"Yes." Alexa said, "you're one of Us. And you've got to remember that the future of the race is important. If you stay, you must never do anything to hurt it."
"I remember what you've been telling me about the p-para-noids," Line nodded. "Guess they're sort of like the cannibal tribes 'mong the Hedgehounds. They're fair quarry for anybody." He felt his wig, stepped to a mirror-unit, and adjusted the headpiece.
Alexa said, "There's Marian outside. I want to see her. Wait for me, Line; I'll be back."
She went out, Lincoln, awkwardly testing his newly-realized powers, felt her thought fingering subtly toward the plump, pretty woman who was moving among the flowers, armed with gloves and spray.
He wandered to the clavilux, and, one-fingered, picked out a tune. He hummed:
"All in the merry month of May, When the green buds they were swellin',
Young Jemmy Grove on his death-bed lay For love of Barb'ry Alien."
Memories of Cassie rose up. He forced them back into the shadows, along with the Hedgehounds and the nomad life he had known. That wasn't his life any more. Cassie-she'd get along all right. He'd go after her, one of these days, and bring her to live with him among the Baldies. Only-only she wasn't a Baldy. She wasn't like Alexa, for instance. She was quite as pretty, sure; yet there was all this talk about the future of the race. If, now, he married a Baldy and had Baldy sons and daughters--
But, he was already married. What was the good of thinking so? A Hedgehound marriage might not amount to a hill of beans among the townsfolk, of course, and, anyway, all this mental round-robin stuff was sort of polygamy.
Well, he'd climb that hill when he came to it. First he had to get the trick of this telepathy business. It was coming, but slowly, for he'd not been conditioned since infancy, as other Baldies were. The latent power had to be wakened and directed--not as a child could be taught, but allowing for Line's maturity, and his ability to grasp and understand the goal.
Marian came in with Alexa. The older woman stripped off her cloth gloves and brushed beads of perspiration from her ruddy cheeks.
" 'Lo, Line," she said. "How's it going?"
"Fairish, Marian. You should of asked me to help out there."
"I need the exercise. I gained three pounds this morning arguing with that turnip-bleeder Gatson, down at the store. Know what he wants for fresh breadfruit?"
"What's that?"
"Catch this." Marian formed mental concepts involving sight, touch and taste. Alexa chimed in with the smell of breadfruit. Line had his own arbitrary standards for comparisons, and within a second had assimilated the absolute meaning; he would recognize a breadfruit from now on. Marian threw a quick mental question. Line answered.
To town (Darryl McNey) by window (ten minutes past)
"A bit confused," Marian said, "but I get the idea. He ought to be back soon. I'm in the mood for a swim. Suppose I fix some sandwiches?"
"Swell," Alexa said. "I'll help. Line knows more about catching trout than anybody I've ever seen, except he doesn't know what a dry fly is."
"I just aim to catch fish," Line said. "Enough to eat. Many a time I had to fish through holes in the ice to keep from being hungry."
Later, stretching his brown, hard body on the sandy bank of the pool upstream, he luxuriated in the warm sunlight and watched Alexa. Slim and attractive in white shorts and bathing cap, she inexpertly practiced casting, while McNey, pipe in his mouth, worked a likely-looking spot under an overhang of branches that brushed the water. Marian placidly ate sandwiches and watched the activities of a community of ants with considerable interest. The deep, unspoken comradeship of the family and the race was intangibly in the air, a bond that reached out, touched Line, and drew him into its friendly center. This is it, he thought. I belong here. And Alexa's mind answered him with quiet confidence: You are one of Us.
The months passed very quickly for Line, broken by occasional visits from Dave Barton, whose manner grew increasingly more troubled, and by the green that covered tree and brush, ground and vine, as spring gave place to summer, and summer drew toward a not-distant autumn. He seldom thought of the Hedgehounds now. There was a sort of tacit acceptance of the situation among the little group; he felt, without actually bringing the realization consciously to mind, that Alexa knew a great deal about his past, and that she would not bring up the matter of Cassie unless he did. That she was beginning to love him he did not doubt. Nor did he doubt much that he loved her. After all, Alexa was his kind, as Cassie never had been.
But he dreamed of Cassie, nevertheless. Sometimes he felt loneliness, even among his own people. At such times he was anxious to finish his telepathic training and join Barton's fight against the paranoids. Barton was eager to enlist Line, but he warned against the danger of moving too soon. "The paranoids aren't fools, Line," he said. "We mustn't underestimate them. I've lived this long simply because I'm a trained big-game hunter. My reactions are just a bit faster than theirs, and I always try to maneuver them in a position where telepathy can't help them. If a paranoid's at the bottom of a well, he may read your intention of dropping a load of bricks on his head-but he can't do a lot about it."
"Any news about Callahan?" McNey asked. "No word for months. There's some plan-maybe a big push in the propaganda field, maybe assassinations of key technologists. I don't know what. I've read no minds that knew the right answers. But I think something's going to break soon; I've found out that much. We've got to be ready for it. We've got to break their code--or get one of our own. The same tune, Darryl."
"I know," McNey said. He stared out at the empty blue sky. "There isn't much I can say now, or even think. The same tune, all right."
"But you haven't failed? In a few weeks you're due back at Niagara."
Line said, "Look, about this code. I was thinking, the Hedgehounds have got a sort of code. Like this." He imitated a few bird and animal calls. "We know what they mean but nobody else knows."
"Hedgehounds aren't telepaths. If they were, your code wouldn't stay a secret long."
"Guess you're right. I'd like to take a crack at the paranoids, though."
"You'll have your chance," Barton said. "But, meanwhile, it's Darryls job to find us a new weapon."
McNey said wearily, "I know all about that. No more pep talks, Dave, please."
Barton stood up, scowling. "I've a job to do down south. I'll see you when I get back, Darryl. Meanwhile, take care of yourself. If this business--whatever it is--should break soon, don't run any risks. You're vital to Us, much more so than I am."
With a nod to Line he went out. McNey stared at nothing. Line hesitated, sent out a querying thought, and met abstracted rebuff. He went downstairs.
He couldn't find Alexa. Finally he went out into the gardens, working his way toward the brook. A flash of color caught his eye, and he headed for it.
Alexa was sitting on a rock, her flimsy playsuit unzipped to let the slight breeze cool her. The heat was so intense that she had removed her wig, and her bald head was shiny and incongruous, incompatible with her artificial lashes and eyebrows. It was the first time Line had ever seen her wigless.
Instantly, at his thought, she swung about and began to replace the wig. But her arm stopped in arrested motion. She looked at him, half questionably, and then with pain and growing understanding in her eyes.
"Put it on, Alexa," Line said.
She watched him steadily. "What for--now?"
"I... it doesn't--"
Alexa shrugged and slipped the headpiece into place. "That was ... strange," she said, deliberately speaking aloud as if she did not want to let her mind slip back into the channels of telepathic intimacy where hurt can strike so unerringly. "I'm so used myself to Baldies being-bald. I never thought before the sight could be--" She did not finish aloud. After a moment she said, "You must have been very unhappy among the Hedgehounds, Line. Even more unhappy than you realize. If you've been conditioned against the sight of baldness to ... to that extent--"
"I
t wasn't," Line denied futilely. "I didn't... you shouldn't think--"
"It's all right. You can't help reactions as deeply rooted as that. Some day standards of beauty will change. Hairlessness will be lovely. Today it isn't, certainly not to a man with
your psychological background. You must have been made to feel very keenly that you were inferior because of your baldness--"
Line stood there awkwardly, unable to deny the thought that had sprung so vividly into his mind, burning with shame I and dismay at the knowledge that she had seen as clearly as himself the ugly picture of her baldness in his thought. As if he had held up a distorting mirror to her face and said aloud, "This is the way you look to me." As if he had slapped her gratuitously across the cheek with the taunt of her-abnormality.
"Never mind," Alexa said, a little shakily, smiling. "You can't help it if baldness disg-... distresses you. Forget it. It isn't as if we were m-married or... anything."
They looked at each other in silence. Their minds touched and sprang apart and then touched again, tentatively, with light thoughts that leaped from point to point as gingerly as if the ideas were ice-floes that might sink beneath the full weight of conscious focus.
I thought I loved you ... perhaps I did .. . yes, I too .. . but now there can't be . . . (sudden, rebellious denial) ... no, it's true, there can't ever be Tightness between us... not as if we were ordinary people... we'd always remember that picture, how I looked (abrupt sheering off from the memory) . . . (agonized repudiation of it) . . . no, couldn't help that.. . always between US ... rooted too deeply ... and anyhow, Cas-(sudden closing off of both minds at once, before even the thought-image had time to form.)
Alexa stood up. "I'm going into town," she said. "Marian's at the hairdresser's. I... I'll get a wave or something."
He looked at her helplessly, half reluctant to let her go, though he knew as well as she how much had been discussed and weighed and discarded in the past moment of voiceless speech.
"Good-by, Alexa," he said.
"Good-by, Line."
Line stood for a long time watching the path, even after she had gone. He would have to leave. He didn't belong here. Even if nearness to Alexa were possible after this, he knew he could not stay. They were--abnormal. He would be seeing the baldness, the contemptible, laughable baldness he had hated in himself, more clearly now than the wigs they wore. Somehow until this moment he had never fully realized--
Well, he couldn't go without telling Darryl. Slowly, dragging his feet a little, he turned back toward the house. When he came to the side lawn he sent out an inexpert, querying thought.
Something answered him from the cellar-laboratory, a queer, strange, disturbing vibration that clung briefly to his mind and then pulled away. It wasn't McNey. It was--an intruder. Line went down the cellar steps. At the bottom he paused, trying to sort the tangled confusion in his mind as he thrust out exploratory mental fingers. The door was open. McNey was lying on the floor, his mind blanked, blood seeping from a red stain on his side. The intruder? Who--
Sergei Callahan. Where--Hidden. And armed.
So am I, Line thought, his dagger springing into his hand. Telepathically you are untrained. In a fight you can't win. That was probably true. Telepathy took the place of prescience with the Baldies. Any Baldy could outguess and conquer a non-Baldy, and Line was not yet thoroughly trained in the use of the telepathic function.
He probed awkwardly. And, suddenly, he knew where Callahan was.
Behind the door. Where he could strike Line in the back when the boy entered the laboratory. He had not expected the untrained Baldy to discover the ambush until too late, and even as Line realized the situation, Callahan made a move to spring out.
All Line's weight smashed against the panel, slamming the door back against the wall. Callahan was caught. Pressed helplessly between the two metal planes--door and wall--he tried to brace himself, to wriggle free. His hand, gripping a dagger, snaked out. Line dropped his own weapon, put his back against the door, and planted his feet more firmly. The door frame gave him good purchase. Veins stood out on his forehead as he ground, crushed, drove the door back with all his strength.
What had Dave Barton said once? "Kill them with machines--" This was a machine-one of the oldest. The lever.
Suddenly Callahan began to scream. His agonized thought begged for mercy. In a moment his strength would fail, he pleaded. "Don't--don't crush me!"
His strength failed.
Line's heavy shoulders surged. There was one frightful mental scream from Callahan, more agonizing than the audible sound he made, and Line let the door swing slowly away from the wall. A body collapsed with its movement. Line picked up his dagger, used it efficiently, and then turned to McNey.
There was a puddle of blood on the floor, but McNey still lived. Callahan had not had time to finish his task.
Line became busy administering first aid.
This was it.
It was past midnight. In the cellar laboratory, McNey leaned back in his chair, wincing as he felt the pressure of the bandages about his ribs. He blinked at the fluorescents, sighed, and rubbed his forehead.
His hand hovered over the notepad. An equation was lacking. He wasn't quite ready to think of it just yet.
But the job was almost finished. It would give the Baldies a weapon, at last, against the paranoids. They couldn't tap the paranoid's secret wave length, but they could--
Not yet. Don't think of it yet.
Even Line had helped, unknowingly, by one suggestion he had made. Mimicry. Yes, that was one answer. The paranoids would not even suspect--
Not yet.
Well, Line had gone back to his Hedgehound tribe and his Hedgehound squaw. In the end, the psychological fixation implanted in the boy's mind had proved stronger than the strong bonds of race. Too bad, because Line had had something that few Baldies possessed--an innate hardness, a resourceful strength that might prove useful in the dark days that were coming.
The dark days that might yet be postponed, for a while, if--
Marian was asleep. McNey forced his thought from her. After years of marriage, they were so closely attuned that even that casual thought might waken her. And not until she had fallen asleep had he dared to bring his mind to bear on this ultimate problem. There could be no secrets between Baldies.
But this would be a secret--the one that would give Dave Barton a weapon against the paranoids. It was the unbreakable code that McNey had searched for for two years now.
It was a secret method of communication for Baldies.
Now. Work fast. Work fast!
McNey's stylus moved rapidly. He made a few adjustments in the machine before him, sealed its fastenings thoroughly, and watched power-flow develop. After a while, something came out of a small opening at one end of the device, a fine mesh of wire, with a few flatly curved attachments. McNey took off his wig, fitted the wire cap to his head, and donned the wig again. After a glance at a mirror, he nodded, satisfied.
The machine was permanently set now to construct these communicator caps when raw materials were fed into it. The matrix, the blueprint, had been built into the device, and the end result was a communicator gadget, easily hidden under a wig, which every non-paranoid Baldy probably would eventually wear. As for the nature of the gadget--
The problem had been to find a secret means of communication, akin to the paranoids' untappable wave band. And telepathy itself is simply a three-phase oscillation of electromagneto-gravitic energy, emanating from the specialized colloid of the human brain. But telepathy, per se, can be received by any sensitive mind en rapport with the sender.
And so the trick had been-find a method of artificial transmission. The brain, when properly stimulated by electric energy, will give out electromagnet-gravitic energy, undetectable except to telepaths because there are no instruments sensitive to this output. But when the paranoids would receive such radiations, without the unscrambling assistance of one of McNey's little caps, they w
ouldn't suspect a code.
Because they'd be hearing-sensing-only static.
It was a matter of camouflage. The waves masqueraded. They masqueraded on a wave band that nobody used, for that particular band was too close to that of the radio communicators used in thousands of private helicopters. For these radios, five thousand megacycles was normal; fifteen thousand manifested itself as a harmless harmonic static, and McNey's device simply added more squirts of static to that harmonic interference.
True, direction finders could receive the signals and locate them-but helicopters, like Baldies, were scattered all over the country, and the race traveled a good deal, both by necessity and by choice. The paranoids could locate the source of the fifteen thousand megacycles emanating from the wire caps-but why should they think to?
It was an adaptation of the Hedgehounds' code of imitating bird and animal calls. A tenderfoot in the woods wouldn't look for a language in the cry of an owl-and the paranoids wouldn't be seeking secret messages in what was apparently only static.
So, in these light, easily disguised mesh helmets, the problem was solved, finally. The power source would be an automatic tapping of free energy, an imperceptible drain on any nearby electrical generator, and the master machine itself, which made the communicators, was permanently sealed. No one, except McNey himself, knew even the principles of the new communication system. And, since the machine would be guarded well, the paranoids would never know, any more than Barton himself would know, what made the gadget tick. Barton would realize its effectiveness, and that was all. The list of raw materials needed was engraved on the feeder-hopper of the machine; nothing else was necessary. So Barton would possess no secrets to betray inadvertently to the paranoids, for the secrets were all sealed in the machine, and in one other place.
McNey took off the wire cap and laid it on the table. He turned off the machine. Then, working quickly, he destroyed the formulas and any traces of notes or raw materials. He wrote a brief note to Barton, explaining what was necessary.
There was no more time left after that. McNey sank back in his chair, his tired, ordinary face without expression. He didn't look like a hero. And, just then, he wasn't thinking about the future of the Baldy race, or the fact that the other place where the secret was sealed was in his brain.
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