Sunburst: 6

“You!” He put back the bottle and glass and dumped the cigar in the sink. She stood up. As the cabinet door swung to she glimpsed the reflection of her face, slate eyes livid against dark skin.

“You sneak!” He grabbed her shoulders and began to shake her. Ridiculously she was reminded of Ma Slippec beating her carpets out of the window. “You filthy guttersnipe! Spying—”

She twisted in his grasp. “I didn’t come to spy! I—”

“—sticking your nose in—”

“—came to ask—”

“—everything, digging up dirt! What do you want here?”

“—if I could see the Dump files!”

“There’s no money in this place! Human garbage, wrecked lives—”

“I don’t want to pry into your life, and I don’t want money!” She wrenched her shoulders away from his hands. “I came to ask to see the Dump files,”—she stamped her foot—“to ask, to ask, to ask!”

They stood glaring at each other, both winded. She gulped and finished lamely, “I was sitting here waiting and when I heard everybody coming I got scared and hid.”

He said slowly, “Maybe you don’t belong in the Dump…but you do belong out there in a court of civil law.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t want you here, but I haven’t got all the say in the matter.”

He strode into the office and over to the filing-cabinet, jerked open a drawer—her eyes were too blurred to see whether it was marked D—and yanked out a thick wad of folders. He slammed it on the desk and leafed through it with trembling hands, pulled out one folder and threw it back in the drawer. He looked up and said through his teeth, “Urquhart said if you asked I was to give you the Dump files.” He picked them up and shoved them at her, and she clutched them to her chest.

“Urquhart has lots of bright ideas,” said Prothero. “But if you want to know what I think, I think he’s a fool—and you’re a thief! Now get out!”

At the door she tripped, twisted to keep hold of the files, and sat down hard on the hall floor. She saw that what she had tripped over was a foot, and looked up at the soldier by the door. It was Davey. She scrambled up and glared at him, but his face was expressionless.

“Touché!” she snarled, and made her way down the hall, into the first dark doorway, where she found a chair, set the files on the floor, and burst into tears.

* * * *

Simultaneously the lights went on and the peculiar tp sound broke on the air.

Jason was sitting at the desk. They were in Urquhart’s office.

“Auditioning for the next Passion Play?” His voice was heavy with sarcasm. She looked up through the tears and saw her hair had broken loose and was bursting out all around her head. Still sobbing, she reached down, fumbled the lace out of a shoe, and tied it back.

“You nut! You had him all ready to like and trust you, and you had to louse it up. What are you blubbering for?”

“I’m insulted.”

He began to laugh.

“Go ahead, if you can get fun out of my pratfalls.”

“I didn’t think that was funny. Are you hurt?”

“Only when you laugh.”

He did his best to smooth his face. “I’m not laughing. Why are you insulted?”

“Because I went in there to—”

“Yeah, I know. You went in there to ask. Well, why’n hell didn’t you?”

“I got scared.”

He snorted. “Oh boy, the Reckless Roamer of Sorrel Park. Never scared in your life…so what? So he would’ve been mad. He wouldn’t have bit your head off—just an ear or two. Now look what you did to him. Was he broadcasting! Nearly took my head off.”

“Why didn’t you stop him? You could’ve.”

“Stop him! You’re a panic. He’s got a head like a bull. I couldn’t try anything on him without his finding out sooner or later, and I couldn’t stay around here ten minutes after he did. He doesn’t really believe it can be done, and I wouldn’t want to be the one to prove it to him. All that stuff with Colin—that was his pride being broken for the hundredth time—twice over because you saw it.”

She took a wad of tissues from Urquhart’s desk and swabbed her face. “I didn’t want to see it.”

“I know you didn’t. But you were sneaky, and you can’t be sneaky around psi even if you’re an Imper—it’s not the best policy. Besides, you heard him. Urquhart told him to let you have the files if you asked.”

“Why didn’t Urquhart just give them to me?”

“He wanted you to think it up for yourself.”

“Oh yeah. So I thought it up and this is what I get for it.”

“You got the files.”

“I don’t want them now—oh, I guess I do. Why did Urquhart want me to ask for them?”

“Ask him.”

She rested her chin on her hands and thought for a moment. “Suppose it was like a test?”

He was silent.

“If I’m not interested in people I’m useless—and I’m too scared to handle them properly it doesn’t matter how interested I am. If you look at it that way I’ve passed one part of it and failed the other.” She smiled. “Maybe I’ve passed a third part by figuring it all out for myself.”

He whistled a bar of melody elaborate with grace notes and arpeggios. “Maybe. Figure you know everything now?”

“No. I still don’t know why you’re here.”

His brow became a pair of joined circumflexes, but he relaxed and stretched. “Look in my file.”

“It wouldn’t be here. These are Dump files.”

“Kiddo…we’re all in the Dump.”

She picked up the heap of files and leafed them.

Names flicked before her eyes: COOK, Elizabeth (Lexy); DOLLARD, John (Jocko); …HALSEY, Grace; HEMMER, Jason; HURLEY, LaVonne; KING, Harvey (Scooter) (Kingfish); …PROTHERO, Colin Adams; PROTHERO, Stephen Decatur…

She stopped. “Swift said it was a brave man that first ate an oyster… Prothero’s put his file in my hands.”

“Oh, he’s brave, all right. But in this case he’s just dumb.”

“I know he took one out. I guess it was mine. But Urquhart’s here, I see. He must have handled the interviews. Who did his?”

“He handed in his analyst’s report.”

She put the files down. “Does your file tell why you’re here, Jason? Don’t ask me to look at it. It’ll tell me all about when you were born, and what you weighed, and whether you were a good-natured kid, and if you broke windows or stole apples. I don’t need that kind of junk. I know I’m the only person you can’t read, and you could say it’s a good enough reason not to trust me…maybe you forget to look at the outsides of people once in a while, because you’re so busy with the inside. But you know what people look like and how they sound when they’re telling lies; you haven’t forgotten everything you learned before you found you had psi.”

Jason sighed. “Yeah. It’s possible. But maybe you’d like to tell me something: why you want to know.”

“I want to know why I ought to stay here,” said Shandy. “I think I could get out if I really tried. You could say it’s my duty to stay, but what do I know about this kind of duty? I’m thirteen years old.

“Nobody knew about you when the Dump was set up. You came here four years later, so you must have come of your own free will. I can see you’ve got a necessary job, but it’s a terribly ugly and dangerous one. Marczinek and the rest just fell into their jobs when they didn’t know they were going to have to stay so long. Nobody forced them to come in the first place, but they had age and experience to help them decide. How could you make such a complicated moral decision at the age of fourteen? Why should I even have to think about it at my age?”

“Maybe,” said Jason, “we just oughta say that if I couldn’t, I’d be in the Dump—and if you couldn’t, you wouldn’t be Shandy Johnson.” He stood up and went over to the window. There was a Walpurgis-Night glow over the rim of the Dump; it gave the watcher the sense of a place where hideous sacrifices were being offered. “That might be nearly all of the answer for you…but it isn’t all of it for me…”

Shandy said, “If you think I’m being too snoopy I won’t pester you anymore.”

“That’s kind of an ambitious statement! Nah, I have to be a lot snoopier—in meaner ways. What I’m getting round to telling you, Shandy, is: there’s two other psis like me in Sorrel Park.”

“Is that right! I guess I don’t know them.”

“No. I hope you never will. One’s a girl—a married woman now—about twenty-four, and the other’s a boy of eleven.”

“Are they bright?”

He turned away from the window, grinning. “I could’ve guessed you’d ask that. Bright enough.”

“Gee, if they could get along like that, without anybody knowing, maybe Doydoy—”

“No.” He sighed. “Not with the present set-up.”

“Powerful?”

“Not in Doydoy’s class, though the boy’s a firecracker. He’s strong and healthy and lively, everything Doydoy should have been… I never forgot him crawling on his hands like that. I wouldn’t let it happen again. I knew Prothero needed somebody like me, because pulling in all the kids in Sorrel Park for examination every year or two was too chancy and sloppy. I got together with the others and worked it out. The kid’s too young and irresponsible. The girl would’ve come, but she wasn’t really strong, physically, and she’d been going to get married…and I’m a tough lunk and don’t look too bright. So I let myself get pulled in. That way I got to have a say about who comes—and who stays. That’s all there is.” He came over and sat down again.

“You’re lucky you didn’t get thrown in the Dump.”

“It wasn’t easy—I had to come out like a solid citizen on the tests, and still not look like I was here on purpose. It nearly got queered because Urquhart figured there was something up right away. But he knew a good thing when he saw it.”

“Does he know about the others?”

“He’s met them, and he’s tested them too. When I was sure I could trust him I thought that’d be the best way to get him to trust me…you saw he knows how to keep his mouth shut.”

“I can do the same.” She bit her lip. “One more thing. I know I really shouldn’t ask—”

“Don’t let that stop you.”

“You’ve gone through a lot to keep others out of the Dump…but you knew I had no psi—and you knew pretty well that if you brought me here I’d be staying. How come you brought me in, Jason?”

He laughed. “It’s what I like about your questions: you can always answer with a simple yes or no. Well, kiddo,”—he slapped the desk and stood up—“the minute I saw you, I says: Jason, here’s one you don’t have to worry about. This doll can take care of herself.”

Shandy was sitting on her bed, trying to put her thoughts in order. She was a little ashamed that she had chivvied Jason into telling her about the other psis, but at least she had penetrated the mystery she had sensed around him. She was resolving to leave him alone and try to forget them, when she felt a sudden stab of jealousy. From his words about them she had deduced a network of friendship and dependence among the three of them; the Dumpling pack had evolved nothing comparable.

But she had never belonged to anything, and she didn’t belong to anything now, either. She muttered, “Feelin’ real sorry for yourself, kook?”

She had just been given her first emotional hotfoot. She had told Urquhart that she had previously gotten her emotions from books, and it was true. Yet, she had also seen the Slippecs in orgies of fury and drunken hate, and had moved aside in her mind to watch them, believing that there was something artificial about them because she herself had never been touched. She conceded now that she might possibly have been mistaken.

If the Slippecs flung their emotions about it did not necessarily mean that they were not real and painful, if only for the short time they lasted. She deduced this because she was feeling real and painful. She had flubbed the business of the files from A to Z and would have given quite a lot to have missed the interchange between Colin and Prothero. She had seen Prothero with something on his back that was every bit as terrible as her father’s scar; and the face of X had come too close for comfort. It was not the kind of experience she thirsted for.

Besides all of which she had been chewed out by both Prothero and Jason. She was furious at herself. She trudged into the bathroom to clean her teeth and confronted her reflection.

“Dumbhead!” She snarled at the dark face the locked-in gene of some forgotten Italian or Spaniard had given her, the child of fair-skinned northern parents. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

Prothero had called her a thief.

But she had seriously considered stealing the files when they were hers for the asking all along. She had never thought of herself as immoral—only a person who had to know things and made sure she found out. For years she had toted jugs of corn from the Slippecs’ still to Fitch’s Joint, without stopping to wonder whether it was wrong. Prohibition was a stupid business; but although the civvies may have encouraged spying and betrayals, the law did not require them. If the law had been obeyed as it stood would the people have been harmed by it?

The spirit of Sorrel Park had been warped by tragedy, barbed wire, and terribly repressive policing. Did this give the citizens an inalienable right to break laws in order to make themselves sick with rotgut? And she had taken full jugs from Ma Slippec and handed them to Fitch; empties from Fitch to be filled by Ma Slippec.

If she had refused would they have forced her to go on, or found her some other way to be useful? She had never put the matter to a test and now it was too late.

But I was only a kid then, I didn’t know what I was doing. And I’m still a kid, anyway. I can’t help…

…thinking like a Dumpling.

She tugged at the frayed lace binding her hair. It snapped, and she flung it away. She made a face in the mirror. Beautiful. Now your hair’s hangin’ down like spaniel ears. She yanked at it, but it stayed. It would have been pretty silly if it had come out.

She noticed a pimple under the angle of her jaw: a stigma of adolescence. That and two hairs in the left armpit. Whee, I’m growing up! She peered down the neck of her jersey. Nothing dangerous there yet. Her feet came to her attention. Long red sneakers, 7½AAAA, no laces. She kicked the unlaced shoe off her foot into the bedroom and followed it in. Thin soles, rubber parting from the uppers, toes about to come out. They had stained her socks many a time in the winter slush, and no new ones in sight. Mebbe when I git the new batch out, dearie? Couple jugs ought a make it? Even if the cigar store had not been a front it would not have brought in enough money to buy her shoes. Her life had been founded on immorality.

There was a pair of new white shoelaces on the bed. She smiled at them; she was grateful, but it was a pity Jason couldn’t have managed the shoes to go with them. She threaded in the new laces, pulled the heap of files onto her lap, and immersed herself in less personal problems.

* * * *

Q: Do you know what’s happening now?

A: You got me hyp—hypma—

Q: I’ve used drugs and hypnosis to inhibit your tp and pk. You may not understand my words, but you can still read my mind and you know I don’t mean you any harm.

A: Yeah…I guess…

Q: And it’s no use trying to fight. You’re much too sleepy. You’ve got quite a record with the civvies, haven’t you, John?

A: Call me Jocko.

Q: All right, Jocko. I was talking to your mother and father and—

A: That ain’t my pop. He’s in the bughouse. That’s Moe.

Q: Moe? Moe who?

A: I dunno. Moe, shmoe. Who cares?

* * * *

A: Stephen Decatur…yeah, my people had me slated for the Navy—but I ended up in the Army instead—sure, they were upset… I’ve always had a funny feeling that I got into all this trouble because I went against them—don’t tell me that’s irrational, I know it already.

Q: I don’t tell people they’re irrational—I just try to help them figure it out for themselves.

A: Well, I figured it out for myself, but I’m no further ahead.

Q: That hasn’t gone far enough as an insight. Maybe you could get some help out of a couple of years of analysis.

A: Analysis! Lie around on a couch and tell some clot how I wet the bed when I was eight years old!

Q: Did you? How old were you when you stopped?

A: None of your goddam business!

* * * *

Q: There’s something I can’t figure out here, Jason. Your file says you were pulled into juvenile court when you were nine years old for malicious mischief—you and Charley Longhouse threw some rocks into Koerner-the-Florist’s window.

A: Yeah, that old bat. The judge gave me probation—my father didn’t, though.

Q: Then you apparently went straight, did well in school, and kept off the books altogether till the day before yesterday, when you broke into Chremsler’s Market Garden and started teeping cabbages and potatoes down Alicia St., giving Mayor Hough a black eye in the process. If it hadn’t been for that, nobody’d have known you were a psi. How come?

A: Well, gee, I guess I just kinda went crazy, that’s all.

Q: That so? Um, tell me, Jason…do you like having psi?

A: Not much.

Q: Why not? You can get what you want, read people’s minds—

A: There’s not much to take around here, and I got my folks here, so I don’t want to leave…the insides of people’s minds isn’t something you want to live with every day, some people, anyway. Things get spoiled: I see a nice-lookin’ doll comin’ down the street all dressed up, and she’s thinkin’, Is the powder covering the pimple on my nose? Oh, you can laugh. I’m only fourteen, I got plenty of time—but I don’t see why I hafta get my ideas all squashed before I’m old enough to really enjoy ’em. It’s no ball having psi.

Q: Maybe not—but I wouldn’t mind knowing what you’re thinking right now.

A: Honest, Doc—nothin’ there but the ordinary junk.

Q: I think I’d like to be able to judge that for myself!

* * * *

A: Help!

Q: I’m trying to help you, son. Please be still. I’m not going to hurt you.

A: I can’t… I want…let me…let me go!

Q: Donatus—is that your name?

A: They—they call—call me—Doydoy.

Q: I don’t want to call you that. Tell me how this happened to you, Donatus.

A: I—I d-on’t know! I want-want my mother, fa-father! Mother, help!

Q: I’m afraid I just can’t do anything more with him, sir.

* * * *

Q: I care.

A: Aah, don’t gimme that malarkey. Remember I know what’s goin’ on in your mind. Just the look of me makes you want to puke.

Q: I never—

A: You don’t have to say. You haven’t got it straight yet. Your mind’s a piece of cellophane to me. You don’t have to say. But it’s my body and I’m stuck with it. I can do anything I like but change my body, ’cause I can’t be sure it’d keep workin’ if I did. Roxy Howard tried it an’ killed herself an’ I’m not gonna be that kind of nut. But if you didn’t have me pegged down like this I could do anything I liked with you. I could change those brains you’re so uppity about into cheese or jelly or lead. Then you wouldn’t think I was so ugly because you wouldn’t be thinkin’.

Q: You don’t have to be ugly inside, LaVonne.

A: Anybody gonna worry what’s inside me? Twisted guts. Them others, they make me laugh. So their old lady spits on them or their old man kicks them around. I got cheated before I was even born! Queen of Sheba coulda been my mother, wouldna made no difference.

Ain’t nobody in the world don’t owe me something for letting me be born. An’ I’m gonna collect. Every time, no matter what you think you can do with me. So don’t gimme any bull that you care.

Q: I guess I’ve gotten all I want from you, LaVonne. But I’ll tell you…you haven’t gone deep enough into those layers of cellophane. I do care…and that’s just the damn fool thing about it.

* * * *

Shandy tidied the heap of closed files and closed her eyes against the face of X. It was an ugly face, a lonely face, radiating with the force of the psi to make its mark on Sorrel Park. Including herself, because she was here. She had told Jason she thought she could escape if she wanted to, but that was half-bravado, and even if she were free the problem would never die in her in the same way as she could get rid of Fitch and the bootlegging business. She was committed.

The ceiling light flickered and she glanced at it. The naked bulb in its mesh housing reminded her of Colin Prothero in his cage, and she shivered, and then yawned. Her time-sense told her it was one-thirty a.m., give or take five minutes; she was going to be terribly cross in the morning. She stretched her arms and yawned again.

And the light exploded.

Without thinking, she flicked off the bed like a lizard and rolled under. She waited there motionless for a few seconds, and then became aware of a stinging scratch on one cheekbone. She rubbed at it, and a sliver of glass came away on her finger.

She thought she heard noises outside, but nothing happened, so she crawled out from under and felt her way over to the window. She slid up the blind: except for a few misty stars there was no light outside.

A voice said, “It’s okay. Don’t get scared.”

“Jason! What happened?”

“The lights went out.”

“Is that right? I’m glad you told me. What are we going to do now?”

“Hold hands.”

“Why Jason, I thought you were going to wait till I grew up.”

“Come on, take my hand and I’ll get you over to Grace’s room. She’s nervous and I want you to be with her while we scout around and see what’s up.”

She found his hand. The palm was not only sweated, but vibrating with such rigors it seemed the whole force of his body was behind them. “Jason.”

“Yeah.” There was a ragged edge to his voice that made her pause, but not for long.

“I know you wouldn’t be scared…why are you shaking?”

“I just caught a chill,” said Jason. “Come on—”

* * * *

Grace Halsey was huddled in her bed, and Shandy knelt beside her. “There’s plenty men posted here, so don’t get worried,” said Jason, and he was gone.

“I am, just the same… Grace, do you think they’ve gotten—” She saw in the dim light that Grace Halsey, too, was trembling. She caught her breath. “They have gotten out!”

“Please, dear, don’t—”

“But nothing can stop—why has he left us here?”

Grace fought for control. “They—you see, they trusted me, they know me, and they hardly realize anything about you; no-one has to worry about us. Really, we’re the two people least likely to be hurt.”

“Oh—I’m sorry, Grace.” She was ashamed. “I shouldn’t have let go like such a nut.”

“It’s all right.” But the trembling increased.

“Grace, you’re crying…” Shandy touched the quivering shoulder, terrified.

Grace found a handkerchief and managed to control herself. “Shandy, I—I was a neurosurgeon before…the paralysis—and after that I thought I’d never be able…they asked me to come here and take care of those children… I—I trusted them. I hoped—oh,”—she blew her nose—“I’m so silly.” Shandy buttoned her lip. After a moment the voice came out of the dark again.

“My dear,” Grace said sadly, “there’s only one thing to be said about it. It’s a mug’s game.”