Callahan grinned at him. "So you traced that propaganda, did you? But a lot of people are beginning to believe Galileo's getting to be a menace. One of these days, Modoc or Sierra's going to lay an egg on Galileo. It won't be our affair. Humans will do the bombing, not Baldies."
"Who started the rumor?" Barton asked.
"There'll be more, a lot more. We'll spread distrust among the towns--a long--term program of planned propaganda. It'll culminate in another Blowup. The fact that humans would fall for such stuff shows their intrinsic unfitness to rule. It couldn't happen in a Baldy world."
McNey said, "Another war would mean the development of anti-communication systems. That'd play into your hands. It's the old rule of divide and fall. As long as radio, television, helicopter and fast-plane traffic weld humans together, they're racially centralized."
"You've got it," Callahan said. "When humanity's lowered to a more vulnerable status, we can centralize and step in. There aren't many truly creative technological brains, you know. We're destroying those-carefully. And we can do it, because we can centralize mentally, through the Power, without being vulnerable physically."
"Except to Us," Barton said gently.
Callahan shook his head slowly. "You can't kill us all. If you knifed me now, it wouldn't matter. I happen to be a coordinator, but I'm not the only one. You can find some of Us, sure, but you can't find Us all, and you can't break Our code. That's where you're failing, and why you'll always fail."
Barton ground out his cigarette with an angry gesture. "Yeah. We may fail, at that. But you won't win. You can't. I've seen a pogrom coming for a long while. If it comes, it'll be justified, and I won't be sorry, provided it wipes out all of you. We'll go down too, and you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you've destroyed the entire species through your crazy egotism."
"I'm not offended," Callahan said. "I've always contended that your group was a failure of the mutation. We are the true supermen-unafraid to take our place in the universe, whereas you're content to live on the crumbs the humans drop from the table."
"Callahan," McNey said suddenly, "this is suicidal. We can't--"
Barton sprang out of his chair and stood straddle-legged, glowering furiously. "Darryl! Don't beg the swine! There's a limit to what I'll stand!"
"Please," McNey said, feeling very helpless and impotent. "We've got to remember that we're not supermen, either."
"No compromise," Barton snapped. "There can't be any appeasement with those wolves. Wolves-hyenas!"
"There'll be no compromise," Callahan said. He rose, his leonine head a dark silhouette against the purple sky. "I came to see you, McNey, for just one reason. You know as well as I that the humans musn't suspect our plan. Leave us alone, and they won't suspect. But if you keep trying to hinder us, you'll just increase the danger of discovery. An underground war can't stay underground forever."
"So you see the danger, after all," McNey said.
"You fool," Callahan said, almost tolerantly. "Don't you see we're fighting for you, too? Leave us alone. When the humans are wiped out, this will be a Baldy world. You can find your place in it. Don't tell me you've never thought about a Baldy civilization, complete and perfect."
"I've thought about it," McNey assented. "But it won't come about through your methods. Gradual assimilation is the answer."
"So we'll be assimilated back into the human strain? So our children will be degraded into hairy men? No, McNey. You don't recognize your strength, but you don't seem to recognize your weakness, either. Leave us alone. If you don't, you'll be responsible for any pogrom that may come."
McNey looked at Barton. His shoulders slumped. He sank lower in his relaxer.
"You're right, after all, Dave," he whispered. "There can't be any compromise. They're paranoids."
Barton's sneer deepened. "Get out," he said. "I won't kill you now. But I know who you are. Keep thinking about that. You won't live long--my word on it."
"You may die first," Callahan said softly.
"Get out."
The paranoid turned and stepped into the dropper. Presently his figure could be seen below, striding along the path. Barton poured a stiff shot and drank it straight.
"I feel dirty," he said. "Maybe this'll take the taste out of my mouth."
In his relaxer McNey didn't move. Barton looked at the shadowy form sharply.
He thought: What's eating you?
I wish . . .I wish we had a Baldy world now. It wouldn't have to be on earth. Venus or even Mars. Callisto--anywhere. A place where we could have peace. Telepaths aren't made for war, Dave.
Maybe it's good for them, though.
You think I'm soft. Well, I am. I'm no hero. No crusader. It's the microcosm that's important, after all. How much loyalty can we have for the race if the family unit, the individual, has to sacrifice all that means home to him?
The vermin must be destroyed. Our children will live in a better world.
Our fathers said that. Where are we?
Not yet lynched, at any rate. Barton laid his hand on McNey's shoulder. Keep working. Find the answer. The paranoid code must be cracked. Then I can wipe them out-all of them!
McNey's thought darkened. I feel there will be a pogrom. I don't know when. But our race hasn't faced its greatest crisis yet. It will come. It will come.
An answer will come too, Barton thought. I'm going now. I've got to locate that Baldy with the Hedgehounds.
Good-bye, Dave.
He watched Barton disappear. The path lay empty thereafter. He waited, now, for Marian and Alexa to return from the town, and for the first time in his life he was not certain that they would return.
They were among enemies now, potential enemies who at a word might turn to noose and fire. The security the Baldies had fought for peacefully for generations was slipping away from underfoot. Before long Baldies might find themselves as homeless and friendless as Hedgehounds.
A too elastic civilization leads to anarchy, while a too rigid one will fall before the hurricane winds of change. The human norm is arbitrary; so there are arbitrary lines of demarcation. In the decentralized culture, the social animal was better able to find his rightful place than he had been in thousands of years. The monetary system was founded on barter, which in turn was founded on skill, genius, and man-hours. One individual enjoyed the casual life of a fisherman on the California coast; his catch could bring him a televisor set designed by a Galileo man who enjoyed electronics-and who also liked fish.
It was an elastic culture, but it had its rigidities. There were misfits. After the Blowup, those antisocials had fled the growing pattern of towns spreading over America and taken to the woods, where individualism could be indulged. Many types gathered. There were bindle stiffs and hobos, Cajuns and crackers, paisanos and Bowery bums-malcontents, antisocials, and those who simply could not be assimilated by any sort of urban life, not even the semirural conditions of the towns. Some had ridden the rods, some had walked the highways of a world that still depended on surface travel, and some were trappers and hunters for even at the time of the Blowup there had been vast forest tracts on the North American continent.
They took to the woods. Those who had originally been woodsmen knew well enough how to survive, how to set birdsnares and lay traps for deer and rabbit. They knew what berries to pick and what roots to dig. The others--
In the end they learned, or they died. But at first they sought what they thought to be an easier way. They became brigands, swooping down in raids on the unifying towns and carrying off booty-food, liquor and women. They mistook the rebirth of civilization for its collapse. They grouped together in bands, and the atomic bombs found targets, and they died.
After a while there were no large groups of Hedgehounds. Unity became unsafe. A few score at most might integrate, following the seasons in the north temperate zones, staying in the backland country in more tropical areas.
Their life became a combination of the American pioneer's and the Amer
ican Indian's. They migrated constantly. They re-learned the use of bow and javelin, for they kept no contact with the towns, and could not easily secure firearms. They drifted in the shallows of the stream of progress, hardy, brown woodmen and their squaws, proud of their independence and their ability to wrest a living from the wild.
They wrote little. But they talked much, and by night, around campfires, they sang old songs-"Barbara Alien," "The Twa Corbies," "Oh Susana," and the folk ballads that last longer than Senates and Parliaments. Had they ridden horseback, they would have known the songs based on the rhythm-patterns of equine gait; as it was, they walked, and knew marching songs.
Jesse James Hartwell, leader of his little band of Hedgehounds, was superintending the cooking of bear steaks over the campfire, and his bass voice rolled out now, muffled and softened by the pines that screened camp from brook. His squaw, Mary, was singing too, and presently others joined in, hunters and their wives-for squaw no longer carried the derogatory shade of meaning it once had. The attitude the Hedgehounds had toward their wives was a more realistic version of the attitudes of medieval chivalry.
"Bring the good old bugle, boys, we'll sing another song--"
It was dark by the stream. They had been late in finding a camping place tonight; the hunt for the bear had delayed them, and after that it had been difficult to find fresh water. As always when the tribe was irritable, there had been half-serious raillery at Lincoln Cody's expense. It was, perhaps, natural for any group to sense the mental difference--or superiority--of a Baldy, and compensate by jeering at his obvious physical difference.
Yet they had never connected Line with the town Baldies. For generations now telepaths had worn wigs. And not even Line himself knew that he was a telepath. He knew that he was different, that was all. He had no memory of the helicopter wreck from which his infant body had been taken by Jesse James Hartwell's mother; adopted into the tribe, he had grown up as a Hedgehound, and had been accepted as one. But though they considered him one of theirs, they were too ready to call him "skinhead"--not quite in jest.
"Sing it as we used to sing it, fifty thousand strong, While we were marching through Georgia ..."
There were twenty-three in Hartwell's band. A good many generations ago, one of his ancestors had fought with the Grand Army of the Republic, and had been with Sherman on his march. And a contemporary of that soldier, whose blood also ran in Hartwell's veins, had worn Confederate gray and died on the Potomac. Now twenty-three outcast Hedgehounds, discards of civilization, huddled about the fire and cooked the bear they had killed with spear and arrow. The chorus burst out vigorously.
"Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the jubilee, Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes men free, So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea While we were marching through Georgia."
There was a gray scar of desolation where Atlanta had been. The bright, clean new towns dotted Georgia, and helicopters hummed to the sea and back again now. The great War between the States was a memory, shadowed by the greater conflicts that had followed. Yet in that still northern forest, vigorous voices woke the past again.
Line rubbed his shoulders against the rough, bark of the tree and yawned. He was chewing the bit of a battered pipe and grateful for the momentary solitude. But he could sense—feel--understand stray fragments of thoughts that came to him from around the campfire. He did not know they were thoughts, since, for all he knew, Hartwell and the others might feel exactly the same reactions. Yet, as always, the rapport made him faintly unhappy, and he was grateful for the--something--that told him Cassie was coming.
She walked softly out of the shadow and dropped beside him, a slim, pretty girl a year younger than his seventeen years. They had been married less than a year; Line was still amazed that Cassie could have loved him in spite of his bald, gleaming cranium. He ran his fingers through Cassie's glossy, black hair, delighting in the sensuous feel of it, and the way it ran rippling across his palm.
"Tired, hon?"
"Nope. You feeling bad, Line?"
"It's nothing," he said.
"You been acting funny ever since we raided that town," Cassie murmured, taking his brown hand and tracing a pattern with her forefinger across the calloused palm. "You figure that wasn't on the beam for us to do, maybe."
"I dunno, Cassie," he sighed, his arm circling her waist. "It's the third raid this year--"
"You ain't questioning Jesse James Hartwell?"
"S'pose I am?"
"Well, then," Cassie said demurely, "you better start considering a quick drift for the two of us. Jesse don't like no arguments."
"No more do I," Line said. "Maybe there won't be no more raids now we're southering."
"We got full bellies, anyhow, and that's more than we had across the Canada line. I never saw a winter like this, Line."
"It's been cold," he acknowledged. "We can make out. Only thing is--"
"What?"
"I kinda wish you'd been along on the raids. I can't talk to nobody else about it. I felt funny. There was voices inside my head, like."
"That's crazy. Or else conjure."
"I'm no hex man. You know that, Cassie."
"And you ain't been smoking crazy weed." She meant the marijuana that grew wild in the backlands. Her gaze sought his. "Tell me what it's like, Line. Bad?"
"It ain't bad and it ain't good. It's mixed up, that's all. It's sort of like a dream, only I'm awake. I see pictures."
"What pictures, Line?"
"I don't know," he said, looking into the darkness where the brook chuckled and splashed. "Because half the time it ain't me when that happens. I get hot and cold inside. Sometimes it's like a music in my head. But when we raided that town it was plain bad, Cassie hon." He seized a bit of wood and tossed it away. "I was like that chip tossed around in the water. Everything was pulling at me every which way."
Cassie kissed him gently. "Don't pay no mind to it. Everybody gets mixed up once in a while. Once we get more south, and the hunting's good, you'll forget your vapors."
"I can forget 'em now. You make me feel better, just being with you. I love the smell of your hair, sweet." Line pressed his face against the cool, cloudly darkness of the girl's braids.
"Well, I won't cut it, then."
"You better not. You got to have enough hair for both of us."
"You think that matters to me, Line? Boone Curzon's bald, and he's plenty handsome."
"Boone's old, near forty. That's why. He had hair when he was young."
Cassie pulled up some moss and patted it into shape on Line's head. She smiled at him half-mockingly. "How's that? Ain't nobody anywhere that's got green hair. Feel better now?"
He wiped his scalp clean, pulled Cassie closer and kissed her. "Wish I never had to leave you. I ain't troubled when you're around. Only these raids stir me up."
"Won't be no more of 'em, I guess."
Line looked into the dimness. His young face, seamed and bronzed by.his rugged life, was suddenly gloomy. Abruptly he stood up.
"I got a hunch Jesse James Hartwells planning another."
"Hunch?" She watched him, troubled. "Maybe it ain't so."
"Maybe," Line said doubtfully. "Only my hunches work pretty good most times." He glanced toward the fire. His shoulders squared.
"Line?"
"He's figgering on it, Cassie. Sitting there thinking about the chow we got at that last town. It's his belly working on him. I ain't going to string along with him."
"You better not start nothing."
"I'm gonna ... talk to him," Line said almost inaudibly, and moved into the gloom of the trees. From the circle of firelight a man sent out a questioning challenge; the eerie hoot of an owl, mournful and sobbing. Line understood the inflection and answered with the caw of a raincrow. Hedgehounds had a language of their own that they used in dangerous territory, for there was no unity among the tribes, and some Hedgehounds were scalpers. There were a few cannibal groups, too, but these degenerates were hated and killed by the re
st whenever opportunity offered.
Line walked into camp. He was a big, sturdy, muscular figure, his strong chest arched under the fringed buckskin shirt he wore, his baldness concealed now by a squirrelhide cap. Temporary shelters had been rigged up, lean-tos, thatched with leaves, gave a minimum of privacy, and several squaws were busily sewing. At the cookpot Bethsheba Hartwell was passing out bear steaks. Jesse James Hartwell, an oxlike giant with a hook nose and a scarred cheek that had whitened half of his beard, ate meat and biscuits with relish, washing them down with green turtle soup-part of the raid's loot. On an immaculate white cloth before him was spread caviar, sardines, snails, chow chow, antipasto, and other dainties that he sampled with a tiny silver fork that was lost in his big, hairy hand.
"C'mon and eat, skinhead," Hartwell rumbled. "Where's your squaw? She'll get mighty hungry."
"She's coming," Line said. He didn't know that Cassie was crouching in the underbrush, a bared throwing-knife in her hand. His thoughts were focused on the chief, and he could still sense what he had called his hunch, and which was actually undeveloped telepathy. Yes, Hartwell was thinking about another raid.
Line took a steak from Bethsheba. It didn't burn his calloused hands. He squatted near Hartwell and bit into the juicy, succulent meat. His eyes never left the bearded man's face.
"We're out of Canada now," he said at last. "It's wanning up some. We still heading south?"
Hartwell nodded. "You bet. I don't figure on losing another toe with frostbite. It's too cold even here."
"There'll be hunting, then. And the wild corn's due soon. We'll have aplenty to eat."
"Pass the biscuits, Bethsheba. Urp. More we eat, Line, the fatter we'll get for next winter."
Line pointed to the white cloth. "Them don't fatten you up none."
"They're good anyhow. Try some of these here fish eggs."
"Yeah. Where's the water?"
Hartwell laughed. Line said, "We going north come summer?"
"We ain't voted on it yet. I'd say no. Me, I'd rather head south."
"More towns. It ain't safe to go on raiding, Jesse."
"Nobody can't find us once we get back in the woods."
Baldy Page 9
