THE SYNDIC, by C. M. Kornbluth (Part II)

X

It took minutes only.

He had headed back to the waterfront, afraid to run, with some vague notion of stealing a boat. Before he reached the row of saloons and joints, a smart-looking squad of eight tall men overtook him.

“Hold it, mister,” a sergeant said. “Are you Orsino?”

“No,” he said hopelessly. “That crazy woman began to yell at me that I was Orsino, but my name’s Wyman. What’s this about?”

The other men fell in beside and behind him. “We’re stepping over to O.N.I.,” the sergeant said.

“There’s the son of a bitch!” somebody bawled. Suddenly there were a dozen sweatered Guardsmen around them. Their leader was the thug Orsino had beaten in a fair fight. He said silkily to the sergeant: “We want that boy, leatherneck. Blow.”

* * * *

The sergeant went pale. “He’s wanted for questioning by the O.N.I.,” he said stolidly.

“Get the marine three-striper!” the Guardsman chortled. He stuck his jaw into the sergeant’s face. “Tell your squad to blow. You marines ought to know by now that you don’t mess with the Guard.”

A very junior officer appeared. “What’s going on here, you men?” he shrilled. “Atten-shun!” He was ignored as Guardsman and marines measured one another with their eyes. “I said attention! Dammit, sergeant, report!” There was no reaction. The officer yelled: “You men may think you can get away with this but by God, you’re wrong!” He strode away, his fists clenched and his face very red.

Orsino saw him stride through a gate into a lot marked Bupers Motor Pool. And he felt a sudden wave of communal understanding that there were only seconds to go. The sergeant played for time: “I’ll be glad to surrender the prisoner,” he started, “if you have anything to show in the way of—”

The Guardsman kicked for the pit of the sergeant’s stomach. He was a sucker Orsino thought abstractedly as he saw the sergeant catch his foot, dump him and pivot to block another Guardsman. Then he was fighting for his life himself, against three bellowing Guardsmen.

A ripping, hammering noise filled the air suddenly. Like cold magic, it froze the milling mob where it stood. Fifty-caliber noise.

The jaygee was back, this time in a jeep with a twin fifty. And he was glaring down its barrels into the crowd. People were beginning to stream from the saloons, joints and shipfitting shops.

The jaygee cocked his cap rakishly over one eye. “Fall in!” he rasped, and a haunting air of familiarity came over Orsino.

The waiting jeep, almost bucking in its eagerness to be let loose—Orsino on the ground, knees trembling with tension—a perfect change of mount scene in a polo match. He reacted automatically.

There was a surrealist flash of the jaygee’s face before he clipped him into the back of the square little truck. There was another flash of spectators scrambling as he roared the jeep down the road.

From then on it was just a question of hanging onto the wheel with one hand, trying to secure the free-traversing twin-fifty with the other, glancing back to see if the jaygee was still out, avoiding yapping dogs and pedestrians, staying on the rutted road, pushing all possible speed out of the jeep, noting landmarks, estimating the possibility of dangerous pursuit. For a two-goal polo player, a dull little practice session.

The road, such as it was, wound five miles inland through scrubby woodland and terminated at a lumber camp where chained men in rags were dragging logs.

Orsino back tracked a quarter-mile from the camp and jolted overland in a kidney-cracking hare and hounds course at fifty per.

The jeep took it for an hour in the fading afternoon light and then bucked to a halt. Orsino turned for an overdue check on the jaygee and found him conscious, but greenly clinging to the sides of the vehicle. But he saw Orsino staring and gamely struggled to his feet, standing in the truck bed. “You’re under arrest, sailor,” he said. “Striking an officer, abuse of government property, driving a government vehicle without a trip-ticket—” His legs betrayed him and he sat down, hard.

Orsino thought very briefly of letting him have a burst from the twin-fifty, and abandoned the idea.

He seemed to have bitched up everything so far, but he was still on a mission. He had a commissioned officer of the Government approximately in his power. He snapped: “Nonsense. You’re under arrest.”

The jaygee seemed to be reviewing rapidly any transgressions he may have committed, and asked at last, cautiously: “By what authority?”

“I represent the Syndic.”

It was a block-buster. The jaygee stammered: “But you can’t—But there isn’t any way—But how—”

“Never mind how.”

“You’re crazy. You must be, or you wouldn’t stop here. I don’t believe you’re from the continent and I don’t believe the jeep’s broken down.” He was beginning to sound just a little hysterical. “It can’t break down here. We must be more than thirty miles inland.”

“What’s special about thirty miles inland?”

“The natives, you fool!”

The natives again. “I’m not worried about natives. Not with a pair of fifties.”

“You don’t understand,” the jaygee said, forcing calm into his voice. “This is The Outback. They’re in charge here. We can’t do a thing with them. They jump people in the dark and skewer them. Now fix this damn jeep and let’s get rolling!”

“Into a firing squad? Don’t be silly, lieutenant. I presume you won’t slug me while I check the engine?”

The jaygee was looking around him. “My God, no,” he said. “You may be a gangster, but—” He trailed off.

Orsino stiffened. Gangster was semi-dirty talk. “Listen, pirate,” he said nastily, “I don’t believe—”

“Pirate?” the jaygee roared indignantly, and then shut his mouth with a click, looking apprehensively about. The gesture wasn’t faked; it alarmed Orsino.

“Tell me about your wildmen,” he said.

“Go to hell,” the jaygee said sulkily.

“Look, you called me a gangster first. What about these natives? You were trying to trick me, weren’t you?”

“Kiss my royal North American eyeball, gangster.”

“Don’t be childish,” Charles reproved him, feeling adult and superior. (The jaygee looked a couple of years younger than he.) He climbed out of his seat and lifted the hood. The damage was trivial; a shear pin in the transmission had given way. He reported mournfully: “Cracked block. The jeep’s through forever. You can get on your way, lieutenant. I won’t try to hold you.”

The jaygee fumed: “You couldn’t hold me if you wanted to, gangster. If you think I’m going to try and hoof back to the base alone in the dark, you’re crazy. We’re sticking together. Two of us may be able to hold them off for the night. In the morning, we’ll see.”

Well, maybe the officer did believe there were wildmen in the woods. That didn’t mean there were.

The jaygee got out and looked under the hood uncertainly. It was obvious that in the first place he was no mechanic and in the second place he couldn’t conceive of anybody voluntarily risking the woods rather than the naval base. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Dismount that gun while I get a fire started.”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said sardonically, saluting. The jaygee absently returned the salute and began to collect twigs.

Orsino asked: “How do these aborigines of yours operate?”

“Sneak up in the dark. They have spears and a few stolen guns. Usually they don’t have cartridges for them but you can’t count on that. But they have…witches.”

Orsino snorted. He was getting very hungry indeed. “Do you know any of the local plants we might eat?”

The jaygee said confidently: “I guess we can get by on roots until morning.”

Orsino dubiously pulled up a shrub, dabbed clods off its root and tasted it. It tasted exactly like a root. He sighed and changed the subject. “What do we do with the fifties when I get them both off the mount?”

“The jeep mount breaks down some damn way or other into two low-mount tripods. See if you can figure it out while I get the fire going.”

The jaygee had a small, smoky fire barely going in twenty minutes. Orsino was still struggling with the jeep gun mount. It came apart, but it couldn’t go together again. The jaygee strolled over at last contemptuously to lend a hand. He couldn’t make it work either.

Two lost tempers and four split fingernails later it developed the “elevating screw” really held the two front legs on and that you elevated by adjusting the rear tripod leg. “A hell of an officer you are,” Orsino sulked.

It began to rain, putting the fire out with a hiss. They wound up prone under the jeep, not on speaking terms, each tending a gun, each presumably responsible for 180 degrees of perimeter.

* * * *

Charles was fairly dry, except for a trickle of icy water following a contour that meandered to his left knee. After an hour of eye-straining—nothing to be seen—and ear-straining—only the patter of rain—he heard a snore and kicked the jaygee.

The jaygee cursed wearily and said: “I guess we’d better talk to keep awake.”

“I’m not having any trouble, pirate.”

“Oh, knock it off—where do you get that pirate bit, gangster?”

“You’re outlaws, aren’t you?”

“Like hell we are. You’re the outlaws. You rebelled against the lawfully constituted North American Government. Just because you won—for the time being—doesn’t mean you were right.”

“The fact that we won does mean that we were right. The fact that your so-called Government lives by raiding and scavenging off us means you were wrong. God, the things I’ve seen since I joined up with you thugs!”

“I’ll bet. Respect for the home, sanctity of marriage, sexual morality, law and order—you never saw anything like that back home, did you gangster?” He looked very smug.

Orsino clenched his teeth. “Somebody’s been telling you a pack of lies,” he said. “There’s just as much home and family life and morality and order back in Syndic Territory as there is here. And probably a lot more.”

“Bull. I’ve seen intelligence reports; I know how you people live. Are you telling me you don’t have sexual promiscuity? Polygamy? Polyandry? Open gambling? Uncontrolled liquor trade? Corruption and shakedowns?”

Orsino squinted along the barrel of the gun into the rain. “Look,” he said, “take me as an average young man from Syndic Territory. I know maybe a hundred people. I know just three women and two men who are what you’d call promiscuous. I know one family with two wives and one husband. I don’t really know any people personally who go in for polyandry, but I’ve met three casually. And the rest are ordinary middle-aged couples.”

“Ah-hah! Middle-aged! Do you mean to tell me you’re just leaving out anybody under middle age when you talk about morality?”

“Naturally,” Charles said, baffled. “Wouldn’t you?”

The only answer was a snort.

“What are bupers?” Charles asked.

“Bu-Pers,” the jaygee said distinctly. “Bureau of Personnel, North American Navy.”

“What do you do there?”

“What would a personnel bureau do?” the jaygee said patiently. “We recruit, classify, assign, promote and train personnel.”

“Paperwork, huh? No wonder you don’t know how to shoot or drive.”

“If I didn’t need you to cover my back, I’d shove this MG down your silly throat. For your information, gangster, all officers do a tour of duty on paperwork before they’re assigned to their permanent branch. I’m going into the pigboats.”

“Why?”

“Family. My father commands a sub. He’s Captain Van Dellen.”

Oh, God. Van Dellen. The sub commander Grinnel—and he—had murdered. The kid hadn’t heard yet that his father had been “lost” in an emergency dive.

* * * *

The rain ceased to fall; the pattering drizzle gave way to irregular, splashing drops from leaves and branches.

“Van Dellen,” Charles said. “There’s something you ought to know.”

“It’ll keep,” the jaygee answered in a grim whisper. The bolt of his gun clicked. “I hear them out there.”

XI

She felt the power of the goddess working in her, but feebly. Dark…so dark…and so tired…how old was she? More than eight hundred moons had waxed and waned above her head since birth. And she had run at the head of her spearmen to the motor sounds. A motor meant the smithymen from the sea, and you killed smithymen when you could.

She let out a short shrill chuckle in the dark. There was a rustling of branches. One of the spearmen had turned to stare at the sound. She knew his face was worried. “Tend to business, you fool!” she wheezed. “Or by Bridget—” His breath went in with a hiss and she chuckled again. You had to let them know who was the cook and who was the potatoes every now and then. Kill the fool? Not now; not when there were smithymen with guns waiting to be taken.

The power of the goddess worked stronger in her withered breast as her rage grew at their impudence. Coming into her woods with their stinking metal!

There were two of them. A grin slit her face. She had not taken two smithymen together for thirty moons. For all her wrinkles and creaks, what a fine vessel she was for the power, to be sure! Her worthless, slow-to-learn niece could run and jump and she had a certain air, but she’d never be such a vessel. Her sister—the crone spat—these were degenerate days. In the old days, the sister would have been spitted when she refused the ordeal in her youth. The little one now, whatever her name was, she would make a fine vessel for the power when she was gathered to the goddess. If her sister or her niece didn’t hold her head under water too long, or have a spear shoved too deep into her gut or hit her on the head with too heavy a rock.

These were degenerate days. She had poisoned her own mother to become the vessel of power.

The spearmen to her right and left shifted uneasily. She heard a faint mumble of the two smithymen talking. Let them talk! Doubtless they were cursing the goddess obscenely; doubtless that was what the smithymen all did when their mouths were not stuffed with food.

She thought of the man called Kennedy who forged spearheads and arrowpoints for her people—he was a strange one, touched by the goddess, which proved her infinite power. She could touch and turn the head of even a smithyman. He was a strange one. Well now, to get on with it. She wished the power were working stronger in her; she was tired and could hardly see. But by the grace of the goddess there would be two new heads over her holy hut come dawn. She could hardly see, but the goddess wouldn’t fail her.…

She quavered like a screech-owl, and the spearmen began to slip forward through the brush. She was not allowed to eat honey lest its sweetness clash with the power in her, but the taste of power was sweeter than the taste of honey.

* * * *

With frightful suddenness there was an ear-splitting shriek and a trampling rush of feet. By sheer reflex, Orsino clamped down on the trigger of his fifty, and his brain rocked at its thunder. Shadowy figures were blotted out by the orange muzzle-flash. You’re supposed to fire neat, spaced bursts of eight he told himself. I wonder what old Gilby would say if he could see his star pupil burning out a barrel and swinging his gun like a fire hose?

The gun stopped firing; end of the belt. Twenty, fifty or a hundred rounds? He didn’t remember. He clawed for another belt and smoothly, in the dark, loaded again and listened.

“You all right, gangster?” the jaygee said behind him, making him jump.

“Yes,” he said. “Will they come back?”

“I don’t know.”

“You filthy swine,” an agonized voice wheezed from the darkness. “Me back is broke, you stinking lice.” The voice began to sob.

They listened to it in silence for perhaps a minute. At last he said to the jaygee: “If the rest are gone maybe we can at least—make him comfortable.”

“Too risky,” the jaygee said after a long pause.

The sobbing went on. As the excitement of the attack drained from Orsino, he felt deathly tired, cramped and thirsty. The thirst he could do something about. He scooped water from the muddy runnel by his knee and sucked it from his palms twice. The third time, he thought of the thirst that the sobbing creature out in the dark must be feeling, and his hand wouldn’t go to his mouth.

“I’m going to get him,” he whispered to the jaygee.

“Stay where you are! That’s an order!”

He didn’t answer, but began to work his cramped and aching body from under the jeep. The jaygee, a couple of years younger and lither than he, slid out first from his own side. Orsino sighed and relaxed as he heard his footsteps cautiously circle the jeep.

“Finish me off!” the wounded man was sobbing. “For the love of the goddess, finish me off, you bitches’ bastards! You’ve broke me back—ah!” That was a cry of savage delight.

There was a strangled noise from the jaygee and then only a soft, deadly thrashing noise from the dark. Hell, Orsino thought bitterly. It was my idea. He snaked out from under the jeep and raced through wet brush.

The two of them were a tangled knot of darkness rolling on the ground. A naked back came uppermost; Orsino fell on it and clawed at its head. He felt a huge beard, took two hand-fulls of it and pulled as hard as he could. There was a wild screech and a flailing of arms. The jaygee broke away and stood up, panting hoarsely. Charles heard a sharp crunch and a snap, and the flailing sweaty figure, beneath him lay still.

“Back to the guns,” the jaygee choked. He swayed, and Orsino took him by the arm.… On the way back to the jeep, they stumbled over something that was certainly a body.

Orsino’s flesh shrank from lying down again in the mud behind his gun, but he did, shivering. He heard the jaygee thud wearily into position. “What did you do to him?” he asked. “Is he dead?”

“Kicked him,” the jaygee choked. “His head snapped back and there was that crack. I guess he’s dead. I never heard of that broken-wing trick before. I guess he wanted to take one more with him. They have a kind of religion.”

The jaygee sounded as though he was teetering on the edge of breakdown. Make him mad, intuition said to Orsino. He might go howling off among the trees unless he snaps out of it.

“It’s a hell of way to run an island,” he said nastily. “You beggars were chased out of North America because you couldn’t run it right and now you can’t even control a lousy little island for more than five miles inland.” He added with deliberate, superior amusement: “Of course, they’ve got witches.”

“Shut your mouth, gangster—I’m warning you.” The note of hysteria was still there. And then the jaygee said dully: “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. You did come out and help me after all.”

“Surprised?”

“Yes. Twice. First time when you wanted to go out yourself. I suppose you can’t help being born where you were. Maybe if you came over to us all the way, the Government would forgive and forget. But no—I suppose not.” He paused, obviously casting about for a change of subject. He still seemed sublimely confident that they’d get back to the naval base with him in charge of the detail. “What ship did you cross in?”

“Atom sub Taft,” Orsino said. He could have bitten his tongue out.

“Taft? That’s my father’s pigboat! Captain Van Dellen. How is he? I was going down to the dock when—”

“He’s dead,” Orsino said flatly. “He was caught on deck during an emergency dive.”

The jaygee said nothing for a while and then uttered an unconvincing laugh of disbelief. “You’re lying,” he said. “His crew’d never let that happen. They’d let the ship be blown to hell before they took her down without the skipper.”

“Grinnel had the con. He ordered the dive and roared down the crew when they wanted to get your father inboard. I’m sorry.”

“Grinnel,” the jaygee whispered. “Grinnel. Yes, I know Commander Grinnel. He’s—he’s a good officer. He must have done it because he had to. Tell me about it, please.”

It was more than Orsino could bear. “Your father was murdered,” he said harshly. “I know because Grinnel put me on radar watch—and I don’t know a God-damned thing about reading a radarscope. He told me to sing out ‘enemy planes’ and I did because I didn’t know what the hell was going on. He used that as an excuse to crash-dive while your father was sleeping on deck. Your good officer murdered him.”

He heard the jaygee sobbing hoarsely. At last he asked Orsino in a dry, choked voice: “Politics?”

“Politics,” Orsino said.

Orsino jumped wildly as the jaygee’s machine gun began to roar a long burst of twenty, but he didn’t fire himself. He knew that there was no enemy out there in the dark, and that the bullets were aimed only at an absent phantom.

“We’ve got to get to Iceland,” the jaygee said at last, soberly. “It’s our only chance.”

“Iceland?”

“This is one for the C.C. of the Constitutionists. The Central Committee. It’s a breach of the Freiberg Compromise. It means we call the Sociocrats, and if they don’t make full restitution—war.”

“What do you mean, we?”

“You and I. You’re the source of the story; you’re the one who’d be lie-tested.”

You’ve got him, Orsino told himself, but don’t be fool enough to count on it. He’s been light-headed from hunger and no sleep and the shock of his father’s death. You helped him in a death struggle and there’s team spirit working on him. The guy covering my back, how can I fail to trust him, how could I dare not to trust him? But don’t be fool enough to count on it after he’s slept. Meanwhile, push it for all it’s worth.

“What are your plans?” he asked gravely.

“We’ve got to slip out of Ireland by sub or plane,” the jaygee brooded. “We can’t go to the New Portsmouth or Com-Surf organizations; they’re Sociocrat, and Grinnel will have passed the word to the Sociocrats that you’re out of control.”

“What does that mean?”

“Death,” the jaygee said.

XII

Commander Grinnel, after reporting formally, had gone straight to a joint. It wasn’t until midnight that he got The Word, from a friendly O.N.I. lieutenant who had dropped into the house.

“What?” Grinnel roared. “Who is this woman? Where is she? Take me to her at once!”

“Commander!” the lieutenant said aghast. “I just got here!”

“You heard me, mister! At once!”

While Grinnel dressed he demanded particulars. The lieutenant dutifully scoured his memory. “Brought in on some cloak-and-dagger deal, Commander. The kind you usually run. Lieutenant-Commander Jacobi was in Syndic Territory on a recruiting, sabotage and reconnaissance mission and one of the D.A.R. passed the girl on him. A real Syndic member. Priceless. And, as I said, she identified this fellow as Charles Orsino, another Syndic. Why are you so interested, if I may ask?”

The Commander dearly wanted to give him a grim: “You may not,” but didn’t dare. Now was the time to be frank and open. One hint that he had anything to hide or cover up would put his throat to the knife. “The man’s my baby, lieutenant,” he said. “Either your girl’s mistaken or Van Dellen and his polygraph tech and I were taken in by a brand-new technique.” That was nice work, he congratulated himself. Got in Van Dellen and the tech.… Maybe, come to think of it, the tech wascrooked? No; there was the way Wyman had responded perfectly under scop.

O.N.I.’s building was two stories and an attic, wood-framed, beginning to rot already in the eternal Irish damp.

“We’ve got her on the third floor, Commander,” the lieutenant said. “You get there by a ladder.”

“In God’s name, why?” They walked past the Charge of Quarters, who snapped to a guilty and belated attention, and through the deserted offices of the first and second floors.

“Frankly, we’ve had a little trouble hanging on to her.”

“She runs away?”

“No, nothing like that—not yet, at least. Marine G-2 and Guard Intelligence School have both tried to snatch her from us. First with requisitions, then with muscle. We hope to keep her until the word gets to Iceland. Then, naturally, we’ll be out in the cold.”

The lieutenant laughed. Grinnel, puffing up the ladder, did not.

The door and lock on Lee Bennet’s quarters were impressive. The lieutenant rapped. “Are you awake, Lee? There’s an officer here who wants to talk to you.”

“Come in,” she said.

The lieutenant’s hands flew over the lock and the door sprang open. The girl was sitting in the dark.

“I’m Commander Grinnel, my dear,” he said. After eight hours in the joint, he could feel authentically fatherly to her. “If the time isn’t quite convenient—”

“It’s all right,” she said listlessly. “What do you want to know?”

“The man you identify as Orsino—it was quite a shock to me. Commander Van Dellen, who died a hero’s death only days ago accepted him as authentic and so, I must admit, did I. He passed both scop and polygraph.”

“I can’t help that,” she said. “He came right up to me and told me who he was. I recognized him, of course. He’s a polo player. I’ve seen him play on Long Island often enough, the damned snob. He’s not much in the Syndic, but he’s close to F. W. Taylor. Orsino’s an orphan. I don’t know whether Taylor’s actually adopted him or not. I think not.”

“No—possible—mistake?”

“No possible mistake.” She began to tremble. “My God, Commander Whoever-You-Are, do you think I could forget one of those damned sneering faces. Or what those people did to me? Get the lie detector again! Strap me into the lie detector! I insist on it! I won’t be called a liar! Do you hear me? Get the lie detector!”

“Please,” the Commander soothed. “I do believe you, my dear. Nobody could doubt your sincerity. Thank you for helping us, and good night.” He backed out of the room with the lieutenant. As the door closed he snapped at him: “Well, mister?”

The lieutenant shrugged. “The lie detector always bears her out. We’ve stopped using it on her. We’re convinced that she’s on our side. Almost deserving of citizenship.”

“Come, now,” the Commander said. “You know better than that.”

Behind the locked door, Lee Bennet had thrown herself on the bed, dry-eyed. She wished she could cry, but tears never came. Not since those three roistering drunkards had demonstrated their virility as males and their immunity as Syndics on her…she couldn’t cry any more.

Charles Orsino—another one of them. She hoped they caught him and killed him, slowly. She knew all this was true. Then why did she feel like a murderess? Why did she think incessantly of suicide? Why, why, why?

* * * *

Dawn came imperceptibly. First Charles could discern the outline of treetops against the sky and then a little of the terrain before him and at last two twisted shadows that slowly became sprawling half-naked bodies. One of them was a woman’s, mangled by fifty-caliber slugs. The other was the body of a bearded giant—the one with whom they had struggled in the dark.

Charles crawled out stiffly. The woman was—had been—a stringy, white haired crone. Some animal’s skull was tied to her pate with sinews as a head-dress, and she was tattooed with blue crescents. The jaygee joined him standing over her and said: “One of their witches. Part of the religion, if you can call it that.”

“A brand-new religion?” Charles asked dubiously. “Made up out of whole cloth?”

“No,” the jaygee said. “I understand it’s an old religion—pre-Christian. It kept going underground until the Troubles. Then it flared up again all over Europe. A filthy business. Animal sacrifices every new moon. Human sacrifices twice a year. What can you expect from people like that?”

Charles reminded himself that the jaygee’s fellow-citizens boiled recalcitrant slaves. “I’ll see what I can do about the jeep,” he said.

The jaygee sat down on the wet grass. “What the hell’s the use?” he mumbled wearily. “Even if you get it running again. Even if we get back to the base. They’ll be gunning for you. Maybe they’ll be gunning for me if they killed my father.” He tried to smile. “You got any aces in the hole, gangster?”

“Maybe,” Orsino said slowly. “What do you know about a woman named Lee—Bennet? Works with O.N.I.?”

“Smuggled over here by the D.A.R. A goldmine of information. She’s a little nuts, too. What have you got on her?”

“Does she swing any weight? Is she a citizen?”

“No weight. They’re just using her over at Intelligence to fill out the picture of the Syndic. And she couldn’t be a citizen. A woman has to marry a citizen to be naturalized. What have you got to do with her, for God’s sake? Did you know her on the other side? She’s death to the Syndic; she can’t do anything for you.”

Charles barely heard him. That had to be it. The trigger on Lee Falcaro’s conditioning had to be the oath of citizenship as it was for his. And it hadn’t been tripped because this pirate gang didn’t particularly want or need women as first-class, all-privileges citizens. A small part of the Government’s cultural complex—but one that could trap Lee Falcaro forever in the shell of her synthetic substitute for a personality. Lie-tests, yes. Scopolamine, yes. But for a woman, no subsequent oath.

“I ran into her in New Portsmouth. She knew me from the other side. She turned me in.…” He knelt at a puddle and drank thirstily; the water eased hunger cramps a little. “I’ll see what I can do with the jeep.”

He lifted the hood and stole a look at the jaygee. Van Dellen was dropping off to sleep on the wet grass. Charles pried a shear pin from the jeep’s winch, punched out the shear pin that had given way in the transmission and replaced it. It involved some hammering. Cracked block, he thought contemptuously. An officer and he couldn’t tell whether the block was cracked or not. If I ever get out of this we’ll sweep them from the face of the earth—or more likely just get rid of their tom-fool Sociocrats and Constitutionists. The rest are probably all right. Except maybe for those bastards of Guardsmen. A bad lot. Let’s hope they get killed in the fighting.

The small of his back tickled; he reached around to scratch it and felt cold metal.

“Turn slowly or you’ll be spitted like a pig,” a bass voice growled.

He turned slowly. The cold metal now at his chest, was the leaf-shaped blade of a spear. It was wielded by a red-haired, red-bearded, barrel-chested giant whose blue-green eyes were as cold as death.

“Tie that one,” somebody said. Another half-naked man jerked his wrists behind him and lashed them together with cords.

“Hobble his feet.” It was a woman’s voice. A length of cord or sinew was knotted to his ankles with a foot or two of play. He could walk but not run. The giant lowered his spear and stepped aside.

The first thing Charles saw was that Lieutenant (j.g.) Van Dellen of the North American Navy had escaped forever from his doubts and confusions. They had skewered him to the turf while he slept. Charles hoped he had not felt the blow.

The second thing he saw was a supple and coltish girl of perhaps 20 tenderly removing the animal skull from the head of the slain witch and knotting it to her own red-tressed head. Even to Orsino’s numbed understanding, it was clearly an act of the highest significance. It subtly changed the composition of the six-men group in the little glade. They had been a small mob until she put on the skull, but the moment she did they moved instinctively—one a step or two, the other merely turning a bit, perhaps—to orient on her. There was no doubt that she was in charge.

A witch, Orsino thought. “It kept going underground until the Troubles.” “A filthy business—human sacrifices twice a year.”

She approached him and, like the shifting of a kaleidoscope, the group fell into a new pattern of which she was still the focus. Charles thought he had never seen a face so humorlessly conscious of power. The petty ruler of a few barbarians, she carried herself as though she were empress of the universe. Nor did a large gray louse that crawled from her hairline across her forehead and back again affect her in the slightest. She wore a greasy animal hide as though it were royal purple. It added up to either insanity or a limitless pretension to religious authority. And her eyes were not mad.

“You,” she said coldly. “What about the jeep and the guns? Do they go?”

He laughed suddenly and idiotically at these words from the mouth of a stone-age goddess. A raised spear sobered him instantly. “Yes,” he said.

“Show my men how,” she said, and squatted regally on the turf.

“Please,” he said, “could I have something to eat first?”

She nodded indifferently and one of the men loped off into the brush.

* * * *

His hands untied and his face greasy with venison fat, Charles spent the daylight hours instructing six savages in the nomenclature, maintenance and operation of the jeep and the twin-fifty machine gun.

They absorbed it with utter lack of curiosity. They more or less learned to start and steer and stop the jeep. They more or less learned to load, point and fire the gun.

Through the lessons the girl sat absolutely motionless, first in shadow, then in noon and afternoon sun and then in shadow again. But she had been listening. She said at last: “You are telling them nothing new now. Is there no more?”

Charles noted that a spear was poised at his ribs. “A great deal more,” he said hastily. “It takes months.”

“They can work them now. What more is there to learn?”

“Well, what to do if something goes wrong.”

She said, as though speaking from vast experience: “When something goes wrong, you start over again. That is all you can do. When I make death-wine for the spear blades and the death-wine does not kill, it is because something went wrong—a word or a sign or picking a plant at the wrong time. The only thing to do is make the poison again. As you grow in experience you make fewer mistakes. That is how it will be with my men when they work the jeep and the guns.”

She nodded ever so slightly at one of the men and he took a firmer grip on his spear.

Death swooped low.

“No!” Charles exploded. “You don’t understand! This isn’t like anything you do at all!” He was sweating, even in the late afternoon chill. “You’ve got to have somebody who knows how to repair the jeep and the gun. If they’re busted they’re busted and no amount of starting over again will make them work!”

She nodded and said: “Tie his hands. We’ll take him with us.” Charles was torn between relief and wonder at the way she spoke. He realized that he had never, literally never, seen any person concede a point in quite that fashion. There had been no hesitation, there had been no reluctance in the voice, not a flicker of displeasure in the face. Simply, without forcing, she had said: “We’ll take him with us.” It was as though—as though she had re-made the immediate past, un-making her opposition to the idea, nullifying it. She was a person who was not at war with herself in any respect whatever, a person who knew exactly who she was and what she was—

The girl rose in a single flowing motion, startling after her day spent in immobility. She led the way, flanked by two of the spearmen. The other four followed in the jeep, at a crawl. Last of all came Charles, and nobody had to urge him. In his portable trap his hours would be numbered if he got separated from his captors.

Stick with them, he told himself, stumbling through the brush. Just stay alive and you can outsmart these savages. He fell, cursed, picked himself up, stumbled on after the growl of the jeep.

Dawn brought them to a collection of mud-and-wattle huts, a corral enclosing a few dozen head of wretched diseased cattle, a few adults and a few children. The girl was still clear-eyed and supple in her movements. Her spearmen yawned and stretched stiffly. Charles was a walking dead man, battered by countless trees and stumbles on the long trek. With red and swollen eyes he watched while half-naked brats swarmed over the jeep and grownups made obeisances to the girl—all but one.

This was an evil-faced harridan who said to her with cool insolence: “I see you claim the power of the goddess now, my dear. Has something happened to my sister?”

“The guns killed a certain person. I put on the skull. You know what I am; do not say ‘claim to be.’ I warn you once.”

“Liar!” shrieked the harridan. “You killed her and stole the skull! St. Patrick and St. Bridget shrivel your guts! Abaddon and Lucifer pierce your eyes!”

An arena formed about them as the girl said coldly: “I warn you the second time.”

The harridan made signs with her fingers, glaring at her; there was a moan from the watchers; some turned aside and a half-grown girl fainted dead away.

The girl with the skull on her pate said, as though speaking from a million years and a million miles away: “This is the third warning; there are no more. Now the worm is in your backbone gnawing. Now the maggots are at your eyes, devouring them. Your bowels turn to water; your heart pounds like the heart of a bird; soon it will not beat at all.” As the eerie, space-filling whisper drilled on the watchers broke and ran, holding their hands over their ears, white-faced, but the harridan stood as if rooted to the earth. Charles listened dully as the curse was droned, nor was he surprised when the harridan fell, blasted by it. Another sorceress, aided it is true by pentothal, had months ago done the same to him.

The people trickled back, muttering and abject.

Just stay alive and you can outsmart these savages, he repeated ironically to himself. It had dawned on him that these savages lived by an obscure and complicated code harder to master than the intricacies of the Syndic or the Government.

A kick roused him to his feet. One of the spearmen grunted: “I’m putting you with Kennedy.”

“All right,” Charles groaned. “You take these cords off me?”

“Later.” He prodded Charles to a minute, ugly block house of logs from which came smoke and an irregular metallic clanging. He cut the cords, rolled great boulders away from a crawl-hole and shoved him through.

The place was about six by nine feet, hemmed in by ten-inch logs. The light was very bad and the smell was too. A few loopholes let in some air. There was a latrine pit and an open stone hearth and a naked brown man with wild hair and a beard.

Rubbing his wrists, Charles asked uncertainly: “Are you Kennedy?”

The man looked up and croaked: “Are you from the Government?”

“Yes,” Charles said, hope rekindling. “Thank God they put us together. There’s a jeep. Also a twin-fifty. If we play this right the two of us can bust out—”

He stopped, disconcerted. Kennedy had turned to the hearth and the small, fierce fire glowing on it and began to pound a red-hot lump of metal. There were spear heads and arrow heads about in various stages of completion, as well as files and a hone.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Aren’t you interested?”

“Of course I’m interested,” Kennedy said. “But we’ve got to begin at the beginning. You’re too general.” His voice was mild, but reproving.

“You’re right,” Charles said. “I guess you’ve made a try or two yourself. But now that there are two of us, what do you suggest? Can you drive a jeep? Can you fire a twin-fifty?”

The man poked the lump of metal into the heart of the fire again, picked up a black-scaled spear head and began to file an edge into it. “Let’s get down to essentials,” he suggested apologetically. “What is escape? Getting from an undesirable place to a desirable place, opposing and neutralizing things or persons adverse to the change of state in the process. But I’m not being specific, am I? Let’s say, then, escape is getting us from a relatively undesirable place to a relatively desirable place, opposing and neutralizing the aborigines.” He put aside the file and reached for the hone, sleeking it along the bright metal ribbon of the new edge. He looked up with a pleased smile and asked: “How’s that for a plan?”

“Fine,” Charles muttered. Kennedy beamed proudly as he repeated: “Fine, fine,” and sank to the ground, born down by the almost physical weight of his depression. His hoped-for ally was stark mad.

XIII

Kennedy turned out to have been an armorer-artificer of the North American Navy, captured two years ago while deer-hunting too far from the logging-camp road to New Portsmouth. Fed on scraps of gristle, isolated from his kind, beaten when he failed to make his daily task of spear heads and arrow points, he had shyly retreated into beautifully interminable labyrinths of abstraction. Now and then, Charles Orsino got a word or two of sense from him before the rosy clouds closed in. When attempted conversation with the lunatic palled, Charles could watch the aborigines through chinks in the palisade. There were about fifty of them. There would have been more if they hadn’t been given to infanticide—for what reason, Charles could not guess.

He had been there a week when the boulders were rolled away one morning and he was roughly called out. He said to Kennedy before stooping to crawl through the hole: “Take it easy, friend. I’ll be back, I hope.”

Kennedy looked up with a puzzled smile: “That’s such a general statement, Charles. Exactly what are you implying—”

The witch girl was there, flanked by spearmen. She said abruptly: “I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?”

He gawked. The only thing that seemed to fit was: “That’s such a general statement,” but he didn’t say it.

“Answer,” one of the spearmen growled.

“I—I don’t understand. I have no brothers.”

“Your brothers in Portsmouth, on the sea. Whatever you call them, they are your brothers, all children of the mother called Government. Why are you untrue to them?”

He began to understand. “They aren’t my brothers. I’m not a child of the government. I’m a child of another mother far away, called Syndic.”

She looked puzzled—and almost human—for an instant. Then the visor dropped over her face again as she said: “That is true. Now you must teach a certain person the jeep and the guns. Teach her well. See that she gets her hands on the metal and into the grease.” To a spearman she said: “Bring Martha.”

The spearman brought Martha, who was trying not to cry. She was a half-naked child of ten!

The witch girl abruptly left them. Her guards took Martha and bewildered Charles to the edge of the village where the jeep and its mounted guns stood behind a silly little museum exhibit rope of vine. Feathers and bones were knotted into the vine. The spearmen treated it as though it were a high-tension transmission line.

“You break it,” one of them said to Charles. He did, and the spearmen sighed with relief. Martha stopped scowling and stared.

The spearman said to Charles: “Go ahead and teach her. The firing pins are out of the guns, and if you try to start the jeep you get a spear through you. Now teach her.” He and the rest squatted on the turf around the jeep. The little girl shied violently as he took her hand, and tried to run away. One of the spearmen slung her back into the circle. She brushed against the jeep and froze, white-faced.

“Martha,” Charles said patiently, “there’s nothing to be afraid of. The guns won’t go off and the jeep won’t move. I’ll teach you how to work them so you can kill everybody you don’t like with the guns and go faster than a deer in the jeep—”

He was talking into empty air as far as the child was concerned. She was muttering, staring at the arm that had brushed the jeep: “That did it, I guess. There goes the power. May the goddess blast her—no. The power’s out of me now. I felt it go.” She looked up at Charles, quite calmly, and said: “Go on. Show me all about it. Do a good job.”

“Martha, what are you talking about?”

“She was afraid of me, my sister, so she’s robbing me of the power. Don’t you know? I guess not. The goddess hates iron and machines. I had the power of the goddess in me, but it’s gone now; I felt it go. Now nobody’ll be afraid of me any more.” Her face contorted and she said: “Show me how you work the guns.”

* * * *

He taught her what he could while the circle of spearmen looked on and grinned, cracking raw jokes about the child as anybody anywhere, would about a tyrant deposed. She pretended to ignore them, grimly repeating names after him and imitating his practiced movements in loading drill. She was very bright, Charles realized. When he got a chance he muttered, “I’m sorry about this, Martha. It isn’t my idea.”

She whispered bleakly: “I know. I liked you. I was sorry when the other outsider took your dinner.” She began to sob uncontrollably. “I’ll never see anything again! Nobody’ll ever be afraid of me again!” She buried her face against Charles’ shoulder.

He smoothed her tangled hair mechanically and said to the watching, grinning circle: “Look, hasn’t this gone far enough? Haven’t you got what you wanted?”

The headman stretched and spat. “Guess so,” he said. “Come on, girl.” He yanked Martha from the seat and booted her toward the huts.

Charles scrambled down just ahead of a spear. He let himself be led back to the smithy block house and shoved through the crawl hole.

“I was thinking about what you said the other day,” Kennedy beamed, rasping a file over an arrowhead. “When I said that to change one molecule in the past you’d have to change every molecule in the past, and you said, ‘Maybe so.’ I’ve figured that what you were driving at was—”

“Kennedy,” Charles said, “please shut up just this once. I’ve got to think.”

“In what sense do you mean that, Charles? Do you mean that you’re a rational animal and therefore that your being rather than essenseis—”

“Shut up or I’ll pick up a rock and bust your head in with it!” Charles roared. He more than half meant it. Kennedy hunched down before his hearth looking offended and scared. Charles squatted with his head in his hands.

I have been listening to you.

Repeated drives of the Government to wipe out the aborigines. Drives that never succeeded.

I’ll never see anything again.

The way the witch girl had blasted her rival—but that was suggestion. But—

I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?

He’d said nothing like that to anybody, not to her or poor Kennedy.

He thought vaguely of psi force, a fragment in his memory. An old superstition, like the id-ego-superego triad of the sick-minded psychologists. Like vectors of the mind, exploded nonsense. But—

I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?

Charles smacked one fist against the sand floor in impotent rage. He was going as crazy as Kennedy. Did the witch girl—and Martha—have hereditary psi power? He mocked himself savagely: that’s such ageneral question!

Neurotic adolescent girls in kerosene-lit farmhouses, he thought vaguely. Things that go bump—and crash and blooie and whoo-oo-oo! in the night. Not in electric lit city apartments. Not around fleshed-up middle-aged men and women. You take a hyperthyroid virgin, isolate her from power machinery and electric fields, put on the pressures that make her feel alone and tense to the bursting point—and naturally enough, something bursts. A chamberpot sails from under the bed and shatters on the skull of stepfather-tyrant. The wide-gilt-framed portrait of thundergod-grandfather falls with a crash. Sure, the nail crystallized and broke—who crystallized it?

Neurotic adolescent girls speaking in tongues, reading face-down cards and closed books, screaming aloud when sister or mother dies in a railroad wreck fifty miles away, of cancer a hundred miles away, in a bombing overseas.

Sometimes they made saints of them. Sometimes they burned them. Burned them and then made saints of them.

A blood-raw hunk of venison came sailing through one of the loopholes and flopped on the sand.

I was sorry when the other outsider took your dinner.

Three days ago he’d dozed off while Kennedy broiled the meat over the hearth. When he woke, Kennedy had gobbled it all and was whimpering with apprehension. But he’d done nothing and said nothing; the man wasn’t responsible. He’d said nothing, and yet somehow the child knew about it.

His days were numbered; soon enough the jeep would be out of gas and the guns would be out of ammo or an unreplaceable part lost or broken. Then, according to the serene logic that ruled the witch girl, he’d be surplus.

But there was a key to it somehow.

He got up and slapped Kennedy’s hand away from the venison. “Naughty,” he said, and divided it equally with a broad spearblade.

“Naughty,” Kennedy said morosely. “The naught-class, the null-class. I’m the null-class. I plus the universe equal one, the universe-class. If you could transpose—but you can’t transpose.” Silently they toasted their venison over the fire.

* * * *

It was a moonless night with one great planet, Jupiter he supposed, reigning over the star-powdered sky. Kennedy slept muttering feebly in a corner. The hearthfire was out. It had to be out by dark. The spearmen took no chance of their trying to burn down the place. The village had long since gone to sleep, campfires doused, skin flaps pulled to across the door holes. From the corral one of the spavined, tick-ridden cows mooed uneasily and then fell silent.

* * * *

Charles then began the hardest job of his life. He tried to think, straight and uninterrupted, of Martha, the little girl. Some of the things that interrupted him were:

The remembered smell of fried onions; they didn’t have onions here;

Salt;

I wonder how the old 101st Precinct’s getting along;

That fellow who wanted to get married on a hundred dollars;

Lee Falcaro, damn her!

This, is damn foolishness; it can’t possibly work;

Poor old Kennedy;

I’ll starve before I eat another mouthful of that greasy deer-meat;

The Van Dellen kid, I wonder if I could have saved him;

Reiner’s right; we’ve got to clean up the Government and then try to civilize these people;

There must be something wrong with my head, I can’t seem to concentrate;

That terrific third-chukker play in the Finals, my picture all over town;

Would Uncle Frank laugh at this?

It was hopeless. He sat bolt upright, his eyes squeezed tensely together, trying to visualize the child and call her and it couldn’t be done. Skittering images of her zipped through his mind, only to be shoved aside. It was damn foolishness, anyway.…

He unkinked himself, stretched and lay down on the sand floor thinking bitterly: why try? You’ll be dead in a few days or a few weeks; kiss the world good-bye. Back in Syndic Territory, fat, sloppy, happy Syndic Territory, did they know how good they had it? He wished he could tell them to cling to their good life. But Uncle Frank said it didn’t do any good to cling; it was a matter of tension and relaxation. When you stiffen up a way of life and try to fossilize it so it’ll stay that way forever, then you find you’ve lost it.

Little Martha wouldn’t understand it. Magic, ritual, the power of the goddess, fear of iron, fear of the jeep’s vine enclosure—cursed, no doubt—what went on in such a mind? Could she throw things like a poltergeist-girl? They didn’t have ‘em any more; maybe it had something to do with electric fields or even iron. Or were they all phonies? An upset adolescent girl is a hell of a lot likelier to fake phenomena that produce them. Little Martha hadn’t been faking her despair, though. The witch-girl—her sister, wasn’t she?—didn’t fake her icy calm and power. Martha’d be better off without such stuff—

“Charles,” a whisper said.

He muttered stupidly: “My God. She heard me,” and crept to the palisade. Through a chink between the logs she was just visible in the starlight.

She whispered: “I thought I wasn’t going to see anything or hear anything ever again but I sat up and I heard you calling and you said you wanted to help me if I’d help you so I came as fast as I could without waking anybody up—you did call me, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did. Martha, do you want to get out of here? Go far away with me?”

“You bet I do. She’s going to take the power of the goddess out of me and marry me to Dinny, he stinks like a goat and he has a cockeye, and then she’ll kill all our babies. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” She sounded very grim and decided.

“Can you roll the boulders away from the hole there?” He was thinking vaguely of teleportation; each boulder was a two-man job.

She said no.

He snarled: “Then why did you bother to come here?”

“Don’t talk like that to me,” the child said sharply—and he remembered what she thought she was.

“Sorry,” he said.

“What I came about,” she said calmly, “was the ex-plosion. Can you make an ex-plosion like you said? Back there at the jeep?”

What in God’s name was she talking about?

“Back there,” she said with exaggerated patience, “you was thinking about putting all the cartridges together and blowing up the whole damn shebang. Remember?”

He did, vaguely. One of a hundred schemes that had drifted through his head.

“I’d sure like to see that ex-plosion,” she said. “The way she got things figured, I’d almost just as soon get exploded myself as not.”

“I might blow up the logs here and get out,” he said slowly. “I think you’d be a mighty handy person to have along, too. Can you get me about a hundred of the machine gun cartridges?”

“They’ll miss ‘em.”

“Sneak me a few at a time. I’ll empty them, put them together again and you sneak them back.”

She said, slow and troubled: “She set the power of the goddess to guard them.”

“Listen to me, Martha,” he said. “I mean listen. You’ll be doing it for me and they told me the power of the goddess doesn’t work on outsiders. Isn’t that right?”

There was a long pause, and she said at last with a sigh: “I sure wish I could see your eyes, Charles. I’ll try it, but I’m damned if I would if Dinny didn’t stink so bad.” She slipped away and Charles tried to follow her with his mind through the darkness, to the silly little rope of vine with the feathers and bones knotted in it—but he couldn’t. Too tense again.

Kennedy stirred and muttered complainingly as an icy small breeze cut through the chinks of the palisade, whispering.

His eyes, tuned to the starlight, picked up Martha bent almost double, creeping toward the smithy-prison. She wore a belt of fifty-caliber cartridges around her neck like a stole. Looked like about a dozen of them. He hastily scooped out a bowl of clean sand and whispered: “Any trouble?”

He couldn’t see the grin on her face, but knew it was there. “It was easy,” she bragged. “One bad minute and then I checked with you and it was okay.”

“Good kid. Pull the cartridges out of the links the way I showed you and pass them through.”

She did. It was a tight squeeze.

He fingered one of the cartridges. The bullet fitted nicely into the socket of an arrowhead. He jammed the bullet in and wrenched at the arrowhead with thumb and forefinger—all he could get onto it. The brass neck began to spread. He dumped the powder into his little basin in the sand and reseated the bullet.

Charles shifted hands on the second cartridge. On the third he realized that he could put the point of the bullet on a hearth-stone and press on the neck with both thumbs. It went faster then; in perhaps an hour he was passing the re-assembled cartridges back through the palisade.

“Time for another load?” he asked.

“Nope,” the girl said. “Tomorrow night.”

“Good kid.”

She giggled. “It’s going to be a hell of a big bang, ain’t it, Charles?”

XIV

“Leave the fire alone,” Charles said sharply to Kennedy. The little man was going to douse it for the night.

There was a flash of terrified sense: “They beat you. If the fire’s on after dark they beat you. Fire and dark are equal and opposite.” He began to smile. “Fire is the negative of dark. You just change the sign, in effect rotate it through 180 degrees. But to rotate it through 180 degrees you have to first rotate it through one degree. And to rotate it through one degree you first have to rotate it through half a degree.” He was beaming now, having forgotten all about the fire. Charles banked it with utmost care, heaping a couple of flat stones for a chimney that would preserve the life of one glowing coal invisibly.

He stretched out on the sand, one hand on the little heap beneath which five pounds of smokeless powder was buried. Kennedy continued to drone out his power-series happily.

Through the chinks in the palisade a man’s profile showed against the twilight. “Shut up,” he said.

Kennedy shivering, rolled over and muttered to himself. The spearman laughed and went on.

Charles hardly saw him. His whole mind was concentrated on the spark beneath the improvised chimney. He had left such a spark seven nights running. Only twice had it lived more than an hour. Tonight—tonight, it had to last. Tonight was the last night of the witch-girl’s monthly courses, and during them she lost—or thought she lost, which was the same thing—the power of the goddess.

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.”

“Who’s this child? And why did you get me up in the dead of night?”

He dipped deeply into Martha’s probings of the past week. “Citizenship’ll make the Guard Intelligence gang think twice before they try to grab you again. Naturally they’d try to block us if we administered the oath in public. Ready?”

“Dramatic,” she sneered. “Oh, I suppose so. Get it over with.”

“Do you, Lee Bennet, solemnly renounce all allegiances previously held by you and pledge your allegiance to the North American Government?”

“I do,” she said.

There was a choked little cry from Martha. “Hell’s fire,” she said. “Like breaking a leg!”

“What are you talking about, little girl?” Lee asked, coldly alert.

“It’s all right,” Charles said wearily. “Don’t you know my voice? I’m Orsino. You turned me in back there because they don’t give, citizenship to women and so your de-conditioning didn’t get triggered off. I managed to break for the woods. A bunch of natives got me. I busted loose with the help of Martha here. Among her other talents, the kid’s a mind reader. I remember the triggering shocked me out of a year’s growth; how do you feel?”

Lee was silent, but Martha answered in a voice half puzzled and half contemptuous: “She feels fine, but she’s crying.”

“Am not,” Lee Falcaro gulped.

Charles turned from her, embarrassed. In a voice that strove to be normal, he whispered to Martha: “What about the boat?”

“Still there,” she said.

Lee Falcaro said tremulously: “Wh-wh-what boat?”

“Martha’s staked out a reactor-driven patrol speedboat at a wharf. One guard aboard. She—watched it in operation and I have some small-boat time. I really think we can grab it. If we get a good head-start, they don’t have anything based here that’ll catch up with it. If we get a break on the weather, their planes won’t be able to pick us up.”

Lee Falcaro stood up, dashing tears from her eyes. “Then let’s go,” she said evenly.

“How’s the C.Q.—that man downstairs, Martha?”

“Still sleepin’. The way’s as clear now as it’ll ever be.”

They closed the door behind them and Charles worked the lock. The Charge of Quarters looked as though he couldn’t be roused by anything less than an earthquake as they passed—but Martha stumbled on one of the rotting steps after they were outside the building.

“Patrick and Bridget rot my clumsy feet off!” she whispered. “He’s awake.”

“Under the porch,” Charles said. They crawled into the dank space between porch floor and ground. Martha kept up a scarcely-audible volleyfire of maledictions aimed at herself.

When they stopped abruptly Charles knew it was bad.

Martha held up her hand for silence, and Charles imagined in the dark that he could see the strained and eerie look of her face. After a pause she whispered: “He’s using the—what do you call it? You talk and somebody hears you far away? A prowler he says to them. A wild man from the woods. The bitches bastard must have seen you in your handsome suit of skin and dirt, Charles. Oh, we’re for it! May my toe that stumbled grow the size of a boulder! May my cursed eyes that didn’t see the step fall out!”

They huddled down in the darkness and Charles took Lee Falcaro’s hand reassuringly. It was cold. A moment later his other hand was taken, with grim possessiveness, by the child.

Martha whispered: “The fat little man. The man who kills, Charles.”

He nodded. He thought he had recognized Grinnel from her picture.

“And ten men waking up. Charles, do you remember the way to the wharf?”

“Sure,” he said. “But we’re net going to get separated.”

“They’re mean, mad men,” she said. “Bloody-minded. And the little man is the worst.”

They heard the stomping feet and a babble of voices, and Commander Grinnel’s clear, fat-man’s tenor: “Keep it quiet, men. He may still be in the area.” The feet thundered over their heads on the porch.

In the barest of whispers Martha said: “The man that slept tells them there was only one, and he didn’t see what he was like except for the bare skin and the long hair. And the fat man says they’ll find him and—and—and says they’ll find him.” Her hand clutched Charles’ desperately and then dropped it as the feet thudded overhead again.

Grinnel was saying: “Half of you head up the street and half down. Check the alleys, check open window—hell, I don’t have to tell you. If we don’t find the bastard on the first run we’ll have to wake up the whole Guard Battalion and patrol the whole base with them all the goddam night, so keep your eyes open. Take off.”

“Remember the way to the wharf, Charles,” Martha said. “Good-bye lady. Take care of him. Take good care of him.” She wrenched her hand away and darted out from under the porch.

Lee muttered some agonized monosyllable. Charles started out after the child instinctively and then collapsed weakly back onto the dirt. They heard the rest.

“Hey, you—it’s him, by God! Get him! Get him!”

“Here he is, down here! Head him off!”

“Over there!” Grinnel yelled. “Head him off! Head him—good work!”

“For God’s sake. It’s a girl.”

“Those goddam yeomen and their goddam prowlers.”

Grinnel: “Where are you from, kid?”

“That’s no kid from the base, commander. Look at her!”

“I just was, sarge. Looks good to me, don’t it to you?”

Grinnel, tolerant, fatherly, amused: “Now, men, have your fun but keep it quiet.”

“Don’t be afraid, kid—” There was an animal howl from Martha’s throat that made Lee Falcaro shake hysterically and Charles grind his fingernails into his palms.

Grinnel: “Sergeant, you’d better tie your shirt around her head and take her into the O.N.I. building.”

“Why, commander! And let that lousy little yeoman in on it?”

Grinnel, amused, a good Joe, a man’s man: “That’s up to you, men. Just keep it quiet.”

“Why, commander, sometimes I like to make a little noise—”

“Ow!” a man yelled. There was a scuffle of feet and babbling voices. “Get her, you damn fool!” “She bit my hand—” “There she goes—” and a single emphatic shot.

Grinnel’s voice said into the silence that followed: “That’s that, men.”

“Did you have to shoot, Commander?” an aggrieved Guardsman said.

“Don’t blame me, fellow. Blame the guy that let her go.”

“God-dammit, she bit me—”

Somebody said as though he didn’t mean it: “We ought to take her someplace.”

“The hell with that. Let ‘em get her in the morning.”

“Them as wants her.” A cackle of harsh laughter.

Grinnel, tolerantly: “Back to the guardhouse, men. And keep it quiet.”

They scuffled off and there was silence again for long minutes. Charles said at last: “We’ll go down to the wharf.” They crawled out and looked for a moment from the shelter of the building at the bundle lying in the road.

Lee muttered: “Grinnel.”

“Shut up,” Charles said. He led her down deserted alleys and around empty corners, strictly according to plan.

The speedboat was a twenty-foot craft at Wharf Eighteen, bobbing on the water safely removed from other moored boats and ships. Lee Falcaro let out a small, smothered shriek when she saw a uniformed sailor sitting in the cockpit, apparently staring directly at them.

“It’s all right,” Charles said. “He’s a drunk. He’s always out cold by this time of night.” Smoothly Charles found the rope locker, cut lengths with the sailor’s own knife and bound and gagged him. The man’s eyes opened, weary, glazed and red while this was going on and closed again. “Help me lug him ashore,” Charles said. Lee Falcaro took the sailor’s legs and they eased him onto the wharf.

They went back into the cockpit. “This is deep water,” Charles said, “so you’ll have no trouble with pilotage. You can read a compass and charts. There’s an automatic dead reckoner. My advice is just to pull the moderator rods out quarter-speed, point the thing west, pull the rods out as far as they’ll go—and relax. Either they’ll overtake you or they won’t.”

She was beginning to get the drift. She said nervously: “You’re talking as though you’re not coming along.”

“I’m not,” he said, playing the lock of the arms rack. The bar fell aside and he pulled a .45 pistol from its clamp. He thought back and remembered where the boat’s diminutive magazine was located, broke the feeble lock and found a box of short, fat, heavy little cartridges. He began to snap them into the pistol’s magazine.

“What do you think you’re up to?” Lee Falcaro demanded.

“Appointment with Commander Grinnel,” he said. He slid the heavy magazine into the pistol’s grip and worked the slide to jack a cartridge into the chamber.

“Shall I cast off for you?” he asked.

“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “You sound like a revival of a Mickey Spillane comedy. You can’t bring her back to life and you’ve got a job to do for the Syndic.”

“You do it,” he said, and snapped another of the blunt, fat, little cartridges into the magazine.

She cast off, reached for the moderator-rod control and pulled it hard.

“Gee,” he gasped, “you’ll sink us!” and dashed for the controls. You had seconds before the worm-gears turned, the cadmium rods withdrew from their slots, the reactor seethed and sent boiling metal cycling through the turbine—

He slammed down manual levers that threw off the fore and aft mooring lines, spun the wheel, bracing himself, and saw Lee Falcaro go down to the deck in a tangle, the .45 flying from her hand and skidding across the knurled plastic planking. But by then the turbine was screaming an alarm to the whole base and they were cutting white water through the buoy-marked gap in the harbor net.

Lee Falcaro got to her feet. “I’m not proud of myself,” she said to him. “But she told me to take care of you.”

He said grimly: “We could have gone straight to the wharf without that little layover to pick you up. Take the wheel.”

“Charles, I—”

He snarled at her.

“Take the wheel.”

She did, and he went aft to stare through the darkness. The harbor lights were twinkling pin-points; then his eyes misted so he could not see them at all. He didn’t give a damn if a dozen corvettes were already slicing the bay in pursuit. He had failed.

XVI

It was a dank fog-shrouded morning. Sometime during the night the quill of the dead reckoner had traced its fine red line over the 30th meridian. Roughly half-way, Charles Orsino thought, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. But the line was straight as a string for the last four hours of their run. The damn girl must have fallen asleep on watch. He glared at her in the bow and broke open a ration. Blandly oblivious to the glare, she said: “Good morning.”

Charles swallowed a mouthful of chocolate, half-chewed, and choked on it. He reached hastily for water and found the tall plastic column of the ion-exchange apparatus empty. “Damn it,” he snarled, “why didn’t you refill this thing when you emptied it? And why didn’t you zig-zag overnight? You’re utterly irresponsible.” He hurled the bucket overside, hauled it up and slopped seawater into the apparatus. Now there’d be a good twenty minutes before a man-sized drink accumulated.

“Just a minute,” she told him steadily. “Let’s straighten this out. I haven’t had any water on the night watch so I didn’t have any occasion to refill the tube. You must have taken the last of the water with your dinner. And as for the zig-zag, you said we should run a straightaway now and then to mix it up. I decided that last night was as good a time as any.”

He took a minute drink from the reservoir, stalling. There was something—yes; he had meant to refill the apparatus after his dinner ration. And he had told her to give it a few hours of straightaway some night.…

He said formally: “You’re quite right on both counts. I apologize.” He bit into a ration.

“That’s not good enough,” she said. “I’m not going to have you tell me you’re sorry and then go scowling and sulking about the boat. In fact I don’t like your behavior at all.”

He said, enormously angry: “Oh, you don’t do you?” and hated her, the world and himself for the stupid inadequacy of the comeback.

“No. I don’t. I’m seriously worried. I’m afraid the conditioning you got didn’t fall away completely when they swore you in. You’ve been acting irrationally and inconsistently.”

“What about you?” he snapped. “You got conditioned too.”

“That’s right,” she said. “That’s another reason why you’re worrying me. I find impulses in myself that have no business there. I simply seem to do a better job of controlling them than you’re doing. For instance: we’ve been quarreling and at cross-purposes ever since you and Martha picked me up. That couldn’t be unless I were contributing to the friction.”

The wheel was fixed; she took a step or two aft and said professorially: “I’ve never had trouble getting along with people. I’ve had differences, of course, and at times I’ve allowed myself displays of temper when it was necessary to assert myself. But I find that you upset me; that for some reason or other your opinion on a matter is important to me, that if it differs with mine there should be a reconciliation.”

He put down the ration and said wonderingly: “Do you know, that’s the way I feel about you? And you think it’s the conditioning or—or something?” He took a couple of steps forward, hesitantly.

“Yes,” she said in a rather tremulous voice. “The conditioning or something. For instance, you’re inhibited. You haven’t made an indecent proposition to me, not even as a matter of courtesy. Not that I care, of course, but—” In stepping aft, she tripped over the water bucket and went down to the deck with a faint scream.

He said: “Here, let me help you.” He picked her up and didn’t let go.

“Thanks,” she said faintly. “The conditioning technique can’t be called faulty, but it has inherent limitations.…” She trailed off and he kissed her. She kissed back and said more faintly still: “Or it might be the drugs we used.… Oh, Charles, what took you so long?”

He said, brooding: “You’re way out of my class, you know. I’m just a bagman for the New York police. I wouldn’t even be that if it weren’t for Uncle Frank, and you’re a Falcaro. It’s just barely thinkable that I could make a pass at you. I guess that held me off and I didn’t want to admit it so I got mad at you instead. Hell, I could have swum back to the base and made a damned fool of myself trying to find Grinnel, but down inside I knew better. The kid’s gone.”

“We’ll make a psychologist of you yet,” she said.

“Psychologist? Why? You’re joking.”

“No. It’s not a joke. You’ll like psychology, darling. You can’t go on playing polo forever, you know.”

Darling! What was he getting into? Old man Gilby was four-goal at sixty, wasn’t he? Good God, was he hooked into marriage at twenty-three? Was she married already? Did she know or care whether he was? Had she been promiscuous? Would she continue to be? He’d never know; that was the one thing you never asked; your only comfort, if you needed comfort, was that she could never dream of asking you. What went on here? Let me out!

It went through his mind in a single panicky flash and then he said: “The hell with it,” and kissed her again.

She wanted to know: “The hell with what, darling?”

“Everything. Tell me about psychology. I can’t go on playing polo forever.”

It was an hour before she got around to telling him about psychology: “The neglect has been criminal—and inexplicable. For about a century it’s been assumed that psychology is a dead fallacy. Why?”

“All right,” he said amiably, playing with a lock of her hair. “Why?”

“Lieberman,” she said. “Lieberman of Johns-Hopkins. He was one of the old-line topological psychology men—don’t let the lingo throw you, Charles; it’s just the name of a system. He wrote an attack on the mengenlehre psychology school—point-sets of emotions, class-inclusions of reactions and so on. He blasted them to bits by proving that their constructs didn’t correspond to the emotions and reactions of random-sampled populations. And then came the pay-off: he tried the same acid test on his own school’s constructs and found out that they didn’t correspond either. It didn’t frighten him; he was a scientist. He published, and then the jig was up. Everybody, from full professors to undergraduate students went down the roster of the schools of psychology and wrecked them so comprehensively that the field was as dead as palmistry in twenty years. The miracle is that it hadn’t happened before. The flaws were so glaring! Textbooks of the older kind solemnly described syndromes, psychoses, neuroses that simply couldn’t be found in the real world! And that’s the way it was all the way down the line.”

“So where does that leave us?” Charles demanded. “Is it or isn’t it a science?”

“It is,” she said simply. “Lieberman and his followers went too far. It became a kind of hysteria. The experimenters must have been too eager. They misread results, they misinterpreted statistics, they misunderstood the claims of a school and knocked down not its true claims but straw-man claims they had set up themselves.”

“But—psychology!” Charles protested, obscurely embarrassed at the thought that man’s mind was subject to scientific study—not because he knew the first thing about it, but because everybody knew psychology was phony.

She shrugged. “I can’t help it. We were doing physiology of the sensory organs, trying to settle the oldie about focusing the eye, and I got to grubbing around the pre-Lieberman texts looking for light in the darkness. Some of it sounded so—not sensible, but positive that I ran off one of Lieberman’s population checks. And the old boy had been dead wrong. Mengenlehre constructs correspond quite nicely to the actual way people’s minds work. I kept checking and the schools that were destroyed as hopelessly fallacious a century ago checked out, some closely and some not so closely, as good descriptions of the way the mind works. Some have predictive value. I used mengenlehre psychology algorithms to compute the conditioning on you and me, including the trigger release. It worked. You see, Charles? We’re on the rim of something tremendous!”

“When did this Lieberman flourish?”

“I don’t have the exact dates in my head. The breakup of the schools corresponded roughly with the lifetime of John G. Falcaro.”

That pin-pointed it rather well. John G. succeeded Rafael, who succeeded Amadeo Falcaro, first leader of the Syndic in revolt. Under John G., the hard-won freedom was enjoyed, the bulging store-houses were joyously emptied, craft union rules went joyously out the window and buildersworked, the dollar went to an all-time high and there was an all-time number of dollars in circulation. It had been an exhuberant time still fondly remembered; just the time for over-enthusiastic rebels against a fusty scholasticism to joyously smash old ways of thought without too much exercise of the conscience. It all checked out.

She started and he got to his feet. A hardly-noticed discomfort was becoming acute; the speedboat was pitching and rolling quite seriously, for the first time since their escape. “Dirty weather coming up,” he said. “We’ve been too damned lucky so far.” He thought, but didn’t remark, that there was much to worry about in the fact that there seemed to have been no pursuit. The meager resources of the North American Navy wouldn’t be spent on chasing a single minor craft—not if the weather could be counted on to finish her off.

“I thought we were unsinkable?”

“In a way. Seal the boat and she’s unsinkable the way a corked bottle is. But the boat’s made up of a lot of bits and pieces that go together just so. Pound her for a few hours with waves and the bits and pieces give way. She doesn’t sink, but she doesn’t steam or steer either. I wish the Syndic had a fleet on the Atlantic.”

“Sorry,” she said. “The nearest fleet I know of is Mob ore boats on the great lakes and they aren’t likely to pick us up.”

The sea-search radar pinged and they flew to the screen. “Something at 273 degrees, about eight miles,” he said. “It can’t be pursuit. They couldn’t have any reason at all to circle around us and come at us from ahead.” He strained his eyes into the west and thought he could see a black speck on the gray.

Lee Falcaro tried a pair of binoculars and complained: “These things won’t work.”

“Not on a rolling, pitching platform they won’t—not with an optical lever eight miles long. I don’t suppose this boat would have a gyro-stabilized signal glass.” He spun the wheel to 180; they staggered and clung as the bow whipped about, searched and steadied on the new course. The mounting waves slammed them broadside-to and the rolling increased. They hardly noticed; their eyes were on the radarscope. Fogged as it was with sea return, they nevertheless could be sure after several minutes that the object had changed course to 135. Charles made a flying guess at her speed, read their own speed off and scribbled for a moment.

He said nothing, but spun the wheel to 225 and went back to the radarscope. The object changed course to 145. Charles scribbled again and said at last, flatly: “They’re running collision courses on us. Automatically computed, I suppose, from a radar. We’re through.”

He spun the wheel to 180 again, and studied the crawling green spark on the radarscope. “This way we give ‘em the longest run for their money and can pray for a miracle. The only way we can use our speed to outrun them is to turn around and head back into Government Territory—which isn’t what we want. Relax, Lee. Maybe if the weather thickens they’ll lose us—no; not with radar.”

They sat together on a bunk, wordlessly, for hours while the spray dashed higher and the boat shivered to hammering waves. Briefly they saw the pursuer, three miles off, low, black and ugly, before fog closed in again.

At nightfall there was the close, triumphant roar of a big reaction turbine and a light stabbed through the fog, flooding the boat with blue-white radiance. A cliff-like black hull loomed alongside as a bull-horn roared at them: “Cut your engines and come about into the wind.”

Lee Falcaro read white-painted letters on the black hull: “Hon. James J. Regan, Chicago.” She turned to Charles and said wonderingly: “It’s an ore boat. From the Mob great lakes fleet.”

XVII

“Here?” Charles demanded. “Here?”

“No possible mistake,” she said, stunned. “When you’re a Falcaro you travel. I’ve seen ‘em in Duluth, I’ve seen ‘em in Quebec, I’ve seen ‘em in Buffalo.”

The bull-horn voice roared again, dead in the shroud of fog; “Come into the wind and cut your engines or we’ll put a shell into you.”

Charles turned the wheel and wound in the moderator rod; the boat pitched like a splinter on the waves. There was a muffled double explosion and two grapnels crunched into the plastic hull, bow and stern. As the boat steadied, sharing the inertia of the ore ship, a dark figure leaped from the blue-white eye of the searchlight to their deck. And another. And another.

“Hello, Jim,” Lee Falcaro said almost inaudibly. “Haven’t met since Las Vegas, have we?”

The first boarder studied her cooly. He was built for football or any other form of mayhem. He ignored Charles completely. “Lee Falcaro as advised. Do you still think twenty reds means a black is bound to come up? You always were a fool, Lee. And now you’re in real trouble.”

“What’s going on, mister?” Charles snapped. “We’re Syndics and I presume you’re Mobsters. Don’t you recognize the treaty?”

The boarder turned to Charles inquiringly. “Some confusion,” he said. “Max Wyman? Charles Orsino? Or just some wild man from outback?”

“Orsino,” Charles said formally. “Second cousin of Edward Falcaro, under the guardianship of Francis W. Taylor.”

The boarder bowed slightly. “James Regan IV,” he said. “No need to list my connections. It would take too long and I feel no need to justify myself to a small-time dago chisler. Watch him gentlemen!”

Charles found his arms pinned by Regan’s two companions. There was a gun muzzle in his ribs.

Regan shouted to the ship and a ladder was let down. Lee Falcaro and Charles climbed it with guns at their backs. He said to her: “Who is that lunatic?” It did not even occur to him that the young man was who he claimed to be—the son of the Mob Territory opposite number of Edward Falcaro.

“He’s Regan,” she said. “And I don’t know who’s the lunatic, him or me. Charles, I’m sorry, terribly sorry, I got you into this.”

He managed to smile. “I volunteered,” he said.

“Enough talk,” Regan said, following them onto the deck. Dull-eyed sailors watched them incuriously, and there were a couple of anvil-jawed men with a stance and swagger Charles had come to know. Guardsmen—he would have staked his life on it. Guardsmen of the North American Government Navy—aboard a Mob Territory ship and acting as if they were passengers or high-rated crewmen.

Regan smirked: “I’m on the horns of a dilemma. There are no accomodations that are quite right for you. There are storage compartments which are worse than you deserve and there are passenger quarters which are too good for you. I’m afraid it will have to be one of the compartments. Your consolation will be that it’s only a short run to Chicago.”

Chicago—headquarters for Mob Territory. The ore ship had been on a return trip to Chicago when alerted somehow by the Navy to intercept the fugitives. Why?

“Down there,” one of the men gestured briskly with a gun. They climbed down a ladder into a dark, oily cavern fitfully lit by a flash in Regan’s hand.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” Regan told them. “If you get a headache, don’t worry. We were carrying some avgas on the outward run.” The flash winked out and a door clanged on them.

“I can’t believe it,” Charles said. “That’s a top Mob man? Couldn’t you be mistaken?” He groped in the dark and found her. The place did reek of gasoline.

She clung to him and said: “Hold me, Charles.… Yes that’s Jimmy Regan.

“That’s what will become top man in the Mob. Jimmy’s a charmer at a Las Vegas Hotel. Jimmy’s a gourmet when he orders at the Pump Room and he’s trying to overawe you. Jimmy plays polo too, but he’s crippled three of his own team-mates because he’s not very good at it. I kept telling myself whenever I ran into him that he was just an accident, the Mob could survive him. But his father acts—funny. There’s something with them, there’s some—

“They roll out the carpet when you show up but the people around them are afraid of them. There’s a story I never believed—but I believe it now. What would happen if my uncle pulled out a pistol and began screaming and shot a waiter: Jimmy’s father did it, they tell me. And nothing happened except that the waiter was dragged away and everybody said it was a good thing Mr. Regan saw him reach for his gun and shot him first. Only the waiter didn’t have any gun.

“I saw Jimmy last three years ago. I haven’t been in Mob Territory since. I didn’t like it there. Now I know why. Give Mob Territory enough time and it’ll be like New Portsmouth. Something went wrong with them. We have the Treaty of Las Vegas and a hundred years of peace and there aren’t many people going back and forth between Syndic and Mob except for a few high-ups like me who have to circulate. Manners. So you pay duty calls and shut your eyes to what they’re really like.

“This is what they’re like. This dark, damp stinking compartment. And my uncle—and all the Falcaros—and you—and I—we aren’t like them. Are we? Are we?” Her fingers bit into his arms. She was shaking.

“Easy,” he soothed her. “Easy, easy. We’re all right. We’ll be all right. I think I’ve got it figured out. This must be some private gun-running Jimmy’s gone in for. Loaded an ore boat with avgas and ammo and ran it up the Seaway. If anybody in Syndic Territory gave a damn they thought it was a load of ore for New Orleans via the Atlantic and the Gulf. But Jimmy ran his load to Ireland or Iceland, H.Q. A little private flier of his. He wouldn’t dare harm us. There’s the Treaty and you’re a Falcaro.”

“Treaty,” she said. “I tell you they’re all in it. Now that I’ve seen the Government in action I understand what I saw in Mob Territory. They’ve gone rotten, that’s all. They’ve gone rotten. The way he treated you, because he thought you didn’t have his rank! Sometimes my uncle’s high-handed, sometimes he tells a person off, sometimes he lets him know he’s top man in the Syndic and doesn’t propose to let anybody teach him how to suck eggs. But the spirit’s different. In the Syndic it’s parent to child. In the Mob it’s master to slave. Not based on age, not based on achievement, but based on the accident of birth. You tell me ‘You’re a Falcaro’ and that packs weight. Why? Not because I was born a Falcaro but because they let me stay a Falcaro. If I hadn’t been brainy and quick, they’d have adopted me out before I was ten. They don’t do that in Mob Territory. Whatever chance sends a Regan is a Regan then and forever. Even if it’s a paranoid constitutional inferior like Jimmy’s father. Even if it’s a giggling pervert like Jimmy.

“God, Charles, I’m scared.

“At last I know these people and I’m scared. You’d have to see Chicago to know why. The lakefront palaces, finer than anything in New York. Regan Memorial Plaza, finer than Scratch Sheet Square—great gilded marble figures, a hundred running yards of heroic frieze. But the hovels you see only by chance! Gray brick towers dating from the Third Fire! The children with faces like weasels, the men with faces like hogs, the women with figures like beer barrels and all of them glaring at you when you drive past as if they could cut your throat with joy. I never understood the look in their eyes until now, and you’ll never begin to understand what I’m talking about until you see their eyes.…”

Charles revolted against the idea. It was too gross to go down. It didn’t square with his acquired picture of life in North America and therefore Lee Falcaro must be somehow mistaken or hysterical. “There,” he murmured, stroking her hair. “We’ll be all right. We’ll be all right.” He tried to soothe her.

She twisted out of his arms and raged: “I won’t be humored. They’re mad, I tell you. Dick Reiner was right. We’ve got to wipe out the Government. But Frank Taylor was right too. We’ve got to blast the Mob before they blast us. They’ve died and decayed into something too horrible to bear. If we let them stay on the continent, with us their stink will infect us and poison us to death. We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to do something.”

“What?”

It stopped her cold. After a minute she uttered a shaky laugh. “The fat, sloppy, happy Syndic,” she said, “sitting around while the wolves overseas and the maniacs across the Mississippi are waiting to jump. Yes—do what?”

Charles Orsino was not good at arguments or indeed at any abstract thinking. He knew it. He knew the virtues that had commended him to F. W. Taylor were his energy and an off-hand talent for getting along with people. But something rang terribly false in Lee’s words.

“That kind of thinking doesn’t get you anywhere, Lee,” he said slowly. “I didn’t absorb much from Uncle Frank, but I did absorb this: you run into trouble if you make up stories about the world and then act as if they’re true. The Syndic isn’t somebody sitting around. The Government isn’t wolves. The Mobsters aren’t maniacs. And they aren’t waiting to jump on the Syndic. The Syndic isn’t anything that’s jumpable. It’s some people and their morale and credit.”

“Faith is a beautiful thing,” Lee Falcaro said bitterly. “Where’d you get yours?”

“From the people I knew and worked with. Numbers-runners, bookies, sluts. Decent citizens.”

“And what about the scared and unhappy ones in Riveredge? That sow of a woman in the D.A.R. who smuggled me aboard a coast raider? The neurotics and psychotics I found more and more of when I invalidated the Lieberman findings? Charles, the North American Government didn’t scare me especially. But the thought that they’re lined up with a continental power does. It scares me damnably because it’ll be three against one. Against the Syndic, the Mob, the Government—and our own unbalanced citizens.”

Uncle Frank never let that word “citizens” pass without a tirade. “We are not a government!” he always yelled. “We are not a government! We must not think like a government! We must not think in terms of duties and receipts and disbursements. We must think in terms of the old loyalties that bound the Syndic together!” Uncle Frank was sedentary, but he had roused himself once to the point of wrecking a bright young man’s newly installed bookkeeping system for the Medical Center. He had used a cane, most enthusiastically, and then bellowed: “The next wise guy who tries to sneak punch-cards into this joint will get them down his throat! What the hell do we need punch-cards for? Either there’s room enough and doctors enough for the patients or there isn’t. If there is, we take care of them. If there isn’t, we put ‘em in an ambulance and take them someplace else. And if I hear one goddammed word about ‘efficiency’—” he glared the rest and strode out, puffing and leaning on Charles’ arm. “Efficiency,” he growled in the corridor. “Every so often a wise guy comes to me whimpering that people are getting away with murder, collections are ten per cent below what they ought to be, the Falcaro Fund’s being milked because fifteen per cent of the dough goes to people who aren’t in need at all, eight per cent of the people getting old-age pensions aren’t really past sixty. Get efficient, these people tell me. Save money by triple-checking collections. Save money by tightening up the Fund rules. Save money by a nice big vital-statistics system so we can check on pensioners. Yeah! Have people who might be working check on collections instead, and make enemies to boot whenever we catch somebody short. Make the Fund a grudging Scrooge instead of an open-handed sugar-daddy—and let people worry about their chances of making the Fund instead of knowing it’ll take care of them if they’re caught short. Set up a vital statistics system from birth to death, with numbers and finger-prints and house registration and maybe the gas-chamber if you forget to report a change of address. You know what’s wrong with the wise guys, Charles? Constipation. And they want to constipate the universe.” Charles remembered his uncle restored to chuckling good humor by the time he had finished embroidering his spur-of-the-moment theory with elaborate scatological details.

“The Syndic will stand,” he said to Lee Falcaro, thinking of his uncle who knew what he was doing, thinking of Edward Falcaro who did the right thing without knowing why, thinking of his good friends in the 101st Precinct, the roaring happy crowds in Scratch Sheet Square, the good-hearted men of Riveredge Breakdown Station 26 who had borne with his sullenness and intolerance simply because that was the way things were and that was the way you acted. “I don’t know what the Mob’s up to, and I got a shock from the Government, and I don’t deny that we have a few miserable people who can’t seem to be helped. But you’ve seen too much of the Mob and Government and our abnormals. Maybe you don’t know as much as you should about our ordinary people. Anyway, all we can do is wait.”

“Yes,” she said. “All we can do is wait. Until Chicago we have each other.”

XVIII

They were too sick with gasoline fumes to count the passing hours or days. Food was brought to them from time to time, but it tasted like avgas. They could not think for the sick headaches that pounded incessantly behind their eyes. When Lee developed vomiting spasms that would not stop, Charles Orsino pounded on the bulkhead with his fists and yelled, his voice thunderous in the metal compartment, for an hour.

Somebody came at last—Regan. The light stabbed Charles’ eyes when he opened the door. “Trouble?” Regan asked, smirking.

“Miss Falcaro may be dying,” Charles said. His own throat felt as though it had been gone over with a cobbler’s rasp. “I don’t have to tell you your life won’t be worth a dime if she dies and it gets back to Syndic Territory. She’s got to be moved and she’s got to have medical attention.”

“Death threat from the dago?” Regan was amused. “I have it on your own testimony that the Syndic is merely morale and people and credit—not a formidable organization. Yes, there was a mike in here. One reason for your discomfort. You’ll be gratified to learn that I thought most of your conversation decidedly dull. However, the lady will be of no use to us dead and we’re now in the Seaway entering Lake Michigan. I suppose it can’t do any harm to move you two. Pick her up, will you? I’ll let you lead the way—and I’ll remind you that I may not, as the lady said, be a four-goal polo player but I am a high expert with the handgun. Get moving.”

Charles did not think he could pick his own feet up, but the thought of pleading weakness to Regan was unbearable. He could try. Staggering, he got Lee Falcaro over his shoulder and through the door. Regan courteously stood aside and murmured: “Straight ahead and up the ramp. I’m giving you my own cabin. We’ll be docking soon enough; I’ll make out.”

Charles dropped her onto a sybaritic bed in a small but lavishly-appointed cabin. Regan whistled up a deckhand and a ship’s officer of some sort, who arrived with a medicine chest. “Do what you can for her, mister,” he told the officer. And to the deckhand: “Just watch them. They aren’t to touch anything. If they give you trouble, you’re free to punch them around a bit.” He left, whistling.

The officer fussed unhappily over the medicine chest and stalled by sponging off Lee Falcaro’s face and throat. The deckhand watched impassively. He was a six-footer, and he hadn’t spent days inhaling casing-head fumes. The trip-hammer pounding behind Charles’s eyes seemed to be worsening with the fresher air. He collapsed into a seat and croaked, with shut eyes: “While you’re trying to figure out the vomiting, can I have a handful of aspirins?”

“Eh? Nothing was said about you. You were in Number Three with her? I suppose it’ll be all right. Here.” He poured a dozen tablets into Charles’ hand. “Get him some water, you.” The deckhand brought a glass of water from the adjoining lavatory and Charles washed down some of the tablets. The officer was reading a booklet, worry written on his face. “Do you know any medicine?” he finally asked.

The hard-outlined, kidney-shaped ache was beginning to diffuse through Charles’ head, more general now and less excruciating. He felt deliciously sleepy, but roused himself to answer: “Some athletic trainer stuff. I don’t know—morphine? Curare?”

The officer ruffled through the booklet. “Nothing about vomiting,” he said. “But it says curare for muscular cramp and I guess that’s what’s going on. A lipoid suspension to release it slowly into the bloodstream and give the irritation time to subside. Anyway, I can’t kill her if I watch the dose.…”

Charles, through half-opened eyes, saw Lee Falcaro’s arm reach behind the officer’s back to his medicine chest. The deckhand’s eyes were turning to the bed—Charles heaved himself to his feet, skyrockets going off again through his head, and started for the lavatory. The deckhand grabbed his arm. “Rest, mister! Where do you think you’re going?”

“Another glass of water—”

“I’ll get it. You heard my orders.”

Charles subsided. When he dared to look again, Lee’s arm lay alongside her body and the officer was triple-checking dosages in his booklet against a pressurized hypodermic spray. The officer sighed and addressed Lee: “You won’t even feel this. Relax.” He read his setting on the spray again, checked it again against the booklet. He touched the syringe to the skin of Lee’s arm and thumbed open the valve. It hissed for a moment and Charles knew submicroscopic particles of the medication had been blasted under Lee’s skin too fast for nerves to register the shock.

His glass of water came and he gulped it greedily. The officer packed the pressurized syringe away, folded the chest and said to both of them, rather vaguely: “That should do it. If, uh, if anything happens—or if it doesn’t work—call me and I’ll try something else. Morphine, maybe.”

He left and Charles slumped in the chair, the pain ebbing and sleep beginning to flow over him. Not yet, he told himself. She hooked something from the chest. He said to the deckhand: “Can I clean the lady and myself up?”

“Go ahead, mister. You can use it. Just don’t try anything.”

The man lounged in the door-frame of the lavatory alternately studying Charles at the wash-basin and Lee on the bed. Charles took off a heavy layer of oily grease from himself and then took washing tissues to the bed. Lee Falcaro’s spasms were tapering off. As he washed her, she managed a smile and an unmistakable wink.

“You folks married?” the deckhand asked.

“No,” Charles said. Weakly she held up her right arm for the washing tissue. As he scrubbed the hand, he felt a small cylinder smoothly transferred from her palm to his. He slid it into a pocket and finished the job.

The officer popped in again with a carton of milk. “Any better, miss?” he asked.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Good. Try to drink this.” Immensely set up by his success in treatment, he hovered over her for a quarter of an hour getting the milk down a sip at a time. It stayed down. He left trailing a favorable prognosis. Meanwhile, Charles had covertly examined Lee’s booty: a pressurized syringe labeled morphine sulfate sol. It was full and ready. He cracked off the protective cap and waited his chance.

It came when Lee grimaced at him and called the deckhand in a feeble murmur. She continued to murmur so indistinctly that he bent over trying to catch the words. Charles leaned forward and emptied the syringe at one inch range into the taut seat of the deckhand’s pants. He scratched absently and said to Lee: “You’ll have to talk up, lady.” Then he giggled, looked bewildered and collapsed on the floor, staring, coked to the eyebrows.

Lee painfully sat up on the bed. “Porthole,” she said.

Charles went to it and struggled with the locking lugs. It opened—and an alarm bell began to clang through the ship. Now he saw the hair-fine, broken wire. An alarm trip-wire.

Feet thundered outside and the glutinous voice of Jimmy Regan was heard: “Wait, you damn fools! You in there—is everything all right? Did they try to pull something?”

Charles kept silent and shook his head at the girl. He picked up a chair and stood by the door. The glutinous voice again, in a mumble that didn’t carry through—and the door sprang open. Charles brought the chair down in a murderous chop, conscious only that it seemed curiously light. There was an impact and the head fell.

It was Regan, with a drawn gun. It had been Regan. His skull was smashed before he knew it. Charles felt as though he had all the time in the world. He picked up the gun to a confused roar like a slowed-down sound track and emptied it into the corridor. It had been a full automatic, but the fifteen shots seemed as well-spaced as a ceremonial salute. Regan, in his vanity, wore two guns. Charles scooped up the other and said to Lee: “Come on.”

He knew she was following as he raced down the cleared corridor and down the ramp, back to the compartment in which they had been locked. Red danger lights burned on the walls. Charles flipped the pistol to semi-automatic as they passed a red-painted bulkhead with valves and gages sprouting from it. He turned and fired three deliberate shots into it. The last was drowned out by a dull roar as gasoline fumes exploded. Pipe fittings and fragments of plate whizzed about them like bullets as they raced on.

Somebody ahead loomed, yelling querulously: “What the hell was that, Mac? What blew?”

“Where’s the reactor room?” Charles demanded, jamming the pistol into his chest. The man gulped and pointed.

“Take me there. Fast.”

“Now look, Mac—”

Charles told him in a few incisive details where and how he was going to be shot. The man went white and led them down the corridor and into the reactor room. Three white-coated men with the aloof look of reactor specialists stared at them as they bulled into the spotless chamber.

The oldest sniffed: “And what, may I ask, are you crewmen doing in—”

Lee slammed the door behind them and said: “Sound the radiation alarm.”

“Certainly not! You must be the couple we—”

“Sound the radiation alarm.” She picked up a pair of dividers from the plot board and approached the technician with murder on her face. He gaped until she poised the needle points before his eyes and repeated: “Sound the radiation alarm.” Nobody in the room, including Charles, had the slightest doubt that the points would sink into the technician’s eyeballs if he refused.

“Do what she says, Will,” he mumbled, his eyes crossing on the dividers. “For God’s sake, do what she says. She’s crazy.”

One of the men moved, very cautiously, watching Charles and the gun, to a red handle and pulled it down. A ferro-concrete barrier rose to wall off the chamber and the sine-curve wail of a standard radioactivity warning began to howl mournfully through the ship.

“Dump the reactor metal,” Charles said. His eyes searched for the exit, and found it—a red-painted breakaway panel, standard for a hot lab.

A technician wailed: “We can’t do that! We can’t do that! A million bucks of thorium with a hundred years of life in it—have a heart, mister! They’ll crucify us!”

“They can dredge for it,” Charles said. “Dump the metal.”

“Dump the metal,” Lee said. She hadn’t moved.

The senior technician’s eyes were still on the bright needle points. He was crying silently. “Dump it,” he said.

“Okay, chief. Your responsibility, remember.”

“Dump it!” wailed the senior.

The technician did something technical at the control board. After a moment the steady rumbling of the turbines ceased and the ship’s deck began to wallow underfoot.

“Hit the panel, Lee,” Charles said. She did, running. He followed her through the oval port. It was like an open-bottomed diving bell welded to the hull. There were large, luminous cleats for pulling yourself down through the water, under the rim of the bell. He dropped the pistol into the water, breathed deeply a couple of times and began to climb down. There was no sign of Lee.

He kicked up through the dark water on a long slant away from the ship. It might be worse. With a fire and a hot-lab alarm and a dead chief aboard, the crew would have things on their mind besides looking for bobbing heads.

He broke the surface and treaded water to make a minimum target. He did not turn to the ship. His dark hair would be less visible than his white face. And if he was going to get a burst of machine-gun bullets through either, he didn’t want to know about it. Ahead he saw Lee’s blonde hair spread on the water for a moment and then it vanished. He breathed hugely, ducked and swam under water toward it.

When he rose next a sheet of flame was lightening the sky and the oily reek of burning hydrocarbons tainted the air. He dove again, and this time caught up with Lee. Her face was bone-white and her eyes blank. Where she was drawing her strength from he could not guess. Behind them the ship sent up an oily plume and the sine-curve wail of the radioactivity warning could be faintly heard. Before them a dim shore stretched.

He gripped her naked arm, roughened by the March waters of Lake Michigan, bent it around his neck and struck off for the shore. His lungs were bursting in his chest and the world was turning gray-black before his burning eyes. He heaved his tired arm through the water as though each stroke would be his last, but the last stroke, by some miracle, never was the last.

XIX

It hadn’t been easy to get time off from the oil-painting factory. Ken Oliver was a little late when he slid into the aseptic-smelling waiting room of the Michigan City Medical Center. A parabolic mike in the ceiling trained itself on the heat he radiated and followed him across the floor to a chair. A canned voice said: “State your business, please.”

He started a little and said in the general direction of the mike: “I’m Ken Oliver. A figure man in the Blue Department, Picasso Oils and Etching Corporation. Dr. Latham sent me here for—what do you call it?—a biopsy.”

“Thank you, please be seated.”

He smiled because he was seated already and picked up a magazine, the current copy of the Illinois Sporting News, familiarly known as the Green Sheet. Everybody in Mob Territory read it. The fingers of the blind spelled out its optimism and its selections at Hawthorne in Braille. If you were not only blind but fingerless, there was a talking edition that read itself aloud to you from tape.

He riffled through the past performances and selections to the articles. This month’s lead was—Thank God I am Dying of Throat Cancer.

He leaned back in the chair dizzily, the waiting room becoming gray mist around him. No, he thought. No. It couldn’t be that. All it could be was a little sore on the back of his throat—no more than that. Just a little sore on the back of his throat. He’d been a fool to go to Latham. The fees were outrageous and he was behind, always a little behind, on his bills. But cancer—so much of it around—and the drugs didn’t seem to help any more.… But Latham had almost promised him it was non-malignant.

“Mr. Oliver,” the loudspeaker said, “please go to Dr. Riordan’s office, Number Ten.”

Riordan was younger than he. That was supposed to be bad in a general practitioner, good in a specialist. And Riordan was a specialist—pathology. A sour-faced young specialist.

“Good morning. Sit here. Open your mouth. Wider than that, and relax. Relax; your glottis is locked.”

Oliver couldn’t protest around the plastic-and-alcohol taste of the tongue depressor. There was a sudden coldness and a metallic snickthat startled him greatly; then Riordan took the splint out of his mouth and ignored him as he summoned somebody over his desk set. A young man, even younger than Riordan, came in. “Freeze, section and stain this right away,” the pathologist said, handing him a forceps from which a small blob dangled. “Have them send up the Rotino charts, three hundred to nine hundred inclusive.”

He began to fill out charts, still ignoring Oliver, who sat and sweated bullets for ten minutes. Then he left and was back in five minutes more.

“You’ve got it,” he said shortly. “It’s operable and you won’t lose much tissue.” He scribbled on a sheet of paper and handed it to Oliver. The painter numbly read: “…anterior…epithelioma…metastases…giant cells.…”

Riordan was talking again: “Give this to Latham. It’s my report. Have him line up a surgeon. As to the operation, I say the sooner the better unless you care to lose your larynx. That will be fifty dollars.”

“Fifty dollars,” the painter said blankly. “But Dr. Latham told me—” He trailed off and got out his check book. Only thirty-two in the account, but he would deposit his paycheck today which would bring it up. It was after three so his check wouldn’t go in today—he wrote out the slip slowly and carefully.

Riordan took it, read it suspiciously, put it away and said: “Good day, Mr. Oliver.”

Oliver wandered from the Medical Center into the business heart of the art colony. The Van Gogh Works on the left must have snagged the big order from Mexico—their chimneys were going full blast and the reek of linseed oil and turps was strong in the air. But the poor beggars on the line at Rembrandts Ltd. across the square were out of luck. They’d been laid off for a month now, with no sign of a work call yet. Somebody jostled him off the sidewalk, somebody in a great hurry. Oliver sighed. The place was getting more like Chicago every day. He sometimes thought he had made art his line not because he had any special talent but because artists were relatively easy-going people, not so quick to pop you in the nose, not such aggressive drunks when they were drunks.

Quit the stalling, a thin, cold voice inside him said. Get over to Latham. The man said “The sooner the better.”

He went over to Latham whose waiting room was crowded with irascible women. After an hour, he got to see the old man and hand him the slip.

Latham said: “Don’t worry about a thing. Riordan’s a good man. If he says it’s operable, it’s operable. Now we want Finsen to do the whittling. With Finsen operating, you won’t have to worry about a thing. He’s a good man. His fee’s fifteen hundred.”

“Oh, my God!” Oliver gulped.

“What’s the matter—haven’t you got it?”

To his surprise and terror, Oliver found himself giving Dr. Latham a hysterical stump speech about how he didn’t have it and who did have it and how could anybody get ahead with the way prices were shooting up and everybody gouged you every time you turned around and yes, that went for doctors too and if you did get a couple of bucks in your pocket the salesmen heard about it and battered at you until you put down an installment on some piece of junk you didn’t want to get them out of your hair and what the hell kind of world was this anyway.

Latham listened, smiling and nodding, with, as Oliver finally realized, his hearing aid turned off. His voice ran down and Latham said briskly: “All right, then. You just come around when you’ve arranged the financial details and I’ll contact Finsen. He’s a good man; you won’t have to worry about a thing. And remember: the sooner, the better.”

Oliver slumped out of the office and went straight to the Mob Building, office of the Regan Benevolent Fund. An acid-voiced woman there turned him down indignantly: “You should be ashamed of yourself trying to draw on the Fund when there are people in actual want who can’t be accommodated! No, I don’t want to hear any more about it if you please. There are others waiting.”

Waiting for what? The same treatment?

Oliver realized with a shock that he hadn’t phoned his foreman as promised, and it was four minutes to five. He did a dance of agonized impatience outside a telephone booth occupied by a fat woman. She noticed him, pursed her lips, hung up—and stayed in the booth. She began a slow search of her hand-bag, found coins and slowly dialed a new number. She gave him a malevolent grin as he walked away, crushed. He had a good job record, but that was no way to keep it good. One black mark, another black mark, and one day—bingo.

General Advances was open, of course. Through its window you could see handsome young men and sleek young women just waiting to help you, whatever the fiscal jam. He went in and was whisked to a booth where a big-bosomed honey-voiced blonde oozed sympathy over him. He walked out with a check for fifteen hundred dollars after signing countless papers, with the creamy hand of the girl on his to help guide the pen. What was printed on the papers, God and General Advances alone knew. There were men on the line who told him with resignation that they had been paying off to G.A. for the better part of their lives. There were men who said bitterly that G.A. was owned by the Regan Benevolent Fund, which must be a lie.

The street was full of people—strangers who didn’t look like your run-of-the-mill artist. Muscle men, with the Chicago style and if anybody got one in the gut, too goddamned bad about it. They were peering into faces as they passed.

He was frightened. He stepped onto the slidewalk and hurried home, hoping for temporary peace there. But there was no peace for his frayed nerves. The apartment house door opened obediently when he told it: “Regan,” but the elevator stood stupidly still when he said: “Seventh Floor.” He spat bitterly and precisely: “Sev-enth Floor.” The doors closed on him with a faintly derisive, pneumatic moan and he was whisked up to the eighth floor. He walked down wearily and said: “Cobalt blue” to his own door after a furtive look up and down the hall. It worked and he went to his phone to flash Latham, but didn’t. Oliver sank instead into a dun-colored pneumatic chair, his 250-dollar Hawthorne Electric Stepsaver door mike following him with its mindless snout. He punched a button on the chair and the 600-dollar hi-fi selected a random tape. A long, pure melodic trumpet line filled the room. It died for two beats and than the strings and woodwinds picked it up and tossed it—

Oliver snapped off the music, sweat starting from his brow. It was the Gershwin Lost Symphony, and he remembered how Gershwin had died. There had been a little nodule in his brain as there was a little nodule in Oliver’s throat.

Time, the Great Kidder. The years drifted by. Suddenly you were middle-aged, running to the medics for this and that. Suddenly they told you to have your throat whittled out or die disgustingly. And what did you have to show for it? A number, a travel pass, a payment book from General Advance, a bunch of junk you never wanted, a job that was a heavier ball and chain than any convict ever wore in the barbarous days of Government. Was this what Regan and Falcaro had bled for?

He defrosted some hamburger, fried it and ate it and then went mechanically down to the tavern. He didn’t like to drink every night, but you had to be one of the boys, or word would get back to the plant and you might be on your way to another black mark. They were racing under the lights at Hawthorne too, and he’d be expected to put a couple of bucks down. He never seemed to win. Nobody he knew ever seemed to win. Not at the horses, not at the craps table, not at the numbers.

He stood outside the neon-bright saloon for a long moment, and then turned and walked into the darkness away from town, possessed by impulses he did not understand or want to understand. He had only a vague hope that standing on the Dunes and looking out across the dark lake might somehow soothe him.

In half an hour he had reached the deciduous forest, then the pine, then the scrubby brushes, then the grasses, then the bare white sand. And lying in it he found two people: a man so hard and dark he seemed to be carved from oak and a woman so white and gaunt she seemed to be carved from ivory.

He turned shyly from the woman.

“Are you all right?” he asked the man. “Is there anything I can do?”

The man opened red-rimmed eyes. “Better leave us alone,” he said. “We’d only get you into trouble.”

Oliver laughed hysterically. “Trouble?” he said. “Don’t think of it.”

The man seemed to be measuring him with his eyes, and said at last: “You’d better go and not talk about us. We’re enemies of the Mob.”

Oliver said after a pause: “So am I. Don’t go away. I’ll be back with some clothes and food for you and the lady. Then I can help you to my place. I’m an enemy of the Mob too. I just never knew it until now.”

He started off and then turned. “You won’t go away? I mean it. I want to help you. I can’t seem to help myself, but perhaps there’s something—”

The man said tiredly: “We won’t go away.”

Oliver hurried off. There was something mingled with the scent of the pine forest tonight. He was half-way home before he identified it: oil smoke.

XX

Lee swore and said: “I can get up if I want to.”

“You’ll stay in bed whether you want to or not,” Charles told her. “You’re a sick woman.”

“I’m a very bad-tempered woman and that means I’m convalescent. Ask anybody.”

“I’ll go right out into the street and do that, darling.”

She got out of bed and wrapped Oliver’s dressing gown around her. “I’m hungry again,” she said.

“He’ll be back soon. You’ve left nothing but some frozen—worms, looks like. Shall I defrost them?”

“Please don’t trouble. I can wait.”

“Window!” he snapped.

She ducked back and swore again, this time at herself. “Sorry,” she said. “Which will do us a whole hell of a lot of good if somebody saw me and started wondering.”

Oliver came in with packages. Lee kissed him and he grinned shyly. “Trout,” he whispered. She grabbed the packages and flew to the kitchenette.

“The way to Lee Falcaro’s heart,” Charles mused. “How’s your throat, Ken?”

“No pain, today,” Oliver whispered. “Latham says I can talk as much as I like. And I’ve got things to talk about.” He opened his coat and hauled out a flat package that had been stuffed under his belt. “Stolen from the factory. Brushes, pens, tubes of ink, drawing instruments. My friends, you are going to return to Syndic Territory in style, with passes and permits galore.”

Lee returned. “Trout’s frying,” she said. “I heard that about the passes. Are you sure you can fake them?”

His face fell. “Eight years at the Chicago Art Institute,” he whispered. “Three years at Original Reproductions, Inc. Eleven years at Picasso Oils and Etchings, where I am now third figure man in the Blue Department. I really think I deserve your confidence.”

“Ken, we trust and love you. If it weren’t for the difference in your ages I’d marry you and Charles. Now what about the Chicagoans? Hold it—the fish!”

Dinner was served and cleared away before they could get more out of Oliver. His throat wasn’t ready for more than one job at a time. He told them at last: “Things are quieting down. There are still some strangers in town and the road patrols are still acting very hard-boiled. But nobody’s been pulled in today. Somebody told me on the line that the whole business is a lot of foolishness. He said the ship must have been damaged by somebody’s stupidity and Regan must have been killed in a brawl—everybody knows he was half crazy, like his father. So my friend figures they made up the story about two wild Europeans to cover up a mess. I said I thought there was a lot in what he said.” Oliver laughed silently.

“Good man!” Charles tried not to act over-eager. “When do you think you can start on the passes, Ken?”

Oliver’s face dropped a little. “Tonight,” he whispered. “I don’t suppose the first couple of tries will be any good so—let’s go.”

Lee put her hand on his shoulder. “We’ll miss you too,” she said. “But don’t ever forget this: we’re coming back. Hell won’t stop us. We’re coming back.”

Oliver was arranging stolen instruments on the table. “You have a big order,” he whispered sadly. “I guess you aren’t afraid of it because you’ve always been rich and strong. Anything you want to do you think you can do. But those Government people? And after them the Mob? Maybe it would be better if you just let things take their course, Lee. I’ve found out a person can be happy even here.”

“We’re coming back,” Lee said.

Oliver took out his own Michigan City-Chicago travel permit. As always, the sight of it made Charles wince. Americans under such a yoke! Oliver whispered: “I got a good long look today at a Michigan City Buffalo permit. The foreman’s. He buys turps from Carolina at Buffalo. I sketched it from memory as soon as I got by myself. I don’t swear to it, not yet, but I have the sketch to practice from and I can get a few more looks later.”

He pinned down the drawing paper, licked a ruling pen and filled it, and began to copy the border of his own pass. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do?” Lee asked.

“You can turn on the audio,” Oliver whispered. “They have it going all the time at the shop. I don’t feel right working unless there’s some music driving me out of my mind.”

Lee turned on the big Hawthorne Electric set with a wave of her hand; imbecillic music filled the air and Oliver grunted and settled down.

Lee and Charles listened, fingers entwined, to half an hour of slushy ballads while Oliver worked. The news period announcer came on with some anesthetic trial verdicts, sports results and society notes about which Regan had gone where. Then—

“The local Mobsters of Michigan City, Indiana, today welcomed Maurice Regan to their town. Mr. Regan will assume direction of efforts to apprehend the two European savages who murdered James Regan IV last month aboard the ore boat Hon. John Regan in waters off Michigan City. You probably remember that the Europeans did some damage to the vessel’s reactor room before they fled from the ship. How they boarded the ship and their present whereabouts are mysteries—but they probably won’t be mysteries long. Maurice Regan is little-known to the public, but he has built an enviable record in the administration of the Chicago Police Department. Mr. Regan on taking charge of the case, said this: ‘We know by traces found on the Dunes that they got away. We know from the logs of highway patrols that they didn’t get out of the Michigan City area. The only way to close the books on this matter fast is to cover the city with a fine-tooth comb. Naturally and unfortunately this will mean inconvenience to many citizens. I hope they will bear with the inconveniences gladly for the sake of confining those two savages in a place where they can no longer be a menace. I have methods of my own and there may be complaints. Reasonable suggestions will be needed, but with crackpots I have no patience.’”

The radio began to spew more sports results. Oliver turned and waved at it to be silent. “I don’t like that,” he whispered. “I never heard of this Regan in the Chicago Police.”

“They said he wasn’t in the public eye.”

“I wasn’t the public. I did some posters for the police and I knew who was who. And that bit at the end. I’ve heard things like it before. The Mob doesn’t often admit it’s in the wrong, you know. When they try to disarm criticism in advance…this Regan must be a rough fellow.”

Charles and Lee Falcaro looked at each other in sudden fear. “We don’t want to hurry you, Ken,” she said. “But it looks as though you’d better do a rush job.”

Nodding, Oliver bent over the table. “Maybe a week,” he said hopefully. With the finest pen he traced the curlicues an engraving lathe had evolved to make the passes foolproof. Odd, he thought—the lives of these two hanging by such a weak thing as the twisted thread of color that feeds from pen to paper. And, as an afterthought—I suppose mine does too.

* * * *

Oliver came back the next day to work with concentrated fury, barely stopping to eat and not stopping to talk. Lee got it out of him, but not easily. After being trapped in a half dozen contradictions about feeling well and having a headache, about his throat being sore and the pain having gone, he put down his pen and whispered steadily: “I didn’t want you to worry friends. But it looks bad. There is a new crowd in town. Twenty couples have been pulled in by them—couples to prove who they were. Maybe fifty people have been pulled in for questioning—what do you know about this, what do you know about that. And they’ve begun house searches. Anybody you don’t like, you tell the new Regan about him. Say he’s sheltering Europeans. And his people pull them in. Why, everybody wants to know, are they pulling in couples who are obviously American if they’re looking for Europeans? And, everybody says, they’ve never seen anything like it. Now—I think I’d better get back to work.”

“Yes,” Lee said. “I think you had.”

Charles was at the window, peering around the drawn blind. “Look at that,” he said to Lee. She came over. A big man on the street below was walking, very methodically down the street.

“I will bet you,” Charles said, “that he’ll be back this way in ten minutes or so—and so on through the night.”

“I won’t take the bet,” she said. “He’s a sentry, all right. The Mob’s learning from their friends across the water. Learning too damned much. They must be all over town.”

They watched at the window and the sentry was back in ten minutes. On his fifth tour he stopped a young couple going down the street studied their faces, drew a gun on them and blew a whistle. A patrol came and took them away; the girl was hysterical. At two in the morning, the sentry was relieved by another, just as big and just as dangerous looking. At two in the morning they were still watching and Oliver was still hunched over the table tracing exquisite filigree of color.

* * * *

In five days, virtually without sleep, Oliver finished two Michigan City-Buffalo travel permits. The apartment house next door was hit by raiders while the ink dried; Charles and Lee Falcaro stood waiting grotesquely armed with kitchen knives. But it must have been a tip rather than part of the search plan crawling nearer to their end of town. The raiders did not hit their building.

Oliver had bought clothes according to Lee’s instructions—including two men’s suits, Oliver’s size. One she let out for Charles; the other she took in for herself. She instructed Charles minutely in how he was to behave, on the outside. First he roared with incredulous laughter; Lee, wise, in psychology assured him that she was perfectly serious. Oliver, puzzled by his naivete, assured him that such things were not uncommon—not at least in Mob Territory. Charles then roared with indignation and Lee roared him down. His last broken protest was: “But what’ll I do if somebody takes me up on it?”

She shrugged, washing her hands of the matter, and went on trimming and dying her hair.

It was morning when she kissed Oliver good-bye, said to Charles: “See you at the station. Don’t say good-bye,” and walked from the apartment, a dark-haired boy with a slight limp. Charles watched her down the street. A cop turned to look after her and then went on his way.

Half an hour later Charles shook hands with Oliver and went out.

Oliver didn’t go to work that day. He sat all day at the table, drawing endless slow sketches of Lee Falcaro’s head.

Time the Great Kidder, he thought. He opens the door that shows you in the next room tables of goodies, colorful and tasty, men and women around the tables pleasantly surprised to see you, beckoning to you to join the feast. We have roast beef if you’re serious, we have caviar if you’re experimental, we have baked alaska if you’re frivolous—join the feast; try a little bit of everything. So you start toward the door.

Time, the Great Kidder, pulls the rug from under your feet and slams the door while the guests at the feast laugh their heads off at your painful but superficial injuries.

Oliver slowly drew Lee’s head for the fifteenth time and wished he dared to turn on the audio for the news. Perhaps he thought, the next voice you hear will be the cops at the door.

XXI

Charles walked down the street and ran immediately into a challenge from a police sergeant.

“Where you from, mister?” the cop demanded, balanced and ready to draw.

Charles gulped and let Lee Falcaro’s drilling take over. “Oh, around, sergeant. I’m from around here.”

“What’re you so nervous about?”

“Why, sergeant, you’re such an exciting type, really. Did anybody ever tell you you look well in uniform?”

The cop glared at him and said: “If I wasn’t in uniform, I’d hang one on you sister. And if the force wasn’t all out hunting the lunatics, that killed Mr. Regan I’d pull you in for spitting on the sidewalk. Get to hell off my beat and stay off. I’m not forgetting your face.”

Charles scurried on. It had worked.

It worked once more with a uniformed policeman. One of the Chicago plain-clothes imports was the third and last. He socked Charles in the jaw and sent him on his way with a kick in the rear. He had been thoroughly warned that it would probably happen: “Count on them to over-react. That’s the key to it. You’ll make them so eager to assert their own virility, that it’ll temporarily bury their primary mission. It’s quite likely that one or more pokes will be taken at you. All you can do is take them. If you get—when you get through, they’ll be cheap at the price.”

The sock in the jaw hadn’t been very expert. The kick in the pants was negligible, considering the fact that it had propelled him through the gate of the Michigan City Transport Terminal.

By the big terminal clock the Chicago-Buffalo Express was due in fifteen minutes. Its gleaming single rail, as tall as a man crossed the far end of the concourse. Most of the fifty-odd people in the station were probably Buffalo-bound…safe geldings who could be trusted to visit Syndic Territory, off the leash and return obediently. Well-dressed, of course, and many past middle-age, with a stake in the Mob Territory stronger than hope of freedom. One youngster, though—oh. It was Lee, leaning, slack-jawed, against a pillar and reading the Green Sheet.

Who were the cops in the crowd? The thickset man with restless eyes, of course. The saintly-looking guy who kept moving and glancing into faces.

Charles went to the newsstand and put a coin in the slot for The Mob—A Short History, by the same Arrowsmith Hunde who had brightened and misinformed his youth.

Nothing to it, he thought. Train comes in, put your money in the turnstile, show your permit to the turnstile’s eye, get aboard and that-is-that. Unless the money is phony, or the pass is phony in which case the turnstile locks and all hell breaks loose. His money was just dandy, but the permit now—there hadn’t been any way to test it against a turnstile’s template, or time to do it if there had been a way. Was the probability of boarding two to one?

The probability abruptly dropped to zero as a round little man flanked by two huge men entered the station.

Commander Grinnel.

The picture puzzle fell into a whole as the two plainclothesmen circulating in the station eyed Grinnel and nodded to him. The big one absent-mindedly made a gesture that was the start of a police salute.

Grinnel was Maurice Regan—the Maurice Regan mysteriously unknown to Oliver, who knew the Chicago police. Grinnel was a bit of a lend-lease from the North American Navy, called in because of his unique knowledge of Charles Orsino and Lee Falcaro, their faces, voices and behavior. Grinnel was the expert in combing the city without any nonsense about rights and mouthpieces. Grinnel was the expert who could set up a military interior guard of the city. Grinnel was the specialist temporarily invested with the rank of a Regan so he could do his job.

The round little man with the halo of hair walked briskly to the turnstile and there stood at a military parade rest with a look of resignation on his face.

How hard on me it is, he seemed to be saying, that I have such dull damn duty. How hard that an officer of my brilliance must do sentry-go for every train to Syndic Territory.

The slack-jawed youth who was Lee Falcaro looked at him over her Green Sheet and nodded before dipping into the Tia Juana past performances again. She knew.

Passengers were beginning to line up at the turnstile, smoothing out their money and fiddling with their permits. In a minute he and Lee Falcaro would have to join the line or stand conspicuously on the emptying floor. The thing was dead for twenty-four hours now, until the next train—and then Grinnel headed across the floor looking very impersonal. The look of a man going to the men’s room. The station cops and Grinnel’s two bruisers drifted together at the turnstile and began to chat.

Charles followed Grinnel, wearing the same impersonal look, and entered the room almost on his heels.

Grinnel saw him in a wash-bowl mirror; simultaneously he half turned, opened his mouth to yell and whipped his hand into his coat. A single round-house right from Charles crunched into the soft side of his neck. He fell with his head twisted at an odd angle. Blood began to run from the corner of his mouth onto his shirt.

“Remember Martha?” Charles whispered down at the body. “That was for murder.” He looked around the tiled room. There was a mop closet with the door ajar, and Grinnel’s flabby body fitted in it.

Charles walked from the washroom to the line of passengers across the floor. It seemed to go on for miles. Lee Falcaro was no longer lounging against the past. He spotted her in line, still slack-jawed, still gaping over the magazine. The monorail began to sing shrilly with the vibration of the train braking a mile away, and the turnstile “unlocked” light went on.

There was the usual number of fumblers, the usual number of “please unfold your currency” flashes. Lee carried through to the end with her slovenly pose. For her the sign said: “incorrect denominations.” Behind her a man snarled: “for Christ’s sake, kid, we’re all waiting on you!” The cops only half noticed; they were talking. When Charles got to the turnstile one of the cops was saying: “Maybe it’s something he ate. How’d you like somebody to barge in—”

The rest was lost in the clicking of the turnstile that let him through.

* * * *

He settled in a very pneumatic chair as the train accelerated evenly to a speed of three hundred and fifty miles per hour. A sign in the car said that the next stop was Buffalo. And there was Lee, lurching up the aisle against the acceleration. She spotted him, tossed the Green Sheet in the Air and fell into his lap.

“Disgusting!” snarled a man across the aisle. “Simply disgusting!”

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Lee told him, and kissed Charles on the mouth.

The man choked: “I shall certainly report this to the authorities when we arrive in Buffalo!”

“Mmm,” said Lee, preoccupied. “Do that, mister. Do that.”

XXII

“I didn’t like his reaction,” Charles told her in the anteroom of F. W. Taylor’s office. “I didn’t talk to him long on the phone, but I don’t like his reaction at all. He seemed to think I was exaggerating. Or all wet. Or a punk kid.”

“I can assure him you’re not that,” Lee Falcaro said warmly. “Call on me any time.”

He gave her a worried smile. The door opened then and they went in.

Uncle Frank looked up. “We’d just about written you two off,” he said. “What’s it like?”

“Bad,” Charles said. “Worse than anything you’ve imagined. There’s an underground, all right, and they are practicing assassination.”

“Too bad,” the old man said. “We’ll have to shake up the bodyguard organization. Make ‘em de rigeur at all hours, screen ‘em and see that they really know how to shoot. I hate to meddle, but we can’t have the Government knocking our people off.”

“It’s worse than that,” Lee said. “There’s a tie-up between the Government and the Mob. We got away from Ireland aboard a speed boat and we were picked up by a Mob lakes ore ship. It had been running gasoline and ammunition to the Government. Jimmy Regan was in charge of the deal. We jumped into Lake Michigan and made our way back here. We were in Mob Territory—down among the small-timers—long enough to establish that the Mob and Government are hand in glove. One of these day’s they’re going to jump us.”

“Ah,” Taylor said softly. “I’ve thought so for a long time.”

Charles burst out: “Then for God’s sake, Uncle Frank, why haven’t you done anything? You don’t know what it’s like out there. The Government’s a nightmare. They have slaves. And the Mob’s not much better. Numbers! Restrictions! Permits! Passes! And they don’t call it that, but they have taxes!”

“They’re mad,” Lee said. “Quite mad. And I’m talking technically. Neurotics and psychotics swarm in the streets of Mob Territory. The Government, naturally—but the Mob was a shock. We’ve got to get ready, Mr. Taylor. Every psychotic or severe neurotic in Syndic Territory is a potential agent of theirs.”

“Don’t just check off the Government, darling,” Charles said tensely. “They’ve got to be smashed. They’re no good to themselves or anybody else. Life’s a burden there if only they knew it. And they’re holding down the natives by horrible cruelty.”

Taylor leaned back and asked: “What do you recommend?”

Charles said: “A fighting fleet and an army.”

Lee said: “Mass diagnosis of the unstable. Screening of severe cases and treatment where it’s indicated. Riveredge must be a plague-spot of agents.”

Taylor shook his head and told them: “It won’t do.”

Charles was aghast. “It won’t do? Uncle Frank, what the hell do you mean, it won’t do? Didn’t we make it clear? They want to invade us and loot us and subject us!”

“It won’t do,” Taylor said. “I choose the devil we know. A fighting fleet is out. We’ll arm our merchant vessels and hope for the best. A full-time army is out. We’ll get together some-kind of militia. And a roundup of the unstable is out.”

“Why?” Lee demanded. “My people have worked out perfectly effective techniques—”

“Let me talk, please. I have a feeling that it won’t be any good, but hear me out.

“I’ll take your black art first, Lee. As you know, I have played with history. To a historian, your work has been very interesting. The sequence was this: study of abnormal psychology collapsed under Lieberman’s findings, study of abnormal psychology revived by you when you invalidated Lieberman’s findings. I suggest that Lieberman and his followers were correct—and that you were correct. I suggest that what changed was the makeup of the population. That would mean that before Lieberman there were plenty of neurotics and psychotics to study, that in Lieberman’s time there were so few that earlier generalizations were invalidated, and that now—in our time, Lee—neurotics and psychotics are among us again in increasingly ample numbers.”

The girl opened her mouth, shut it again and thoughtfully studied her nails.

“I will not tolerate,” Taylor went on, “a roundup or a registration, or mass treatment or any such violation of the Syndic’s spirit.”

Charles exploded: “Damn it, this is a matter of life or death to the Syndic!”

“No, Charles. Nothing can be a matter of life or death to the Syndic. When anything becomes a matter of life or death to the Syndic, the Syndic is already dead, its morale, is already disintegrated, its credit already gone. What is left is not the Syndic but the Syndic’s dead shell. I am not placed so that I can say objectively now whether the Syndic is dead or alive. I fear it is dying. The rising tide of neurotics is a symptom. The suggestion from you two, who should be imbued with the old happy-go-lucky, we-can’t-miss esprit of the Syndic that we cower behind mercenaries instead of trusting the people who made us—that’s another symptom. Dick Reiner’s rise to influence on a policy of driving the Government from the seas is another symptom.

“I mentioned the devil we know as my choice. That’s the status quo, even though I have reason to fear it’s crumbling beneath our feet. If it is, it may last out our time. We’ll shore it up with armed merchantmen and a militia. If the people are with us now as they always have been, that’ll do it. The devil we don’t know is what we’ll become if we radically dislocate Syndic life and attitudes.

“I can’t back a fighting fleet. I can’t back a regular army. I can’t back any restrictive measure on the freedom of anybody but an apprehended criminal. Read history. It has taught me not to meddle, it has taught me that no man should think himself clever enough or good enough to dare it. That is the lesson history teaches us.

“Who can know what he’s doing when he doesn’t even know why he does it? Bless the bright Cromagnon for inventing the bow and damn him for inventing missile warfare. Bless the stubby little Sumerians for miracles in gold and lapis lazuli and damn them for burying a dead queen’s hand-maidens living in her tomb. Bless Shih Hwang-Ti for building the Great Wall between northern barbarism and southern culture, and damn him for burning every book in China. Bless King Minos for the ease of Cnossian flush toilets and damn him for his yearly tribute of Greek sacrificial victims. Bless Pharaoh for peace and damn him for slavery. Bless the Greeks for restricting population so the well-fed few could kindle a watch-tower in the west, and damn the prostitution and sodomy and wars of colonization by which they did it. Bless the Romans for their strength to smash down every wall that hemmed their building genius, and damn them for their weakness that never broke the bloody grip of Etruscan savagery on their minds. Bless the Jews who discovered the fatherhood of God and damn them who limited it to the survivors of a surgical operation. Bless the Christians who abolished the surgical preliminaries and damn them who substituted a thousand cerebral quibbles. Bless Justinian for the Code of Law and damn him for his countless treacheries that were the prototype of the wretched Byzantine millenium. Bless the churchmen for teaching and preaching, and damn, them for drawing a line beyond which they could only teach and preach in peril of the stake.

“Bless the navigators who, opened the new world to famine-ridden Europe, and damn them for syphillis. Bless the red-skins who bred maize, the great preserver of life and damn them for breeding maize the great destroyer of topsoil. Bless the Virginia planters for the solace of tobacco and damn them for the red gullies they left where forests had stood. Bless the obstetricians with forceps who eased the agony of labor and damn them for bringing countless monsters into the world to reproduce their kind. Bless the Point Four boys who slew the malaria mosquitoes of Ceylon and damn them for letting more Sinhalese be born then five Ceylons could feed.

“Who knows what he is doing, why he does it or what the consequences will be?

“Let the social scientists play with their theories if they like; I’m fond of poetry myself. The fact is that they have not so far solved what I call the two-billion-body problem. With brilliant hindsight some of them tell us that more than a dozen civilizations have gone down into the darkness before us. I see no reason why ours should not go down into the darkness with them, nor do I see any reason why we should not meanwhile enjoy ourselves collecting sense-impressions to be remembered with pleasure in old age. No; I will not agitate for extermination of the Government and hegemony over the Mob. Such a policy would automatically, inevitably and immediately entail many, many violent deaths and painful wounds. The wrong kind of sense-impressions. I shall, with fear and trembling, recommend the raising of a militia—a purely defensive, extremely sloppy militia—and pray that it will not Involve us in a war of aggression.”

He looked at the two of them and shrugged. “Lee, so stern, Charles so grim,” he said. “I suppose you’re dedicated now.” He looked at the desk.

He thought: I have a faint desire to take the pistol from my desk and shoot you both. I have a nervous feeling that you’re about to embark on a crusade to awaken Syndic Territory to its perils. You think the fate of civilization hinges on you. You’re right, of course. The fate of civilization hinges on every one of us at any given moment. We are all components in the two-billion-body problem. Somehow for a century we’ve achieved in Syndic Territory for almost everybody the civil liberties, peace of mind and living standards that were enjoyed by the middle classes before 1914—plus longer life, better health, a more generous morality, increased command over nature; minus the servant problem and certain superstitions. A handful of wonderfully pleasant decades. When you look back over history you wonder who in his right mind could ask for more. And you wonder who would dare to presume to tamper with it.

He studied the earnest young faces. There was so much that he might say—but he shrugged again.

“Bless you,” he said. “Gather ye sense impression while ye may. Some like pointer readings, some like friction on the mucous membranes. Now go about your business; I have work to do.”

He didn’t really. When he was alone he leaned back and laughed and laughed.

Win, lose or draw, those two would go far and enjoy themselves mightily along the way. Which was what counted.