Sunburst

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  “He’s badly hurt,” said Grace, “but alive. Go to sleep, dear.”

  She croaked, “The machine—LaVonne—”

  Urquhart said, “The computer’s ruined, but there were three other peer machines over the country taking over right away—it’s lucky we were too shut in here to know about them—and we’ve got LaVonne in the cage. The world’s still running, and you can get to sleep.”

  “Jason—”

  “They’re all safe,” Grace said. “That’s enough talk for now.”

  A needle pricked her arm and she slipped into a darkness where she battled screaming nightmares and floundered in seas of terror for days, until at last she washed up on a bank of silence.

  * * * *

  Urquhart: Shandy. Can you hear me?

  Shandy: Yes. Am I dreaming?

  Urquhart: No. Open your eyes. Can you see me?

  Shandy: Yes.

  Urquhart: Good. Do you feel well?

  Shandy: I’m aching all over. What do you want?

  Urquhart: I want to talk to you for a while.

  Shandy: You—have you hypnotized me? I feel strange.

  Urquhart: No, I haven’t hypnotized you. But there’re things I want to find out. I’m not going to try any depth analysis, but I told you I wanted to know how you tick… I’ve just given you drugs to relax you a little and release some of your inhibitions.

  Jason: Inhibitions! Did she ever have any?

  Shandy: If I’ve got no inhibitions I can tell you what I think of you, you big ape!

  Jason: She sounds like herself.

  Urquhart: Jason, I think you have a right to be here, but if you’re going to make a fuss you can get out.

  Jason: Okay, okay.

  Urquhart: Shandy, Jason’s been telling me about your idea…about psi, and about the delinquent’s being the victim of genetic defect.

  Shandy: I didn’t mean it for anything definite. It was just one way of putting things together.

  Urquhart: I understand that. Whether it’ll hold water is something else again, but I’d like to hear a little more about it.

  Shandy: I don’t think there’s much to say about it. Just—if you look at delinquents, and at the Dumplings, they seem to separate themselves into a distinct physical and emotional type. I don’t know what happens with Negroids and Mongolians—

  Urquhart: Oh, I’ll promise not to use them for an arguing point right now. What’s the basis for your conclusions?

  Shandy: Well, first of all, distinct behavior patterns turn up in them even when they’re little kids. They’re restless and active, and wet their beds till they’re quite big. By the time they’re fourteen they’ve probably been in trouble with the police several times already…and instead of feeling guilty they just feel everybody’s against them. They’re generally mesomorphic, and kind of runty till puberty, and then they grow up suddenly; and they keep on being hostile, suspicious and defiant, and can’t put off anything they want at the moment, or make plans for the future…

  Urquhart: And they often have the brainwaves of children—and also immature patterns of capillary loops in their fingertips—

  Shandy: Do they? I didn’t know that.

  Urquhart: But it’s no real excuse for calling them animals.

  Shandy: No, but it is a physical thing that separates them from other people. I’ve heard there’ve been lots of hopeless psychopaths with normal brainwaves—but I don’t think they’d have been Dumplings. I guess the most animal thing about them is that they have to have everything for today. And the hostility.

  Urquhart: A lot of them calm down in their thirties.

  Shandy: So do the lions in the zoo when they lose their teeth—and for these people the whole world is a zoo. I know it’d be hard to pick them out of the ordinary criminal lot till they’ve made themselves and everybody else so miserable they can’t be helped. I’d even be sorry if anybody found an absolutely definite way of identifying them because then you’d have some crank yacking that they ought to be sterilized, and that’d be awful. I don’t know what ought to be done for them—but I think there ought to be better ways to weed them out and handle them when they’re young and dangerous—without being either cruel or soppy—until they’re fit to live in society, and I think this idea might help people look at them more calmly.

  Urquhart: Um. All right. Now the other thing. People have had some pretty wild romantic dreams about psi over the ages. I’ll admit the Dumplings aren’t anybody’s dream of Superman come true. But you seem to feel it’s—“garbage” was the term you used.

  Shandy: Yes, because the creatures that have it all turn out to be primitive. Pk and tp are just extra physical power, and telepathy is a way of communicating if you don’t have speech. The way telepathy turns up in animals it’s probably pretty clumsy. For herd animals that have to stick together it might be useful, but I bet a human being born with it could never separate his mind from everybody else’s long enough to develop a logical idea.

  Urquhart: Jason, Prester, Helmi and Doydoy don’t fit your definition of animals, and they have psi.

  Shandy: I can’t explain them. I’m just glad they’re here.

  Urquhart: …And you say the Dumplings became psis because radiation would do more harm, produce a more bizarre effect, on the gonads of parents who would be likely to have defective children anyway.

  Shandy: Yes.

  Urquhart: And psi is definitely not the attribute of the supernormal?

  Shandy: Gee whiz you sound so disappointed! Maybe one day…but I think it’d be a long time before people could bear knowing each other’s miseries telepathically—and what would scientists and artists do if they couldn’t be alone to think? Real super-psis would be too much of a jump away from us, and evolution works slowly.

  Urquhart: Then how would you picture a supernormal who seemed reasonable in relation to Homo sapiens?

  Shandy: I never thought about that. Do I have to? I’m sleepy…

  Urquhart: Take a stab at it. You don’t have to knock yourself out.

  Shandy: I—I don’t know… I guess you start with brains.

  Urquhart: It’s the classic gambit.

  Shandy: Well, I don’t think the world’d get much use out of a super-kook. But…there’s been lots of geniuses in the world, and many of them have been unhappy…and a lot of them have been nasty.

  Urquhart: Superman has to be noble.

  Shandy: Not goody-goody. But he has to be moral or he’ll do harm. Even the brightest kid gets pushed around by all sorts of things while he’s growing up, and you can’t always be sure he’ll turn out moral.

  Urquhart: You want a person who’s protected from the mischances of psychodynamic forces.

  Shandy: Yes. Somebody who’d turn out to be moral no matter what happened to him.

  Urquhart: Stable moral equilibrium.

  Shandy: With plenty of room to be different. Otherwise, supernormals would be dull—and I don’t think they’d last. Suppose he started off with a lot of the best building materials—and arranged them however he liked, or however life pushed them around for him. But whatever he started with, however it got arranged in a million possible ways, he’d end up with something balanced. Even if it didn’t look like much, even if it looked kind of loony from the outside.

  Urquhart: If it looked too crazy he’d never be respected…

  Shandy: Some might get lost…but that’s the chance he’d have to take in the evolutionary battle, like everybody else under the sun.

  Urquhart: Your superman’s vague.

  Shandy: If he looked too beautiful or noble or eccentric he might be picked out and pushed aside. You’d want him to be an organic part of humanity, to give his qualities to his children—if he could transmit them. I can’t think of anybody like that as other-directed, so I guess he’d keep out of the way and sta
y inconspicuous till his building materials were permanently arranged. And he’d watch and learn and wait.

  Urquhart: Wait for what?

  Shandy: To find out what he was.

  Urquhart: Why would he have to find out?

  Shandy: Because a bright person who isn’t curious is useless. There’s plenty of decent lumps in the world, but they can’t stand a new idea, and they’re more harm than help. He’d have to find out what he was because he couldn’t help finding out everything he could.

  Urquhart: And after he found out?

  Shandy: He’d try to find a place for himself in society, and get married, I guess, and have his kids.

  Urquhart: It’s a modest superman.

  Shandy: He’s a kind ordinary people could live with, even if they felt he was a little eccentric. He’d have the same emotions and the same hopes. That’s why I think he’d have a chance. You couldn’t expect an advance to come in a single impossible leap to the summit. One step would be enough.

  Urquhart: Would he be happy?

  Shandy: His life might be hard and lonely, he might wish he weren’t different at all—but I don’t see how he could be really unhappy when he had the whole universe to observe and learn about and understand.

  Urquhart: I see. One more thing, Shandy. What kind of child do you think your superman would have been?

  Shandy: Child? Gee, I dunno… I don’t think I ever knew or heard of a bright kid who wasn’t something of a nudnik, so I guess he’d be that…and…and he’d have to stay a kid a long time to build that kind of complicated moral structure in himself…

  Urquhart: Yes…I think so. Anybody you know…who fits that description?

  Shandy: …I…I don’t—I—Oh…

  Shandy: She’s upset. Now look what you’ve done!

  Urquhart: It’s all right… Helmi, Prester, Jason—they’ve managed with psi. She can manage with this. Come on, Shandy, calm down. You’ll get used to it.

  * * * *

  She woke to an afternoon light coming through the window. She was in her old room, and the first thing she noticed was that the broken panes had been replaced. And the next, that her bed had bars.

  She crawled over them clumsily, blinked away a wave of dizziness, and found she was wearing a coarse white hospital gown. She tottered over to the window and rested her hands on the sill. It was warm from the sun. Someone was singing below; not Marczinek; a baritone:

  Gonna hoe corn, drink it till I die…

  She pushed up the screen and put her head out the window, elbows on the sill. Jason had dug up Marczinek’s flowerbed, and was shoveling on loam from a wheelbarrow. He looked up and grinned, presumably at her expression.

  “What do you expect to plant this late in the season?”

  “Hollyhocks,” he said happily, “hardy phlox, four-o’clocks, and Urquhart’s coming down the hall.”

  She pulled back hastily and jumped into bed. Jason kept singing:

  Gonna hoe that corn, keep drinkin’ till I die,

  Singin’ the workshirt blues ’cause I’m too old to cry…

  Urquhart wandered in and sat on the bed. “You look beat, but I’m told you’ll be all right. Hungry?”

  “Not yet. What’s today?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “What have I missed?”

  He grinned. “Nothing you couldn’t do without.”

  “I’m scared to ask…how Marczinek is.”

  He shrugged. “He’s an old man…and they weren’t gentle.”

  “I—I know Frankie Slippec’s dead, and—and Colin… LaVonne was trying to make as much mess as she could.”

  “She did plenty. Buttsy, Willy, Gloria—they’re dead, and the rest got banged up in varying degrees, but they’ll live.”

  Curtis was alive then—and Doydoy. “I still can’t understand how it ended as it did. It seemed impossible for them to lose.”

  He shook his head. “No, Shandy. They made it impossible for themselves to win. It’s true they made a big mess—but look at the record. First, they picked Marczinek only because he knew there was an important computer in Chicago. He couldn’t run one, he had no psi, and he didn’t know that five or six years ago equally important connecting centers were set up in San Francisco, Edmonton, and Boston. As soon as they got the wind up, the government shifted the Chicago computer’s functions onto its sisters. We could have had them shut it down, but we didn’t want to make the Dumplings suspicious.

  “Second: they could have managed without Doydoy—but they would have had to use their brains. So they struck out at anybody who could have helped them—and they’ve been striking out all their lives. They could have made use of Doydoy all those years if they’d respected anything but his raw power—but they couldn’t let a cripple teach them.

  “They missed their chance with LaVonne because she’s a girl, and a dwarf—and again with Prester. They might have won him over if they’d tried—but he’s a Negro…the only one. No one who was different could be an equal of theirs. Thank your stars they were so dumb…think of what they might have been able to do operating just one level higher.”

  She shuddered. “I don’t like to think of it. Where are they now?”

  “In the Dump. It’s the only place we had for them.”

  “Is it safe?”

  He smiled. “Do you know how they got out of the Dump?”

  “I never had time to ask.”

  “Doydoy got them to take a whole lot of junk, compact it till it was extremely small and dense, heavier than lead, and pk it at one of the antennas. It hit and knocked it out of phase for a second, and the second was all they needed to get through the hole in the Field.”

  “That was pretty smart.”

  “That’s what I told Doydoy, and all he said was, ‘It took me eight years.’” He shook his head. “They won’t do it again. We’ve got another circuit running around outside that one, and they’d never be able to manage it with two.”

  “Prester—”

  “We wanted him to stay here with us, but he said he’d help us only if he could still live with the Aaslepps.” Urquhart took out a cigar.

  She didn’t blame Prester. He had a place and wanted to keep it. She was trying to work up courage to ask about Doydoy when she noticed the band on Urquhart’s cigar. “That’s not a Sorrel Park homemade.”

  “No, thank God.” He admired it for a moment. “Sorrel Park’s opening up…on the Fourth of July”—he smiled wryly—“to celebrate the end of independence.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “After that donnybrook in Chicago there wasn’t much we could keep secret any more… I guess people here will be happy enough. Stuffs coming in on a use-it-now-pay-God-knows-when plan…that’s how I got the cigars. There’s plenty of noise going on in the world about us.”

  “I don’t know…that Nigeria thing…”

  “That’ll be something to look forward to, all right, but now everybody’s playing cards close to the chest. They’re perfectly happy to let us have the notoriety. You’ll see, we’ll replace Middletown, Plainville and the Trobriand Islands in all the learned journals.”

  “Sounds like endsville to me—but you won’t let anybody near the Dump.”

  “No.” He added grimly. “And that’ll be hardest of all.”

  She touched his hand. “You’ll be leaving. You’ll be out of it, and it won’t bother you.”

  He looked away and puffed in silence for a moment. “There’s a nice new uniform hanging in my closet. Maybe I’ll get up the nerve to put it on tomorrow, or the next day…” He sighed. “It seems I’m free to leave, but I can’t…not because I didn’t finish the job, but because I never properly got started. Now I’ll have more money, more help, new ideas. And maybe I’ll be able to do something. Anyway, I’m getting married tomorrow.”

 
“You are!”

  “It’s nice to see your face lighting up a bit! Yes, to Wilma French, at the library. So you see, I’m stuck here.”

  Stuck here. He wasn’t the only one with ambivalent feelings. And after dark / in Sorrel Park / what will become of me, me, me?

  “What’s the matter, Shandy? Don’t you approve of my choice?”

  “Dr. Urquhart, was all that true—about me?”

  He said lightly, “It may not be exactly true, but it’s probably as near as makes no difference.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s scary.”

  “Not as bad as having psi.”

  “But I don’t like it. What will happen to me?”

  “Shandy, it’s not even a theory—it’s a belief. Nobody can prove it one way or the other, so nobody will bother you too much about it, or make the kind of fuss they’re making about psi. We know you’re good, but we don’t know what you’re good for yet. We might send you away for some testing and a little formal education to find out if we can make use of you around here—now you’re looking really sick!”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want to spoil things for you.”

  “You were searching so many years before you came here…but after you’d been here a while, I had the feeling you’d stopped. Maybe I can guess why. But Shandy, you did have to find out.”

  “Just for this,” she said bitterly.

  “You couldn’t want anything better. You said so yourself. And it impresses me more than all the psi in the world.” He stood up. “Now get dressed and sit out in the sunshine for a few minutes.” He paused at the door. “You can see Marsh, too. He’s been asking for you.”

  * * * *

  She confronted her face in the mirror. It was pale, and there were dark smudges under her eyes. It looked neither nobler nor wiser. “Hey, Odd Johnson!” she jeered, “where’s your coltish grace?”

  Her old clothes were missing from the closet. Someone had shopped for her: sandals, underwear, hair-ribbons, and a simple sleeveless white cotton dress with geometric designs—for Sorrel Park a marvel of taste and elegance. She dressed conscientiously but without spirit and walked out down the hall.