of hovercraft were buzzing over the city. The distant haze resolved itself, not smoke as it would have been in Sorrel Park, but the mist of a lakeside city steaming in a drizzling June day.

  The mist thinned on approach; towers still unbroken rose like marvels, a million windows flickering against the pale sky. She had imagined them, but had never expected to know them, and she reveled in them. The Pack was loose, the woman was bleeding by the roadside, and she was merely happy to be alive.

  There were no
visible scars on the surface of the city. It extended itself beneath them in squares, segments, triangles, rhombuses, parallelograms, and the traffic moved in a metallic many-celled stream from narrow streets into twisting knotted entries to multiple-laned freeways furious with urgency and complex as the vascular tree. White lights glared in the dull day from every shaft of glass and steel. The upper air quivered with its own traffic, and on distant fields there were ships rising beyond the air.

  Within a mile there were forty-five people who could destroy it all with wish.

  They moved forward slowly. She looked down; something was happening to the surge of mid-day traffic. It was beginning to ebb, with much snarling and clogging, from the crowded center. Small black-and-white saucer-shaped police-copters were buzzing over intersections, leading automobiles and buses away from the center. Storm-warnings were up.

  “Right there,” Doydoy said.

  “That’s the Loop.”

  “No. South. The computers.”

  The pilot whistled, impressed even under hypnosis. “The Chicago Pentagon!”

  Now Doydoy began to twitch and thresh in his seat, caught in an unconscious terror. Shandy watched helplessly. But the pilot was calm. He circled in a slow downward spiral, like a gull wheeling toward the sea. Doydoy’s legs had slid from the pile of cushions; Jason and Prester were still and gaping beside him, but he clawed at the air in an extremity of fear; sweat broke out on him so sharp and sudden the splotches flared on his shirt like spattered raindrops. He twitched and stuttered, “Com-Com-munica-cations Cen-Cen-Center in-in Depar-par-par—”

  “Department of Strategic Services!” the pilot yelled. “Right!”

  Shandy pressed her face to the down slanting window and saw a remarkably insignificant office building surrounded by a great swathe of grass dotted with flowerbeds. The buzzing craft around them had withdrawn; the sky was empty.

  And Doydoy began to wail. The sound was terrifying; the power of his fear of the Dumplings was something no hypnosis could control.

  The grounds below were deserted. Shandy pulled at Jason’s arm. “Quick! Are they down there? Are they all there?”

  Jason blinked. “Yes, I—”

  Above them, with a savage rip, the rotors broke off and flew to the four winds; the helicopter plunged out of the sky. Shandy, trying frantically to force the codephrase between her lips, found her throat torn open in an endless scream.

  Sunburst: 13

  “—Carries new delight! Oh my God, new insight carries—”

  She had not lost consciousness, but the jolting change from one second to the next gave the same impression. She was crouched on the floor with her fingers locked in a plexus over her skull to protect the vulnerable bones.

  “It’s okay.” Jason was on his feet beside her, wide-eyed and alert. Prester was pulling up Doydoy, who had slid to the floor and was trying to put on his glasses. One of the lenses was cracked.

  She sat up. Things did not look okay to her. The pilot was sprawled unconscious over the instrument panel, a thin line of blood running down his temple, and the crewmen, dazed, were pulling themselves up off the floor. But the psis were no longer under hypnosis. Either the code-phrase or the shock of falling—she didn’t want to know which—had brought them to their senses. The helicopter, minus rotors, was still in the air. As she was absorbing the shock of this discovery, it gently lowered itself a couple of feet, and grounded.

  Jason glanced at her in passing. “You look all right.” He told the crewmen, who were bending over the pilot, “He’s just knocked out. Grab his arms and we’ll get you out of this. You can find a hospital. Understand?” One of them nodded dazedly. “Don’t be scared. Go on, Pres.”

  Prester snapped his fingers and the men disappeared.

  “Him!” Jason snorted. “Gotta have a gesture for everything. Shandy, you get out and run like hell!”

  The door opened. She leaped out, but her legs buckled under her. Jason jumped down beside her and grabbed her elbow. “Come on, you got to… Jeez, now we got the whole city on us.” Crowds were converging from the rim of the green lawn. “Get rid of them, Pres—no fireworks,” and the running figures turned and began to race back the way they had come, trampling each other in their haste.

  The helicopter burst into flames. “Get going, Shandy!” Jason gave her a push that sent her flying, and she rolled out of the way with a speed and energy that surprised her. Then the burning helicopter disappeared, and Prester, carrying Doydoy, ran out from the scorched area it had occupied. He was swearing intensely in a style far beyond his years. He set Doydoy on the grass and murmured, “Somebody playing keepsies.”

  Doydoy pointed at the building and squeaked, “J-Jocko, in-inside!”

  “Yeah, the lookout.” Jason chewed his lip. “They’re underground.”

  Shandy asked, “The building isn’t all?”

  “Heck, no. Just administration. Underground they got computers. A lead-and-steel maze a mile deep and a mile square. If they tried to teep from there they might end up inside a wall. That’s why they need Jocko here.”

  “He’s knocked out the people upstairs,” Prester said. “Killed two.” He added thoughtfully, “Like to pick off that boy.”

  “We’ll do that,” Jason said. “…Boy, we sure picked a lousy place to be stuck out in the middle of.” They were half-hidden by a flowerbed, but there was a terrible expanse of unsheltered lawn between them and the federal building to the north. “Go on, Shandy, scram!”

  She turned and ran without a word. The grass was spongy, and moisture from the recent rains was beginning to seep through the soles of her shoes. The air was humid, but there was only a thin haze of cloud; the sun would shine within an hour, and it seemed unjust that there should be so much terror on a June day in Chicago.

  She looked back once. Jason and Prester were pounding in back of her. Doydoy had disappeared, and Jason yelled, “Run! Run!” She ran. After a dozen steps she heard cries behind her and whirled in time to see Jason and Prester struggling with four or five Dumplings. Within a second, they vanished. She dithered a moment. It was impossible to help them now, and she went on with aching legs,, knowing that if the Dumplings decided to stop her all the speed she could muster was no use.

  She was right. A wall of two Dumplings, shoulder to shoulder, broke out of the air with a crash before her, and she slammed into them. They grasped her each to an arm; she pulled back, struggling. She knew one of them. It was Frankie Slippec, but there was no sign of recognition in his eyes.

  Without a word they started pulling her toward the building. She twisted and cried out in their grasp, but it was no use. There was no one to save her here.

  They couldn’t pk her, but they were fast. Up stone steps, across the lobby, down halls heaped with senseless bodies, down stairs leaping from landing to landing because elevators were too slow. She collapsed in their grip, half-fainting.

  At last only the elevator could take them where they wanted to go. They pushed her in, crammed in after her, and in defiance of controls sent it falling like a meteor down subterranean shafts of lead and steel built to withstand the bomb that had not yet dropped.

  After some trial and error they had solved the maze of caverns and tunnels by blazing a trail in scorchmarks on the composition floor; they followed it down twisting byways until a pocket of light at the end, and a growing hum of machines, rewarded them. When they had reached the great chamber of the control room, they stopped and let her go.

  Quivering in all her bones, Shandy tried to pull herself together, and screwed up her eyes at the blaze of light from walls and ceiling. This, she understood finally, was what Doydoy had meant, blurting through chattering teeth about communications centers and computers.

  The walls were covered with charts, grids, and edge-lit world maps flickering in spectrum colors. Ranged before them were six great consoles studded with con
trols. The men and women who had handled them had been knocked out and shoved into corners like rag dolls. Marczinek, useless too because he could not run a computer, had been flung into a console chair; his head lolled, his arms hung limp, and his gaudy shirt was bloody.

  Jason and Prester were standing near him; all the Dumplings were around them. But Doydoy was gone.

  She ran over to Marczinek, but Curtis Quimper said, “Stay where you are. He’s alive, and you want to keep him alive.”

  “But—”

  Jason stopped her with an outstretched arm. “Keep out of the way. We can’t do anything for him now.” She moved back to the wall.

  “Where’s Doydoy?” The Dumplings scuffled. Curtis Quimper breathed hard. “Looks like he got away.”

  “Lost him again! That’s good.”

  “Never mind. We’ll get him back.”

  “I thought you didn’t care about him anymore.”

  Jason said, “They think they’ll get him to run this thing.” He waved a hand to indicate the huge installation.

  “What for?”

  “Power,” said LaVonne. “Know what this controls? The country: telephones, cables, trains, planes, airships, warning systems, rockets, missiles, and—a lot more I forget. The country…maybe half the world.”

  “You don’t need Doydoy for that. You could have figured it out from these people here.” She nodded at the crumpled shapes in the corner.

  “They raised a fuss…we didn’t think they’d wear too well.”

  Jason said flatly, “That’s a lie. The state they were in when they came down here they were only too happy to knock anybody around.” The Pack’s fury, frightening as it was, was also its weak point.

  “Watch out,” said Curtis Quimper.

  Shandy observed them narrowly: LaVonne and Curtis Quimper. The Kingfish was dead, and Curtis was weakening and tiring with increased age and the savage use he had made of his abilities. LaVonne could reason on deeper and more hidden levels than the rest, and outmatch any of them. She would know they would never let a girl lead them—much less a girl who was a twisted and ugly dwarf; but she was there to lend Quimper her strength—until the day he became too tired. After him…there were thirty-eight other potential leaders.