by James Gunn
He felt the current tugging at the boat and smelled the river close to his nose, fishy and muddy; then slowly the river began to relax its grasp. A few moments later the bow ground into something firm. The boat rocked as bodies left it at one side and then the other. Then he felt the boat being pulled higher on the bank. A hand reached in, clutched Gavin's arm, and pulled him out.
“You're gonna stay here, Jen,” he heard Gregory whisper. “You and Gerard. Gonna give us cover, Gerard, if we're pursued, and be ready to shove off if we have to get away in a hurry. Jen, you'll keep Gerard company. No funny business with Jen, now,” he said, and chuckled. “Want you alert, Ger.”
He pulled Gavin's arm. “Come on, we'll find the others.” But they didn't find the other boat, and after a few minutes of searching up and down the bank in the dark, Gregory swore and turned inland. “Who needs ’em?” he said.
They stumbled through scrub trees and brush, branches stinging their faces, before they came out onto a meadow. Or maybe it was a lawn. It was as smooth and closely cropped as a lawn. Gregory made them get down and crawl. They crawled endlessly, Gavin in front, feeling cautiously ahead with one hand, trying to peer through impenetrable darkness, Gregory pushing him from behind.
It was like all the nightmares Gavin had ever had rolled into one. Gavin couldn't believe it was happening.
What are you doing here, Gavin?
It sounded like the Professor's voice asking him a question in class. He had to answer. But he didn't know the answer.
I don't know, Professor.
Then get out of here, Gavin.
As he felt Gregory's grasp on his leg loosen as Gregory leaned his weight on that arm, Gavin jerked his leg forward and rolled quickly to his left, rose on all fours and then to his feet, and began to run back the way they had come.
“Come back here, you son-of-a-bitch!” Gregory shouted.
As if Gregory's voice was the cock's crow that split the night, the darkness turned to daylight behind Gavin. He saw the trees in front of him outlined like stick figures against the darkness beyond, and he threw himself forward and rolled over and over until he was in the midst of the scrub.
“Ahhhhh!” Gregory shouted behind him. It seemed almost like a scream of joy. A moment later came the whump of a grenade and the chatter of gunfire.
An amplified voice came from everywhere, like the voice of God. “Surrender! You are surrounded. You can't get away. Surrender or be shot!”
But Gavin was up and dodging among the small trees and tall bushes. Another grenade went off behind him, and more gunfire.
The best bottle-thrower in the University was doing his thing with grenades.
Someone was thrashing through the woods toward the generating plant. Gavin stopped moving until the noise had passed. Even then he couldn't bring himself to move.
But the guns began to bark singly behind him, and projectiles whistled through the leaves above his head, and Gavin moved. Shouts and explosions mingled in confused counterpoint behind as he ran. He thought he could hear Gregory's voice like a Norse berserker glorying in the combat.
He ran, crouched low to avoid stray bullets and flailing branches. In a few steps he reached the riverbank. The lights from the generating plant went overhead, leaving the bank itself in deeper darkness. Gavin ran along the bank looking for the boat.
“Jenny,” he called softly. “Jenny!” He didn't care if Gerard heard him. He wouldn't be so insane as to want to hang around when so clearly the raiding party had run into a trap. “Jenny!”
He stepped into a soft spot and went in up to one knee. He dragged himself out and began to run again. “Jenny!”
Behind him and above him the battle intensified. Now the bullets were continuous rather than single, a solid sheet of noise rocking the world. Suddenly Gavin decided he was searching in the wrong direction, and he turned around and began running back the other way.
As he passed close to the gunfire, an explosion shattered the night, splitting it apart, throwing Gavin flat on the bank, his hands buried. The gunfire stopped. Gavin's ears rang with silence. “My God! The plastic!” Gavin thought, and got up and ran again, covered with mud. When he reached the bridge, long minutes later, he realized that there were no rowboats on the bank.
Trucks and tracked vehicles rattled the old bridge. Lights came on above. Sirens blasted. Gavin took a deep breath and edged along the top of the low dam.
Jenny was gone.
He took another few cautious steps. He heard the water rushing over the spillway; it could not be far ahead. He tried to remember what it was like. The water rushed, a dirty brown, over the edge, and fell about ten feet, to splash white and foamy into the river below. He had not thought it a big drop when he had looked at it from above as he arrived at the University, but then he had not thought about trying to walk across the top of the spillway. He could be thrown against concrete or drowned in the turbulence below the dam.
A giant's voice echoed down the river. “Your comrades have been killed or captured! Surrender or take the risk of being shot on sight! Curfew violators are warned! Come walking out with your hands in the air or suffer the consequences!”
Gavin edged along the dam. His groping hands met the rough concrete of a pillar. He rested against it, listening to the hiss, splash, roar of the water. It was on the other side of the pillar. Gavin could smell the water misting up.
Floodlights on the bridge began to swoop up and down the river. Somewhere upriver a motorboat was whipping the water into froth. The sound broke Gavin's paralysis of will and body. He edged around the pillar and put one foot on the other side. Cold water pulled at it, chilling his foot, sending shivers up his back. He edged it out a little farther and swung around the pillar. Both feet now were in the sluicing water; his back was against the pillar, his arms thrown back to clutch it.
Jenny was gone.
He forced himself away from the pillar and stood in the raging water wavering for balance. Then he was all right, and he pushed one foot forward and pulled the other behind. The top of the spillway was slick with the polish from a hundred years of river water. Fishy spray rose around him, soaking his clothes, invading his lungs. The thunder of the water hitting the river below deafened him. How long was the spillway, he wondered, fifteen, twenty feet? He had to be across it before the boat arrived. If it had a spotlight, they couldn't miss him. They could shoot him off the spillway like a duck in a shooting gallery. If that happened, he knew, he would have to drive off the spillway and take his chances with the river below.
For a mad moment he wished he had gone along with Gregory, and then he realized that what he did or didn't do wouldn't have mattered. It was a trap. It had been a trap all along. Hadn't it?
He was in the middle of the spillway, and the rushing water was strong. It kept trying to pry his feet loose from the solid rock or concrete underneath, trying to pull his feet over the dam. One foot slipped as he edged it forward, and he swayed to his left, trying to balance himself on his back foot, his arms outspread, waving in the air as if to find a handhold. And then his forward foot found its place, and he inched on, moving a little faster now, getting the feel of it. The water seemed to get shallower over his feet. And then he was sure—it was shallower and the pull was almost gone. The water was gone, and he clutched another pillar.
He clung to it desperately. Jenny! Jenny!
A flash of light hit the bridge behind him. The boat had a spotlight! He moved around the pillar and was on the rough top of the dam again. Now he could hear the motorboat propeller chewing up the water. Gavin moved swiftly. The spot of light flicked on the side of the bridge and began to slide south along it.
Gavin reached another pillar. As he touched it he felt a metal cable, old with rust, dangling beside the pillar. Gavin put his hand around it and edged over the side of the dam, slipping into the water. He felt the cold water slither up his body, over his chest, over his shoulders and up his neck and face, until it closed greasily over the top
of his head.
He looked up. The top of the water where his hand broke through turned bright and slowly darkened again to brown and then to black. His eyes stung. He shut them and slowly edged up for a breath, took a quick glimpse around through water-blurred eyes, and went under again.
Hours later, cold and wet and shivering, he waited in a clump of bushes not far from the ruins of the burned-out basement. The lights and sounds had slowly ebbed. Now the sky was graying in the east and the morning smog was swirling around corners and creeping up slopes. Gavin rose shakily from the bushes and trotted toward the basement, bent over simianlike until his knuckles almost touched the ground, slithered into the basement, swung back the bricks, and slipped into the dark opening behind the fallen floor.
It seemed to him as if he were retreating to the womb, with his terrible memories of confusion and fear and pain that waited for people like him outside the walls, and everything blurred for him, until, an eternity later, he found himself in front of the decayed old building that was home.
Jenny! he thought. Where are you?
And he looked up and wondered if he would find her in his bed, waiting to warm him with her body and her love, and he leaped eagerly up the stairs to their room.
But it was empty, and the bed was empty, and he fell into it, not removing his wet, filthy clothing, and he lay there, shivering, curled up, his hands between his legs, until his body warmed and he slept and dreamed and woke screaming and finally slept again.
4. Power Play
The young always are opposed to what is. They suck in revolution with their mother's milk. “Change the order!” they say. “Down with the establishment!” “First we'll make a revolution—then we'll find out what for.” “Abolish injustice, destroy discrimination, share the wealth, shoot the bastards!” To shatter the old is easy; to make it work is hard. A civilized society makes itself sufficiently difficult to overthrow that the eternal young rebels must learn the system in order to achieve their ends—and then, of course, they have an investment in the system.
—THE PROFESSOR'S NOTEBOOK
Gavin was awakened by repeated pokes to his belly. He struggled upward out of a dark puddle of nightmares. “What?” he asked, opening his eyes to dusty sunshine. “Who?”
He found himself sitting upright in his bed, still damp, still muddy from the river, still confused about what had happened, about what was real and what was dream. The room was buzzing. He wondered if someone had slipped him a hallucinogenic again; what he was experiencing was more aftereffect than aftermath.
“Jenny?” he said, and looked around. An older man, with a broom in his hand, was standing at the foot of the bed. He was dressed like a student, but he wore his clothing like a costume. He was not to the status born.
He was no Gregory, violent, threatening, and reckless. He was an average sort of man, neither very blond nor very dark, very large nor very small; he would have been unnoticeable except that his eyes were very steady and his voice was very quiet, and, Gavin thought, he probably was very efficient. At whatever he did.
At the moment he was poking Gavin in the belly with his own broom. When Gavin's eyes stayed open, the stranger tossed the broom clattering into a corner packed with dust kitties.
“All right, Gavin,” the stranger said, “get up. It's noon, and StudEx wants to see you.”
The room buzzed, and Gavin could scarcely hear him. “Stu Decks?” Gavin repeated. “Who's he?”
“The Student Executive Committee, dummy. They want to see you.”
Gavin put his hand to his forehead and rubbed it. “Of course.” He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and then froze his head in position as he was hit by a wave of dizziness. “Why does StudEx want to see me?”
“You know the answer to that better than me,” the stranger said. “I'm just the sergeant-at-arms.”
Gavin sat on the edge of the bed holding his head, smelling the river on his body, trying to summon the will to move, to comprehend. Except for the buzzing, the house was silent.
“Damn, you're a mess.” the sergeant-at-arms said. “Do you go to bed like that all the time? I don't see how you freaks can live like this—all this filth and vermin and decay.”
“You freaks?” Gavin echoed. “Aren't you a student?”
“You don't have to be a freak to be a student.”
Gavin had never seen this man before, but he knew the man was no student, except in the general sense that anyone who lives on a campus is a student. Gavin doubted if he had ever been a student, although he might have enrolled briefly before dropping out. No, this man had drifted here and found the campus life easy and the pickings good—plenty of willing girls, money to be extorted or earned by extorting for others, power to be served. He was a scavenger, a parasite on the student body, a mercenary of the revolution.
“I ain't got all day,” the sergeant-at-arms said quietly. It was a steely quiet, like the quiet of a knife slipping into an unsuspecting back. “I'd think you'd want to get out of a place like this.”
“Yeah,” Gavin said, standing up. The room did sickening things, and Gavin grabbed the wall until it settled down. “A guy downstairs sews leather into belts and bags and vests, and he starts up his machine about this time. A guy upstairs is on speed. He's been watching a stone idol for two weeks now. The other day we had to tie him down to his bed and gag him because the statue told him to put out his eyes, and he wouldn't stop screaming...”
“You don't need to worry about the guy downstairs,” the sergeant-at-arms said. “He didn't want to tell me where you lived, and he won't be using his hands for a while. If you want, I can take care of the guy upstairs, too.”
Gavin shivered. His attempt to be casual had turned into reality. “No need, no need,” he said. Poor Ned. Faithful and broken. “I've got to change.”
“You mean you got another pair of those? Why bother? No, you come now, as you are.”
Gavin wondered if those were the man's instructions, but he didn't want to ask. A brief tension had run through the room. Nothing obvious had changed, but it was like the difference between a cat stopped to observe and one that has gathered itself for a spring.
“Okay,” Gavin said. He walked toward the door, his clothing clinging clammily to his body, his mind beginning to shake the paralysis of sleep, remembering ... Jenny and Gregory ... The night and the river ... The lightning of battle..."Jenny!” he thought, and anguish made him stagger as he led the stranger out the door and down the creaking stairs to the outside.
The sun hit him with shiny clubs. The day was bright and warm, as if it had never seen death or known sorrow. Gavin looked at the buildings around him with a stranger's eyes. He saw all their sad age and imperfections, the sagging walls, the weathered sides, the loose boards, the gaps in the patched roofs, the weeds that surrounded the houses like green savages, the trash and junk that lay scattered among the weeds like the weeds of an industrialized society, the grass sprouting in walks and streets as if they were some strange mulch.
This is how the Professor would have seen it if he had been conscious when they brought him into the house from the alley, Gavin thought.
The outdoors buzzed too, and Gavin realized that his ears were buzzing. Everything around him seemed brilliant and unreal.
The sergeant-at-arms pushed Gavin from behind, and Gavin stumbled down the concrete-block step onto what remained of a concrete walk, and the mood was broken. But Gavin had a strange feeling of parting as they walked to Fourteenth Street and then slowly climbed the Hill.
“What are you studying?” Gavin asked the quiet man who walked just a little behind him, a little to his left. Somehow, he felt, he had to force the situation into a more normal social occasion.
The man thought for a moment and then said, “People.”
“Psychology?”
“Yeah, that's right. Psychology. And a bit of anatomy.”
The sunshine was warm, but Gavin shivered again. “You seem older.”
“I'm from New York. There you get old quick or you don't get old at all.”
“Yeah,” Gavin said. This man with him, a little behind, a little to the left, was a survivor of a tougher school than Gavin's. Gavin's chances with Gregory would not have been good, he knew, but he believed that his chances with this deadly nonperson of a man were nonexistent.
They had reached the top of the Hill, and Gavin was breathing hard. He didn't know whether it was emotional strain or the swift pace. He had the feeling of being pushed, as if a phantom hand was always in the middle of his back.
The air was clear on top of the Hill and the sun shone down upon them and students walked past on their way to class or lunch or rendezvous, as if everything were normal, and Gavin wanted to call out to them and say, “I am being abducted by this person who is walking a little behind me and a little to my left. Fellow students, au secour!" Only it would have seemed ridiculous, his being abducted by one average sort of man, and he knew it wouldn't do any good anyway. Either he would receive a switchblade or an ice pick in the side, or the sergeant-at-arms would fade away, average as he was, and later they would do it all over again, only this time without pretense of civility.
Better to go when he was summoned, as if willingly, than be dragged, twisting and hurt, into the presence of StudEx.
Even as he was thinking these thoughts, he received a guiding shove on the shoulder that sent him toward the front door of a small chapel set in grass and climbing roses. Both the grass and the roses were artificial. He stood inside the door for a moment, blinking in the darkness after the brilliance of the day, seeing nothing, and a hand pushed him forward and then to the right down a dim aisle between wooden benches that slowly swam into view.
