Primitive aborigines, he jeered silently at himself. A life time wasn’t long enough to learn the intricacies of their culture—as occasional executions among them for violating magical law proved to the hilt. His first crude notion—blowing the palisade apart and running like hell—was replaced by a complex escape plan hammered out in detail between him and Martha.
Martha assured him that the witch girl could track him through the dark by the power of the goddess except for four days a month—and he believed it. Martha herself laid a matter-of-fact claim to keener second sight than her sister because of her virginity. With Martha to guide him through the night and the witch-girl’s power disabled, they’d get a day’s head start. His hand strayed to a pebble under which jerked venison was hidden and ready.
“But Martha. Are you sure you’re not—not kidding yourself? Are you sure?”
He felt her grin on the other side of the palisade. “You’re sure wishing Uncle Frank was here so you could ask him about it, don’t you, Charles?”
He sure was. He wiped his brow, suddenly clammy.
Kennedy couldn’t come along. One, he wasn’t responsible. Two, he might have to be Charles’ cover-story. They weren’t too dissimilar in build, age, or coloring. Charles had a beard by now that sufficiently obscured his features, and two years absence should have softened recollections of Kennedy. Interrogated, Charles could take refuge in an imitation of Kennedy’s lunacy.
“Charles, the one thing I don’t get is this Lee dame. She got a spell on her? You don’t want to mess with that.”
“Listen, Martha, we’ve got to mess with her. It isn’t a spell—exactly. Anyway I know how to take it off and then she’ll be on our side.”
“Can I set off the explosion? If you let me set off the explosion, I’ll quit my bitching.”
“We’ll see,” he said.
She chuckled very faintly in the dark. “Okay,” she told him. “If I can’t, I can’t.”
He thought of being married to a woman who could spot your smallest lie or reservation, and shuddered.
Kennedy was snoring by now and twilight was deepening into blackness. There was a quarter-moon, obscured by over-cast. He hitched along the sand and peered through a chink at a tiny noise. It was the small scuffling feet of a woods-rat racing through the grass from one morsel of food to the next. It never reached it. There was a soft rush of wings as a great dark owl plummeted to earth and struck talons into the brown fur. The rat squealed its life away while the owl lofted silently to a tree branch where it stood on one leg, swaying drunkenly and staring with huge yellow eyes.
As sudden as that, it’ll be, Charles thought abruptly weighted with despair. A half-crazy kid and yours truly trying to outsmart and out-Tarzan these wild men. If only the little dope would let me take the jeep! But the jeep was out. She rationalized her retention of the power even after handling iron by persuading herself that she was only acting for Charles; there was some obscure precedent in a long, memorized poem which served her as a text-book of magic. But riding in the jeep wasout.
By now she should be stringing magic vines across some of the huts and trails. “They’ll see ‘em when they get torches and it’ll scare ‘em. Of course I don’t know how to do it right, but they don’t know that. It’ll slow ‘em down. If she comes out of her house—and maybe she won’t—she’ll know they don’t matter and send the men after us. But we’ll be on our way. Charles, you sure I can’t set off the explosion? Yeah, I guess you are. Maybe I can set off one when we get to New Portsmouth?”
“If I can possibly arrange it.”
She sighed: “I guess that’ll have to do.”
It was too silent; he couldn’t bear it. With feverish haste he uncovered the caches of powder and meat. Under the sand was a fat clayey soil. He dug up hands-full of it, wet it with the only liquid available and worked it into paste. He felt his way to the logs decided on for blasting, dug out a hole at their bases in the clay. After five careful trips from the powder cache to the hole, the mine was filled. He covered it with clay and laid on a roof of flat stones from the hearth. The spark of fire still glowed, and he nursed it with twigs.
She was there, whispering: “Charles?”
“Right here. Everything set?”
“All set. Let’s have that explosion.”
He took the remaining powder and with minute care, laid a train across the stockade to the mine. He crouched into a ball and flipped a burning twig onto the black line that crossed the white sand floor.
The blast seemed to wake up the world. Kennedy charged out of sleep, screaming, and a million birds woke with a squawk. Charles was conscious more of the choking reek than the noise as he scooped up the jerked venison and rushed through the ragged gap in the wall. A hand caught his—a small hand.
“You’re groggy,” Martha’s voice said, sounding far away. “Come on—fast. Man, that was a great ex-plosion!”
She towed him through the woods and underbrush—fast. As long as he hung on to her he didn’t stumble or run into a tree once. Irrationally embarrassed by his dependence on a child, he tried letting go for a short time—very short—and was quickly battered into changing his mind. He thought dizzily of the spearmen trying to follow through the dark and could almost laugh again.
* * * *
Their trek to the coast was marked by desperate speed. For twenty-four hours, they stopped only to gnaw at their rations or snatch a drink at a stream. Charles kept moving because it was unendurable to let a ten-year-old girl exceed him in stamina. Both of them paid terribly for the murderous pace they kept. The child’s face became skull-like and her eyes red; her lips dried and cracked. He gasped at her as they pulled their way up a bramble-covered 45-degree slope: “How do you do it? Isn’t this ever going to end?”
“Ends soon,” she croaked at him. “You know we dodged ‘em three times?”
He could only shake his head.
She stared at him with burning red eyes. “This ain’t hard,” she croaked. “You do this with a gut-full of poison, that’s hard.”
“Did you?”
She grinned crookedly and chanted something he did not understand:
“Nine moons times thirteen is the daughter’s age
When she drinks the death-cup.
Three leagues times three she must race and rage
Down hills and up—”
She added matter-of-factly: “Last year. Prove I have the power of the goddess. Run, climb, with your guts falling out. This year, starve for a week and run down a deer of seven points.”
He had lost track of days and nights when they stood on the brow of a hill at dawn and looked over the sea. The girl gasped: “’Sall right now.She wouldn’t let them go on. She’s a bitch, but she’s no fool.” The child fell in her tracks. Charles, too tired for panic, slept too.
* * * *
Charles woke with a wonderful smell in his nostrils. He followed it hungrily down the reverse slope of the hill to a grotto.
Martha was crouched over a fire on which rocks were heating. Beside it was a bark pot smeared with clay. As he watched, she lifted a red-hot rock with two green sticks and rolled it into the pot. It boiled up and continued to boil for an astonishing number of minutes. That was the source of the smell.
“Breakfast?” he asked unbelievingly.
“Rabbit stew,” she said. “Plenty of runways, plenty of bark, plenty of green branches. I made snares. Two tough old bucks cooking in there for an hour.”
They chewed the meat from the bones in silence. She said at last: “We can’t settle down here. Too near to the coast. And if we move further inland, there’s her. And others. I been thinking.” She spat a string of tough meat out. “There’s England. Work our way around the coast. Make a raft or steal a canoe and cross the water. Then we could settle down. You can’t have me for three times thirteen moons yet or I’d lose the power. But I guess we can wait. I heard about England and the English. They have no hearts left. We can take as many slaves as we want. They cry a
lot but they don’t fight. And none of their women has the power.” She looked up anxiously. “You wouldn’t want one of their women, would you? Not if you could have somebody with the power just by waiting for her?”
He looked down the hill and said slowly: “You know that’s not what I had in mind, Martha. I have my own place with people far away. I want to get back there. I thought—I thought you’d like it too.” Her face twisted. He couldn’t bear to go on, not in words. “Look into my mind, Martha,” he said. “Maybe you’ll see what it means to me.”
She stared long and deep. At last she rose, her face inscrutable, and spat into the fire. “Think I saved you for that?” she asked. “And forher? Not me. Save yourself from now on, mister. I’m going to beat my way south around the coast. England for me, and I don’t want any part of you.”
She strode off down the hill, gaunt and ragged, but with arrogance in her swinging, space-eating gait. Charles sat looking after her, stupefied, until she had melted into the underbrush. “Think I saved you for that? And for her?” She’d made some kind of mistake. He got up stiffly and ran after her, but he could not pick up an inch of her woods-wise trail. Charles slowly climbed to the grotto again and sat in its shelter.
He spent the morning trying to concoct simple springs out of bark strips and whippy branches. He got nowhere. The branches broke or wouldn’t bend far enough. The bark shredded, or wouldn’t hold a knot. Without metal, he couldn’t shape the trigger to fit the bow so that it would be both sensitive and reliable.
At noon he drank enormously from a spring and looked morosely for plants that might be edible. He decided on something with a bulbous, onion-like root. For a couple of hours after that he propped rocks on sticks here and there. When he stepped back and surveyed them, he decided that any rabbit he caught with them would be, even for a rabbit, feeble-minded. He could think of nothing else to do.
First he felt a slight intestinal qualm and then a far from slight nausea. Then the root he had eaten took over with drastic thoroughness. He collapsed, retching, and only after the first spasms had passed was he able to crawl to the grotto. The shelter it offered was mostly psychological, but he had need of that. Under the ancient, mossy stones, he raved with delirium until dark.
Sometimes he was back in Syndic Territory, Charles Orsino of the two-goal handicap and the flashing smile. Sometimes he was back in the stinking blockhouse with Kennedy spinning interminable, excruciatingly boring strands of iridescent logic. Sometimes he was back in the psychology laboratory with the pendulum beating, the light blinking, the bell ringing and sense-impressions flooding him and drowning him with lies. Sometimes he raced in panic down the streets of New Portsmouth with sweatered Guardsmen pounding after him, their knives flashing fire.
But at last he was in the grotto again, with Martha sponging his head and cursing him in a low, fluent undertone for being seven times seven kinds of fool.
She said tartly as recognition came into his eyes: “Yes, for the fifth time, I’m back. I should be making my way to England and a band of my own, but I’m back and I don’t know why. I heard you in pain and I thought it served you right for not knowing deathroot when you see it, but I turned around and came back.”
“Don’t go,” he said hoarsely.
She held a bark cup to his lips and made him choke down some nauseating brew. “Don’t worry,” she told him bitterly. “I won’t go. I’ll do everything you want, which shows that I’m as big a fool as you are, or bigger because I know better. I’ll help you find her and take the spell off her. And may the goddess help me because I can’t help myself.”
* * * *
“…things like sawed tree-trunks, shells you call them…a pile of them…he looks at them and he thinks they’re going bad and they ought to be used soon…under a wooden roof they are…a thin man with death on his face and hate in his heart…he wears blue and gold…he sticks the gold, you call a coat’s wrist the cuff, he sticks the cuff under the nose of a fellow and yells his hate out and the fellow feels ready to strangle on blood…it’s about a boat that sank…this fellow, he’s a fat little man and he kills and kills, he’d kill the man if he could.…”
A picket boat steamed by the coast twice a day, north after dawn and south before sunset. They had to watch out for it; it swept the coast with powerful glasses.
“…it’s the man with the bellyache again but now he’s sleepy…he’s cursing the skipper…sure there’s nothing on the coast to trouble us…eight good men aboard and that one bastard of a skipper.…”
Sometimes it jumped erratically, like an optical lever disturbed by the weight of a hair.
“…board over the door painted with a circle, a zig-zag on its side, an up-and-down line…they call it office of intelligent navels…the lumber camp…machine goes chug-rip, chug-rip…and the place where they cut metal like wood on machines that spin around…a deathly-sick little fellow loaded down and chained…fell on his face, he can’t get up, his bowels are water, his muscles are stiff, like dry branches and he’s afraid…they curse him, they beat him, they take him to a machine that spins…they…they—they—”
She sat bolt upright, screaming. Her eyes didn’t see Charles. He drew back one hand and slammed it across her cheek in a slap that reverberated like a pistol shot. Her head rocked to the blow and her eyes snapped back from infinity-focus.
She never told Charles what they had done to the sick slave in the machine shop, and he never asked her.
Without writing equipment, for crutches, Charles doubted profoundly that he’d be able to hang onto any of the material she supplied. He surprised himself; his memory developed with exercise.
The shadowy ranks of the New Portsmouth personnel became solider daily in his mind; the chronically-fatigued ordnance-man whose mainspring was to get by with the smallest possible effort; the sex-obsessed little man in Intelligence who lived only for the brothels where he selected older women—women who looked like his mother; the human weasel in BuShips who was impotent in bed and a lacerating tyrant in the office; the admiral who knew he was dying and hated his juniors proportionately to their youth and health.
And—
“…this woman of yours…she ain’t at home there…she ain’t at…at home…anywhere.…the fat man, the one that kills, he’s talking to her but she isn’t…yes she is…no she isn’t—she’s answering him, talking about over-the-sea.…”
“Lee Falcaro,” Charles whispered. “Lee Bennet.”
The trance-frozen face didn’t change; the eerie whisper went on without interruption: “…Lee Bennet on her lips, Lee Falcaro down deep in her guts…and the face of Charles Orsino down there too.…”
An unexpected pang went through him.
He sorted and classified endlessly what he had learned. He formed and rejected a dozen plans. At last there was one he could not reject.
XV
Commander Grinnel was officer of the day, and sore as a boil about it. O.N.I. wasn’t supposed to catch the duty. You risked your life on cloak-and-dagger missions; let the shore-bound fancy dans do the drudgery. But there he was, nevertheless, in the guard house office with a .45 on his hip, the interminable night stretching before him, and the ten-man main guard snoring away outside.
He eased his bad military conscience by reflecting that there wasn’t anything to guard, that patrolling the shore establishment was just worn out tradition. The ships and boats had their own watch. At the very furthest stretch of the imagination, a tarzan might sneak into town and try to steal some ammo. Well, if he got caught he got caught. And if he didn’t, who’d know the difference with the accounting as sloppy as it was here? They did things differently in Iceland.
* * * *
They crept through the midnight dark of New Portsmouth’s outskirts. As before, she led with her small hand. Lights flared on a wharf where, perhaps, a boat was being serviced. A slave screamed somewhere under the lash or worse.
“Here’s the doss house,” Martha whispered. It was smack
between paydays—part of the plan—and the house was dark except for the hopefully-lit parlor. They ducked down the alley that skirted it and around the back of Bachelor Officer Quarters. The sentry, if he were going his rounds at all, would be at the other end of his post when they passed—part of the plan.
Lee Falcaro was quartered alone in a locked room of the O.N.I. building. Martha had, from seventy miles away, frequently watched the lock being opened and closed.
They dove under the building’s crumbling porch two minutes before a late crowd of drinkers roared down the street and emerged when they were safely gone. There was a charge of quarters, a little yeoman, snoozing under a dim light in the O.N.I. building’s lobby.
“Anybody else?” Charles whispered edgily.
“No. Just her. She’s asleep. Dreaming about—never mind. Come on Charles. He’s out.”
The little yeoman didn’t stir as they passed him and crept up the stairs. Lee Falcaro’s room was part of the third-floor attic, finished off specially. You reached it by a ladder from a second-floor one-man office.
The lock was an eight-button piccolo—very rare in New Portsmouth and presumably loot from the mainland. Charles’ fingers flew over it: 1-7-5-4-, 2-2-7-3-, 8-2-6-6- and it flipped open silently.
But the door squeaked.
“She’s waking up!” Martha hissed in the dark. “She’ll yell!”
Charles reached the bed in two strides and clamped his hand over Lee Falcaro-Bennet’s mouth. Only a feeble “mmm!” came out, but the girl thrashed violently in his grip.
“Shut up, lady!” Martha whispered. “Nobody’s going to rape you.”
There was an astonished “mmm?” and she subsided, trembling.
“Go ahead,” Martha told him. “She won’t yell.”
He took his hand away nervously. “We’ve come to administer the oath of citizenship,” he said.
The girl answered in the querulous voice that was hardly hers: “You picked a strange time for it. Who are you? What’s all the whispering for?”
He improvised. “I’m Commander Lister. Just in from Iceland aboard atom sub Taft. They didn’t tell you in case it got turned down, but I was sent for authorization to give you citizenship. You know how unusual it is for a woman.”
The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Science Fiction Stories Page 46
