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 saidattention! 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 markedBupers 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'reunder 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 didbelievethere were wildmen in the woods. That didn't mean therewere.
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'mnot 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'rethe 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?"
"Whatwoulda 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."
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 intoherwoods 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 afinevessel 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 subTaft," 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.
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."Thatwas nice work, he congratulated himself. Got in Van Dellen and the tech.... Maybe, come to think of it, the techwascrooked? 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'llbe 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 anoldreligion—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, literallynever, 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 toogeneral." 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 gettingusfrom 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.
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 ageneralstatement, 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 ageneralstatement," 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.
"Youbreak 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 changeeverymolecule 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 yourbeingrather thanessenseis—"
"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 ofpsiforce, 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 hereditarypsipower? He mocked himself savagely: that's such ageneralquestion!
Neurotic adolescent girls in kerosene-lit farmhouses, he thought vaguely. Things that go bump—and crash and blooie andwhoo-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 andthenmade 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—youdidcall 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'sgoing 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 wayshegot 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: "Sheset the power of the goddess to guard them."
"Listen to me, Martha," he said. "I meanlisten. 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?"
"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, ithadto 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 yousure?"
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'vegotto 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. Ifshecomes 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, yousureI 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'shard."
"Didyou?"
She grinned crookedly and chanted something he did not understand: