Sunburst: 2

My name is Sandra Ruth Johnson. I was born in Sorrel Park on June 3rd, 2011. Both my parents were born here; their families had settled in thirty or forty years before. My father’s name was Lars Johnson, and it was his grandfather, Olaf Jensen, who came here from Denmark and changed his name to make it sound more American, though the family still kept giving their kids first names like Nels and Kristin.

My father was a kind of ratty, vital little man with freckles and white eyelashes. He was a steam fitter at the power plant, and he had arthritis badly in his hands. The fingers were hard and callused and permanently curled from handling pipes and wrenches. I think he took drugs for it, but even so he never could lay his hand out flat on a table.

My mother was the big soft type of woman that always seems to marry a little scrawny energetic man. Her name was Katherine O’Brian, and her parents were born in Ireland. She had very black hair and blue eyes. She cleaned offices at the plant while they were running the thermonuclear pile, and after the Blowup, when the old coal plant was put to use again, she went over there until I was born, like most of the other workers who survived, and my father kept on wrenching pipes.

I know that some of the people involved were able to have children soon afterwards, but though my parents had had the injections against r-sickness they hadn’t had any kids before, and then they were sterile for about seventeen years, and I guess never expected to have any. And my father had been hit in the back by a piece of hot material, and the wound never quite healed. I imagine my arrival was kind of a surprise. My father was forty-seven when I was born, and my mother forty-two. I think. I was three and a half when they died, and since I can’t remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old, that means I can’t have really known them for more than two years, so maybe I haven’t got everything down correctly.

I couldn’t tell you whether they were any different from other people, or any better. I only know that I loved them. My father used to dance me around the room, singing, “Shandy, Shandy, sugar and candy!” and we played all those games that most very little kids play with their fathers. My mother used to wallop me once in a while, but I never considered this particularly unfair; she wore clean cotton housedresses so full of starch they crackled. Not like Ma Slippec—though there was some kind of queer suffocated goodness in her too.

I remember very clearly the day my father went into the hospital for the last time. I was nearly three and a half by then. After my mother had packed a few things for him she took the dressing off his back and went into the bathroom to make a fresh one so he could start off clean. I had had a popsicle and came in because my hands were sticky. I was supposed to stay out of the way but they were upset and didn’t hear me. My father was sitting on the bed with nothing on but his briefs; his back was towards me…

* * * *

She lifted her head and looked out the window, sucking the top of the pen; a small puff of summer cumulus moved blindly across the field of a vision haunted by memory:

A sunburst with twisting rays of exploded scar, and between the rays thick brown keloids; a humped center of ruined flesh, cracked and oozing, ebbing out beyond the cancerous moles into coin-size blue-black naevi, paling and decreasing till they washed into freckles on white skin.

She jerked her mind away, past the man at the desk and the other one watching immobile in the corner, down to the scribbled pages.

* * * *

…heard a noise and turned. His mouth opened wide; he was about to yell at me and then he stopped. He looked terribly shocked for a moment; I don’t know what he saw in my face—I’m not quite certain of what I was thinking, but I do know what I saw. He took a good deep breath and said in a much more gentle voice than he had been going to use before, “Run out and play, kid.” I went back out and played and after a few minutes he came down with his suitcase and kissed me goodbye. I never saw him again.

We lived over the grocery next door to the Slippecs, and my mother left me with them when she went to the funeral. I didn’t do any crying, and I heard Ma Slippec say to Karel, “That kid gives me the shivers.”

When my mother came back from the funeral in her black dress with her eyes swollen, she hugged me and cried again and said, “You just don’t know what it’s all about, do you, sweetie?” But adults don’t realize how sensitive even not very bright children are to these things. I’ve seen it plenty of times in the children of the oldest Slippec boy and girl, and as far as I can tell they’re about dull normal.

My mother had stopped work when she had me, but when my father died she had to go back to her old job and she had the Slippecs take care of me. They were a rowdy lot, always having the kind of fights that blow over like summer thunderstorms—but they weren’t mean. My mother didn’t care much for them, especially because the old man was in jail again as usual, but she figured if Ma Slippec could keep her own six kids alive and healthy she could do the same for me.

But then my mother started coming home more tired and sick every day. First she couldn’t get my supper, and after a while she could hardly get me to bed. I began to be afraid. My father had gone away so casually…

One day she couldn’t go to work, and she stayed in bed for a few days—she was terribly pale, and her skin was hot. Ma Slippec called the ambulance for her, finally, and packed her some clothes in the same suitcase my father took. She smiled at me from the stretcher, and said she’d be back soon—but she’d become thin…her hair was so black, and her skin so white against it…

* * * *

Shandy put the pen aside and lined up the sheets, and folded them across, down over her closed childhood. She got up, handed them to the man at the desk, and went over to the window.

Outside she could see a courtyard, surrounded by a brick wall with iron gates. There were three jeeps parked in the court. She had been brought here by one of them the night before. Beyond that there was an asphalt pavement; an electrified fence, sentry-guarded, enclosed all of this and also a huge acreage empty of everything but grasses, wild flowers, and the Dump.

A great circle bounded by a wall of heavy fieldstone covered with concrete, topped by barbed wire, and implanted with several dozens of huge antennas emitting the buzzing scrambler circuit known as the Marczinek Field. It was impossible to see what was inside the Dump, and she did not want to. Sometimes the dull wash of a savage roar of sound beat against the windowpanes. Other times there was only the buzz of the Field.

Beyond the Dump, the vast meadow, and the fence, there was a deep culvert, last ditch against the road threading the world outside.

Urquhart cleared his throat rather peremptorily and she came back to the little table and sat down. He was a youngish balding man with horn-rimmed glasses; his elbow was resting firmly on Rorschach’s Test: he was its owner. He pulled a thread from a frayed cuff and folded his pink rawboned hands. He had made little red-ink notes on the margins of her ms., which she imagined as: Use of “ratty” in conj. w. father—signif? and Sight of scar—poss. trauma?

He had not bothered to ask her whether she had read up on Wechsler-Bellevue, Stanford-Binet, Charlebois, Porteus, because Jason Hemmer was useless as a lie detector in her case, and with psi in question no-one took anything on trust; he had been obliged to make do with whatever methods he could devise on the moment. His manner was not bland; she had stripped the tools from his hands and he was not in a mood to forgive her for it.

She herself was beginning to wonder if she had been so smart. It might have been a great deal simpler and safer to take the tests cold and perhaps learn more at the outcome. But she was interested. She had played one round of the game with Jason Hemmer and lost, without resentment; she was ready for the second.

Some crazy chance had decreed that when the psi mutation hit the human race it would choose the type of child most likely to develop the delinquent type of psychopathic personality, and every one of the forty-seven Dumplings had been through Urquhart’s mill, psi and all. He could marvel that he was still alive. She felt that dealing with an absolutely non-psi, and an Impervious as well, could be a welcome change of pace for him.

Psi is for psychopath, what I am not, and don’t you forget!

Urquhart unplaited his fingers and leaned down to switch on the tape recorder. “You feel justified in labeling the Slippec grandchildren as dull normal?”

She was taken aback, but answered, “As long as I’m not handing out the Prognostic Indexes.”

“Do you have any evidence for this kind of judgment?”

“Three years of close observation; I did a lot of babysitting.”

“What did you observe?” The words might have been assumed sarcasm. The tone betrayed some genuine interest.

“Co-ordination, speech and play-patterns, vocabulary, group interaction,”—she shrugged—“what you look at in kids.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why. I just wanted to know.”

“Anything in particular?”

“Only whatever there is to find out.”

“That’s why you took this—” He thumped the Rorschach with his elbow.

She reddened. “Partly. Mostly I wanted to know how to keep out of the Dump.”

“Every child in Sorrel Park has been here—except you, and most of them have gone home again. Why did you think we might want you particularly?”

“I didn’t want to take any chances. I admit now that taking it wasn’t such a bright idea.”

He humphed and built his long fingers into a steeple. “You say here, about your father: ‘I don’t know what he saw in my face.’ I wonder about that.”

She waited.

“I think you do, you know. You say what you realized about your mother, when she became sick. I think you might try to remember what you thought when you were looking at your father’s back.”

She admitted, “Maybe I can, but I don’t know that it’s not a false memory.”

“Why should it be?”

“Because it still doesn’t seem reasonable, even to me, that a three-year-old, no matter how bright, could look at that thing and know that a man was going to die from it—and that it could show so clearly in my face he could read it there.”

“Why not reasonable even to you?”

“Because once you’ve lived with psi you can accept a lot of other unreasonable things.”

Urquhart shifted in his chair, and the man in the corner brought out a pipe and tobacco-pouch.

“Don’t you think it’s more likely that what shocked your father was your calm—after the initial shock of finding you looking at something he normally concealed? The fact that you didn’t cry at the sight?”

Shandy said calmly, “The only time I ever cried was when my hands or my body wouldn’t work the way I wanted, or I couldn’t find out something I wanted to know. I could throw tantrums over those things, but not sorrow or fear.”

“Pain?”

She smiled. “Not from being smacked. I went into a rage if the pain was the result of my own clumsiness.”

Urquhart pinched his lower lip and looked at the sheets again.

Shandy folded her hands in her lap and said gently, “Try Rorschach?”

As Urquhart raised his head, glaring, there was a subdued rat-a-tat-tat from the corner, and both turned their heads. The thin old man who had been sitting so silent and immobile was now trying to bite the pipestem to keep from laughing. He had a narrow ascetic hawkface and a thick quiff of white hair. Though he was wearing army trousers, his shirt was a gaudy cotton emblazoned with palm trees and sunsets, a duplicate of which Shandy had seen Mrs. Pyper retailing for $2.49.

Early in the morning, through the window of her room, she had heard a resonant bass voice singing “Many Brave Hearts Are Asleep in the Deep,” and when she stuck her head out she saw the bent back of the old man in his colored shirt; he was digging in a small flowerbed beneath the window. He complemented the flowers in his shirt, and his selection of plants was as wayward and eccentric as his taste in clothes. Wild, blowsy poppies straggled in and out madly among ragged tulips with dropping petals, colors crazily mixed. Alternately he hummed, bellowed, or swore as he rubbed a callused thumb. She had wondered what his place was in the scheme of things here.

Urquhart, glancing at him, said, “Come off it, Marsh.” His tone was tolerant, almost bantering, and Shandy for the first time looked thoughtfully at the man himself. He was wearing a tweed suit, not tans. Perhaps to emphasize a difference, as the older man had done with the loony shirt. But the latter had succumbed to army pants, while he… I’m only here as a temporary consultant, thank you, so I won’t need…

Eight years. He had been a lot younger when he first heard of the strange consequences of the Blowup. A rising young psychiatrist? Some older doctor’s Bright Young Man? The suit was frayed. Eight years docked from the prime of learning and earning. Forced as well to learn the techniques for giving and analyzing Rorschach and other tests because it wasn’t feasible to keep a whole battery of psychologists and psychiatric social workers for forty-seven children with whom it was almost useless, as well as dangerous, to come into contact.

“Well,” the man in the corner broke his silence. “Sheath the swords and call it a draw.”

Urquhart smiled. Then he said, “Listen, Shandy, I’ll admit I haven’t the patience and tolerance I once had and ought to have now. I’m not trying to burn you down to the stump. But I like to find out things about people too.”

“But I have no psi.”

“You haven’t now. I know that; even if you had some special or superior kind I don’t believe you would have been able to conceal it all these years. But even with your height and age you haven’t reached puberty yet—and I’ve seen how these things work. Who knows what you might be able to do later?”

“Then why—”

“No, I’m not worried about psychopathic or schizophrenic trends. But you are an Impervious. I’ve never seen one, and I want to know how you tick. It’s special and rare, and it might be very useful to us one day.” He sighed. “If you weren’t so young, it’d be a lot of use to us right now.”

But he would not elaborate.

* * * *

She rested her arms on the sill of her window and looked out into the evening. Her room faced away from the Dump; she was glad of that. There was a stretch of lawn around the flower plot, and beyond that, the brick wall with its gate, the asphalt road, and several wooden barracks buildings for the Military. Lights were on in them. She thought of the lamplight she had watched in the dusty streets the evening before, when she was free.

She had not seen Jason since she arrived. She had sat beside him on the hard jouncing seat of the jeep, grateful that noise and movement had made conversation impossible. She had sensed him becoming glummer and glummer as the ride went on, and finally when they turned into the courtyard and were getting out, he had looked at her, warily, and said, “You mad?” She had said no, and that was it.

There were no bars on her window, but it was two floors up. Unless she were willing to break her neck it was useless to climb out. The room was clean; it contained a bed, table, chest of drawers, and chair. There were a closet and a small windowless bathroom off it. She would have considered it luxurious if there had not been a soldier standing guard outside the door.

She had been interviewed by Urquhart, measured and encephalographed by a white-coated woman doctor in a wheelchair, pumped for minute autobiographical details by a grim Colonel Prothero; she was feeling raw and badly used. Her mind and person, private all her life, had been probed too deeply within the day to suit even her enthusiasm for the acquisition of knowledge.

What am I? I want to know…but I won’t find out from them…

Lights were blinking out in the barracks, and even in the other wing of the redbrick ell she was in. Soldiers slept early, and so did their commanders. Her light was out. She got into bed and slept.

She leaped awake completely disoriented, blinking at the foreign shapes of the cracks of light round the door and the starlit window. She shook her head. There was a racket down below, and the barked commands, door slams, and running about had brought her a rare nightmare: she had crouched in the street with Jason once more, shivering and sick with the terrors of the CP raid. Now wide awake and listening, she felt a small stab of fear.

Nearly everyone in Sorrel Park shared a contempt that was deep and sincere for both the civvies and the MPs. At the same time they had developed a fear of a Dump escape comparable to fears in other times and places of plague and atomic war. Shandy was aware of the incongruity of these emotions, but she had some share in both of them. Only, she sometimes sensed, to have a bond with humanity…because, when she thought about it, she had little to lose.

She ran to the window and looked out. All was calm outside; the grounds were tinged with dull yellow light from the windows below. She opened the door a crack. The soldier was gone, perhaps called down by whatever emergency was going on. She could get out of the building now, probably, but the gates would be manned. And there was excitement going on down below. She headed for it.

The iron staircase was cold to her bare feet; on the lower floor she discovered the source of the noise from the first doorway. The door was ajar.

She pushed it open a little further and peered in. The room was adjacent to Colonel Prothero’s office, and in its opposite doorway two soldiers were supporting a person almost unrecognizable as human. His head was hanging down and his clothes and skin were covered with blood and incredible filth.

She glimpsed Prothero snarling and knuckling his yellow-bristled head as though to pull all the hair out. He was in pajamas. Khaki. The woman doctor, crisp, and immaculately white-coated as she had been during the afternoon, swiveled her chair in front of Shandy’s line of vision and said quietly, “Lay him down on the couch there.”

The spattered thing hanging between the soldiers raised its head. It was Jason Hemmer. One eye was closed and black; he had a bleeding bruise on the cheek below it, and his lips were swollen. He muttered thickly, “Figured they were asleep…they were laying for me…”

Prothero snuffed like a horse. “You heard what she said! Get him down there!”

Shandy craned her neck as the men set Jason on the couch. The doctor wheeled over and obscured the view, dabbing with swabs of cotton and antiseptic.

Jason’s voice ran thickly, broken by groans as the sting of soap and antiseptic hit the raw. “Jocko broke a collarbone, growing—in—ouch, dammit!—all crooked—”

“He’s a tough one…” the woman murmured, turning momentarily to throw a wad of cotton in a wastebasket, “—don’t know if he’ll let me—”

“Yeah…Doydoy’s got an open sore on his neck…the Kingfish’s got an—”

“Hold still, now. This one will hurt.”

“—ugh—abscessed tooth, been drivin’ everybody else nuts—in fact he started this whole thing with me—”

“Get it all down, Tapley!” Prothero roared. “What are you gawking for, man?” Tapley fumbled for his notebook.

“—and La Vonne—she’s hopeless!”

“Well, you’ll try to sort her out for me tomorrow,” she said cheerfully. “That’s about all for now, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Oh—” Jason raised himself up on an elbow, gasping painfully, and Shandy saw his grimacing face over the white shoulder. “Colonel… Colin’s all right.” Prothero grunted.

Shandy, unable to restrain herself, had slipped into the room, flat against the wall, in the shadow by the door.

“And Frankie Slippec?” she whispered.

Jason turned his head. “He’s okay, he—hey! Who are you? I never saw you before—jeez, I can’t read you! What—”

“Lie back, Jason dear,” the doctor said, and added without moving, “and you, Shandy, go back to bed now, please.”

Shandy, suddenly conscious of her threadbare nightgown and her bare feet, cringed and slipped out quickly. But she lingered in the hall long enough to see Urquhart move past the doorway and bend over Jason Hemmer.

“Lie still now, Jason. Go to sleep, boy, and we’ll start getting rid of those blocks. That’s right, close your eyes. Now I’m going to count down from fifteen, and when I get to one..