by C. L. Moore
He started to say no. Then he paused and his little anxious eyes tried to penetrate my thoughts. Finally he said in a tired voice, "Go on, talk. I'm listening."
A distant flicker of caution told me not to spill everything at once. Not now. Not entirely.
"When I got here I found things were even rougher than you'd said," I told him. "I had to take a beating to get to the top boys in San Andreas. You saw me afterward. You know. Well, I didn't tell you who I saw. I didn't say the people who gave me the permit to play in San Andreas were the local Freedom Committee. In person."
Nye leaned to peer at me searchingly, unveiling most of Times Square behind his left ear. New York glittered three thousand windy miles. "Did you get names?" he asked. "Could you identify——"
"The hell with names. I could identify them but I won't. They're small fry. I can use them to catch bigger fish. I want money, Ted. You give me an assignment and I'll guarantee to follow through. You want figures on ammunition caches? You want the names of top men here? You want to know what the anti-Com is? Just say the word and I'll dig up the answers. For a price."
"You're dreaming, Howard." He sounded tired. "You mean they trust you? You just walked in and picked up your permit, for nothing. No lie-box check? I don't believe it."
I looked him straight in the eye. "They haven't got a lie-box. Not here, anyhow. And they trust me just about as far as I trust you. But I earned my permit. I did a little job for them. I stole a hedgehopper and delivered it to the local Committee. So now I'm a rebel. How do you like it?"
He showed his teeth at me. "Damn you, Howard, I warned you! I don't want to interfere with the local authorities. You stick your neck out too far and you get your head chopped off. What did they want with a 'hopper?"
"They didn't say. I could find out. And let me do the worrying about my neck, will you?"
"I'll worry about it until your tour's finished. I need you to run the troupe, not play spy. Wait a minute, I want to think." He rubbed his forehead wearily and his sigh was gusty over all the windy, nighttime miles. I wondered how Raleigh was doing in his ornate bed somewhere in this same enormous night. Dying? Dead? (My mind worked out a sudden, senseless little rhyme. Ted—dead. Nye—die.)
"All right," he said. So you stole a 'hopper. Is it still in reach? Could you get to it without anybody knowing?"
"I think so."
"All right. I'll tell Guthrie to give you a tracer box. I want it slapped on the 'hopper underneath someplace where it won't show. Then we can pick up its signals and find out where it's going. After that you go to bed. Forget about spying. I've got trained men on the job. I don't need amateurs."
"What's in this for me so far?" I asked.
He sighed. "Oh, an extra hundred."
I drew a breath through my teeth and told him what I thought of him. He laughed. The transmission wavered briefly and so did his face, like a reflection in water. He shook his head and his left ear eclipsed Times Square. "Relax and do as you're told," he said. "Now send Guthrie in. He knows his job. You do as he says. Good night, Howard. Take it easy, and for God's sake stop trying to be a hero and just follow orders."
"Sure," I said. "Sure I will. Good night, Ted."
I stood looking at the truck that held my bunk, feeling the warm wind streaming around me, knowing I couldn't sleep yet. I'd drawn too deep, maybe, on the hidden wellsprings inside myself. Tonight the need the actor in the play had felt for the girl Susan Jones was still alive in me. I looked up at the stars and knew my own need. Rohan's need, for a girl like Cressy Kellogg. It was a strange feeling, clean and fresh and new, as if all my old troubles had washed away in the bath of lights and applause tonight.
After a while I turned my back on the trucks and went slowly across the clearing in the moonlight. The camp was quiet. The cast had gone silently to bed, ignoring me, and I was alone in the world, filled with happiness and confidence and this new, warm need. The moonlight slanted in long beams among the trees, touching everything with a blue unreality like moonlight on a stage. Or maybe intensely real, distilled to the clarity only the stage can give. The ferns were silvery against the rich, dark trees, and a sense of secret awareness filled the whole grove. The trees, the ferns, every living thing was alive tonight, and knew it. Even the air had a life of its own. Even I myself ...
I lit a cigarette and watched the pale blue smoke go streaming away in the wind and wondered if Cressy was asleep. I wondered if I could wake her if she was without wakening everybody else. And if she'd come out to me even if I could. Still thinking about it, I followed my blowing smoke slowly up the path toward the fire-eaten redwood, walking like a man in a dream through bars of blue light and bars of rich, windy darkness.
There was somebody leaning against the tree. I saw another streamer of blue smoke blowing and I heard stiff skirts rustle. Then a circle of pale ruffles like spun sugar moved into the light, and I knew I wasn't the only one who had recognized a need in the play tonight. I hadn't played alone. Cressy had been a part of the story too, and a responding part.
She leaned there looking up at me without surprise, not saying anything. I didn't speak either. The play had spoken for us. In somebody else's words we'd already said to each other tonight everything that needed to be said. I ground out my cigarette carefully upon the inward curve of the big tree's burned-out heart, killing the live coal upon the dead one. I took the cigarette from Cressy's fingers and ground it carefully upon the same burned side of the ever living tree.
She turned to me before my arms came up to take her, and the skirts like spun sugar rustled noisily, for one last moment making a barrier between us, before I felt her knees and thighs mold themselves against mine out of the resisting fabric. She was warm and alive in my arms, letting her head lean back against my hand so her eyes met mine and her smiling mouth stopped smiling and waited for my kiss.
It was all here for the asking. Everything I'd lost in the play and surrendered with such passionate need and such painful loss. But something was making trouble in my mind, ... I let my hand move down her back, shaping the essential Cressy firm and real under the springing skirts. But something was wrong.
Somewhere in my mind a door closed, firm and slow.
The fresh newness dissolved in me and for an instant the old and terrible feeling came back. I held a clockwork girl in my arms and the moonlight was brassy. A voice in my mind said, "No, no, this isn't the way you go. This isn't for you. Not yet. Not now." And then the uncontrollable memory of the dream seemed to glance at me like lighting and recede again before I could know its face. I saw a bright dazzle receding downward too fast to read, too dazzling to ignore. The words of fire I wanted to know and must not. Yet. And I opened my arms and let Cressy go.
There wasn't a thing to say.
I stood looking at her bewildered face a moment or two before I shook my head and let my arms drop, made a gesture of negation and helplessness, and walked slowly back through a night gone murky to the caravan and my bunk again.
I lay on the bunk for a long time, looking out at the stars, hearing the wind sough, soft and vast, through the swaying heights above me. I was at first too puzzled and disturbed to sleep.
One thing seemed certain. That dream I thought I had dreamed in the New York bedroom hadn't been a thing that happened in sleep. It had to be real. In a haze of alcohol and drugs I must have perceived dizzily a real man who whispered real words in my ear, the haze distorting everything that happened. Who it was, and why, still swam in the mists of hallucination. But he had told me things I couldn't have dreamed. He had——
I blinked at the stars. He had sent ere, to this troupe, this grove, this one itinerary among all the paths I might have chosen. This one place. Why? What had he told me that I must not remember? I beat my knuckles against my temple trying to jolt an answer out. But you can't get answers that way.
This much, at least, seemed sure—he had planted some compulsion in my mind that was guiding me—somewhere. Not against my will exa
ctly. But against my knowledge. When I took a wrong turning the old, dead numbness came back as it had come tonight. And when I took a right turning ... I remembered the flooding happiness on stage tonight and the very memory of it lit the fire anew. It was all there. It would come again. Suddenly I felt very tired, very relaxed, very confident. No matter what happened, I knew I could handle it as long as I followed the course my instinct told me.
The sky was powdered to pale silver with the infinite multitudes of the stars receding into infinite smallness. The dot of the rebels' star, Charlie Starr's light, winked red, white, and blue over and over among the tops of the ever living trees. The wind blew and the world turned and I sank into oblivion.
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CHAPTER XVIII
A VOICE UNDER MY pillow spoke firm and brisk. It was my own voice. "Get up, Rohan. Time to get up. Rohan!" I struggled painfully out of sleep so deep I wasn't quite sure who I was. When I could, I reached under the pillow and shut off the sleep teacher I'd set last night in lieu of an alarm clock. The dark was thin outside, just grading over toward dawn. In the bunks around me the motionless lumps that were Pod Henken, Roy, and Guthrie lay heavily. The wind had blown itself out, the stars shone pale above the still sequoias, and far off on the highway a truck went by with a muted roar that sounded obscurely comforting in the deathly chill of dawn.
I went quietly about my business, nobody stirring to see me go. It was still dark under the trees and the needles sighed as I walked on them going up to the truck stop. I had a gun in one coat pocket and in the other the little metal tracer box Guthrie had given me to tag the 'hopper with. It was about as big as a match box, but heavy. I paused at the edge of the clearing to look back.
In the silent trucks the silent cast lay sleeping. I owed them an apology, of course. I'd stolen the show last night from under their noses, cut Polly's part, shifted the pivot character from Roy to myself. They'd gone along with me magnificently, but still I owed apologies all around. I would have to make them later. I was on my way to something bigger than the play this morning, and I knew I wouldn't see this grove again.
Already it looked empty. Under the trees the pattern of our rehearsal stage lay deeply grooved in the needles. The wind had scuffed over the patterns last night, but you could see them still. And in my mind's eye I could see the ghostly shapes of all of us, too, still endlessly rehearsing under the hanging light. A lot had happened to me here in this clearing. A different Rohan went out of it.
A confident Rohan. Last night's tremor of the old deadness had gone again. The warm certainty that nothing could go wrong had come back in the night like a flooding tide, filling all the inlets and hollows of my mind up to the brim. In my pockets the gun and the tracer box balanced each other, both heavy and hard. I walked between them through the darkness, chilly and a little awed by the mountain dawn, but warm in the center with happy confidence.
I got coffee and eggs and hot cakes from a waitress moving in her sleep behind the counter. I hitched a ride with a trucker going toward San Andreas. I got off at the right spot and struck out through the fields toward the brown barn. It was that simple.
This was the day when I couldn't make mistakes. The episode with Cressy last night had somehow dissolved like a dream out of my mind and it seemed to me I had never lost the full flood of my confidence. If there was a guard stationed in the fields around the old barn he was asleep or looking the other way. The door creaked with a melancholy sound when I slipped inside. The 'hopper still sat in the musty, cow-smelling dark just as I had known it would. I couldn't make mistakes. Not now.
I touched the 'hopper's flank and it quivered like something nervous and responsive, glad of company. The tracer box was heavy in my hand. I slapped it on the underside of the 'hopper's frame and felt it leap the last half inch out of my palm and smack eagerly onto the metal surface. Magnetized, I supposed. Anyhow, it stuck.
I seemed to hear Nye's acid voice saying, "For God's sake stop trying to be a hero and follow orders." I laughed, gave the 'hopper a farewell pat (it shivered gratefully), and went out into the rapidly paling dawn. I had no intention of following orders.
From Nye's viewpoint I was now finished. From my own I hadn't even started yet. This was a lead I'd bought with my own sweat and blood. I'd risked my neck for the rebel contacts and the 'hopper. Out of what I'd done, somebody was going to make discoveries, trace leads, collect credit. I intended the somebody to be me.
The 'hopper itself was nothing. It might or might not lead into something. I needed a very important something to buy my theater with. I stood there in the thin darkness, breathing deep, testing my intention cautiously against reality. Could I do it? Would the world stay firm and docile under my feet? It would. Confidence brimmed in me like a deep, still tide. I was on the right path. There would be no turning back.
I hadn't a doubt in the world I could do what I meant to do.
The world was awake and rustling around me as I toiled up the mountain slope above the fields where the barn stood. Birds shrilled in the leaves. The sky glowed bright gold in the cloudless east and the morning smelled new-minted. I sat down under a tree to wait. It was wonderful to be alive.
If I had guessed right, whoever came for the 'hopper would have to bring it up in this direction. He wasn't likely to return the way it had come. He was even less likely to drive through San Andreas. From my vantage spot up here I could tell which way he was heading. I could get there first.
He didn't show up for so long I had begun to get sleepy again. The woods were alive around me and the warming air that rose from the meadows breathed upward still and peaceful and fragrant. But after a while I heard a faint buzzing far off and woke from a half doze. At first I couldn't see any motion, but then the high grass began to thresh in a diagonal across one of the meadows that the 'hopper with one man in it showed briefly before it dived again into cover and came invisibly toward the mountain in a heaving of grass, its buzz no louder than a bee's. It seemed to be alone. My luck still held.
I dusted myself off and set out to cut across its path. I had plenty of time. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do, but it didn't worry me. The magic had come back and I knew I couldn't go wrong. I heard the humming deepen as the 'hopper began to climb, and I pulled the gun out of my pocket and ran, bending low, the branches whipping my face. The driver was headed for a gap in the mountain ridge, and I wanted to get there first.
I made it with not much time to spare. On the way I ran into a broken branch that dragged a long scratch across my forehead, and even that was luck, though I didn't know it then. I felt blood begin to trickle and swiped it angrily with the back of my hand as I labored up the slope. The buzzing below swelled like a hive full of bees, and I topped the ridge and looked down on the oval top of the 'hopper bouncing briskly across the side of the hill, the legs on one side bent up tight and the legs on the other long. The driver sat low in the bucket seat, his knees bent high. I was close enough so I couldn't miss.
I took very deliberate aim and shot him through the calf of his left leg. The crack of the gun sounded crisp and loud in the woods, the echoes bouncing off from tree to tree like the sound of many guns firing. Maybe that's where I got my next idea.
I saw the driver double up to grab at his leg, and the 'hopper veered in a downhill semicircle and heaved to a stop. The idea bloomed full size in my mind and I spun away and scrambled over the slope in the gully I'd just emerged from. I rolled a little way downhill, and then I yelled as loud as I could three or four times, changing my voice between yells. At random I fired the rest of the shots in my gun among the trees, still yelling. One bullet whined off a rock. The echoes of them all resounded between the gully walls and diminished among the pines until my little gun fight with myself sounded like a brisk battle among half a dozen. I reloaded fast and fired off three more shots, yelling in several voices. And then I went calmly back across the hillside to the 'hopper.
My man was flat on the ground behind a rock, a gun n
osing at me over the top and his eyes looking wide and surprised behind it. I dropped my gun in my pocket and held up both hands.
"It's okay," I called to him. "They're gone. Are you all right?"
"Who were they?" he countered, not stirring.
"Comus, I think. Or renegades. How can you tell? I didn't get a very good look." I smeared the blood trickling down my face to improve things as much as possible. "I was lucky," I told him modestly. "All I got was this. How about you?"
"Never mind about me," he said, still watching me over his gun. "Who are you? What are you doing here?"
I gave him a candid look. "Name's Rohan. My troupe put on a play last night in San Andreas. Also I'm the guy who swiped that 'hopper. Harris's orders." I smeared my bleeding forehead again and started to turn away. "If you're all right, I'll go on back," I said.
"I asked what you were doing here." He tapped the gun barrel on the rock slightly to remind me about it.
"Tell you the truth," I said with candor, "I wasn't so sure just what Harris was planning to do with that 'hopper. After all, I stole it. My prints are all over it. If Harris wants to get me shot all he has to do is have it driven into the nearest Comus station. I got thinking about it last night and I couldn't sleep until I'd checked on it. When I saw you take off over the mountain I figured it was worth a little climb to see what's on this side. Maybe a Comus outfit, for all I knew. Then I heard shots and——" I gestured at my smeared forehead. "There were only two of them and they're probably a mile away by now." I paused. "All right if I go now?" I added plaintively.
He heaved himself up from behind the rock, putting his gun away. "Lucky for me you were here," he said grudgingly. "Thanks." He looked down at his leg. The cloth was soaked and blood had begun to trickle down the rock he lay on.
I said quickly, "That doesn't look too good. Let's see." The bullet had gone through, leaving an unpleasant-looking hole on each side of his calf, and he was bleeding pretty freely. I didn't believe it was serious, but I wanted him to think it was. I gambled on the hope that he was as little used as I to this kind of derring-do. "Got a handkerchief?" I asked. "You're losing too much blood. Maybe you'd better get on back to town." I let him think it over and then added, "I could drive. I don't think you should."