Enoch waited, watching the both of them.
“God help me,” cried Hank. “My own daughter is a witch!”
“I think,” said Enoch, “you should go back home. If I happen to find Lucy, I will bring her there.”
Neither of them made a move.
“You haven’t heard the last of this,” yelled Hank. “You have my daughter somewhere and I’ll get you for it.”
“Any time you want,” said Enoch, “but not now.”
He made an imperative gesture with the rifle barrel.
“Get moving,” he said. “And don’t come back. Either one of you.”
They hesitated for a moment, looking at him, trying to gauge him, trying to guess what he might do next.
Slowly they turned and, walking side by side, moved off down the hill.
XV
HE should have killed both of them, he thought. They were not fit to live.
He glanced down at the rifle. His hands had such a grip on the gun that his fingers stood out white and stiff against the satin brown of the wood.
He gasped a little in his effort to fight down the rage that boiled inside him, trying to explode. If they had stayed here any longer he’d have given in to that towering rage.
Even as it stood, it would be bad. They would say he was a madman; that he had run them off at gunpoint. They might even say that he had kidnaped Lucy and was holding her against her will. They would stop at nothing to make him all the trouble that they could.
He had no illusions about what they might do, for he knew the breed, vindictive in their smallness—little vicious insects of the human race.
He stood beside the porch and watched them down the hill, wondering how a girl so fine as Lucy could spring from such decadent stock. Perhaps her handicap had kept her from becoming another one of them. Perhaps if she could have talked with them or listened, she would in time have become as shiftless and as vicious as any one of them.
It had been a great mistake to get mixed up in a thing like this. A man in his position had too much to lose.
And yet what could he have done? Could he have refused to give Lucy his protection, with the blood soaking through her dress from the lashes that lay across her shoulders? Should he have ignored the frantic, helpless pleading in her face?
He turned heavily around and went back inside the station.
LUCY was still sitting on the sofa. She held a flashing object in her hand, staring at it raptly. Her face again held that same vibrant and alert expression he had seen that morning when she’d held the butterfly.
He laid the rifle on the desk and stood quietly there, but she must have caught the motion of him. She looked quickly up. Then her eyes went back to the flashing thing in her hands.
It was the pyramid of spheres. Now all the spheres were spinning slowly, in alternating clockwise and counterclockwise motions. As they spun they shone and glittered, each in its own particular color, as if there might be, deep inside each one of them, a source of soft, warm light.
Enoch caught his breath at the beauty and the wonder of it—the old, hard wonder of what this thing might be and what it might be meant to do. He had puzzled at it a hundred times or more. He could find nothing significant. So far as he could see, it was only meant to look at, although there had been that persistent feeling of purpose—that, perhaps, somehow, it was meant to operate.
And now it was in operation.
He had tried it a hundred times; Lucy had picked it up just once; and she had got it figured out.
He noticed the rapture on her face. Was it possible that she knew its purpose?
He went across the room and touched her arm. She lifted her face to look at him, and in her eyes he saw the gleam of happiness and excitement.
He made a questioning gesture toward the pyramid, trying to ask if she knew what it might be. But she did not understand him. Or perhaps she knew, but knew as well how impossible it would be to explain its purpose. She made that happy, fluttery motion with her hand again, indicating the table with its load of gadgets. There was laughter in her face.
Just a kid, Enoch told himself, with a box heaped high with new and wondrous toys.
Was that all it was to her? Was she happy and excited merely because she suddenly had become aware of all the beauty and the novelty of the things stacked there on the table?
He turned wearily and went back to the desk. He picked up the rifle and hung it on the pegs.
SHE should not be in the station. No human being other than himself should ever be inside the station. Bringing her here, he had broken that unspoken understanding he had with the aliens who had installed him as a keeper. Although, of all humans, Lucy was the one who could possibly be exempt from the restriction. For she could never tell the things that she had seen.
She could not remain. She must be taken home. Otherwise there would be a massive hunt for her, a lost girl—a beautiful deaf-mute.
A story like that would bring in newspapermen in a day or two. The woods would be swarming with searchers.
Hank Fisher would tell how he’d tried to break into the house and couldn’t. Then others would try to break in and there’d be hell to pay.
Enoch sweated, thinking of it.
All the years of keeping out of people’s way would be for nothing then. This strange house on a lonely ridge would become an international mystery, and a challenging target for all the crackpots of the world.
He went to the medicine cabinet, to get the healing ointment that had been included in the drug packet provided by Galactic Central.
He opened the little box. More than half of it remained. He’d used it through the years, but sparingly. There was, in fact, little need to use a great deal of it.
He went across the room to Lucy, showed her what he had and made motions to show her what it was for. She slid her dress off her shoulders and he bent to look at the slashes.
The bleeding had stopped, but the flesh was red and angry.
Gently he rubbed ointment into the stripes that the whip had made.
She had healed the butterfly, he thought; but she could not heal herself.
On the table in front of her the pyramid of spheres still was flashing and glinting, throwing a flickering shadow of color all about the room.
It was operating, but what could it be doing?
XVI
ULYSSES came as twilight was deepening into night.
Enoch and Lucy had just finished with their supper and were sitting at the table when Enoch heard his footsteps.
The alien stood in shadow and he looked, Enoch thought, more than ever like the cruel clown. His lithe, flowing body had the look of smoked, tanned buckskin. The patchwork color of his hide seemed to shine faintly; the hard angles of his face, the bald head, the flat, pointed ears pasted tight against the skull, lent him a vicious fearsomeness.
If one did not know him for the gentle character that he was, Enoch told himself, he would be enough to scare a man out of seven years of growth.
“We had been expecting you,” said Enoch. “The coffee pot is boiling.”
Ulysses took a slow step forward, then paused.
“You have another with you. A human, I would say.”
“There is no danger,” Enoch told him.
“Of another gender. A female, is it not? You have found a mate?”
“No,” said Enoch. “She is not my mate.”
“You have acted wisely through the years,” Ulysses told him. “In a position such as yours, a mate is not the best.”
“You need not worry. There is a malady upon her. She has no communication. She can neither hear nor speak.”
“A malady?”
“Yes, from the moment she was born. She has never heard or spoken. She can tell of nothing here.”
“Sign language?”
“She knows no sign language. She refused to learn it.”
“She is a friend of yours.”
“For some years,” said Enoch. “She cam
e seeking my protection. Her father used a whip to beat her.”
“This father knows she’s here?”
“He thinks she is. But he cannot know.”
Ulysses came slowly out of the darkness and stood within the light.
Lucy was watching him. There was no terror on her face. Her eyes were level and untroubled and she did not flinch.
“She takes me well,” Ulysses said. “She does not run or scream.”
“She could not scream,” said Enoch, “even if she wished.”
“I MUST be most repugnant,” Ulysses said, “at first sight to any human.”
“She does not see the outside only. She sees inside of you as well.”
“Would she be frightened if I made a human bow to her?”
“I think,” said Enoch, “she might be very pleased.”
Ulysses made his bow, formal and exaggerated, with one hand upon his leathery belly, bowing from the waist.
Lucy smiled and clapped her hands.
“You see?” Ulysses cried, delighted. “I think that she may like me.”
“Why don’t you sit down, then,” suggested Enoch, “and we all will have some coffee.”
“I had forgotten of the coffee. The sight of this other human drove coffee from my mind.”
He sat down at the place where the third cup had been set, waiting for him. Enoch started around the table, but Lucy rose and went to get the coffee.
“She understands?” Ulysses asked.
Enoch shook his head. “You sat down by the cup and the cup was empty.”
She poured the coffee, then went over to the sofa.
“She will not stay with us?” Ulysses asked.
“She’s intrigued by that table full of trinkets. She set one of them to going.”
“You plan to keep her here?”
“I can’t keep her,” Enoch said. “There’ll be a hunt for her. I’ll have to take her home.”
“I do not like it,” Ulysses said. “Nor do I. Let’s admit at once that I should not have brought her here. But at the time it seemed the only thing to do. I had no time to think it out.”
“You’ve done no wrong,” said Ulysses, softly.
“She cannot harm us,” said Enoch. “Without communication of any kind . . .”
“It’s not that,” Ulysses told him. “She’s just a complication and I do not like further complications. I came tonight to tell you, Enoch, that we are in trouble.”
“Trouble? But there’s not been any trouble.”
Ulysses lifted his coffee cup and took a long drink of it.
“That is good,” he said. “I carry back the bean and make it at my home. But it does not taste the same.”
“This trouble?”
“You remember the Vegan that died here several of your years ago.”
Enoch nodded. “The Hazer.”
“The being has a proper name of his own . . .”
Enoch laughed. “You don’t like our nicknames.”
“It is not our way,” Ulysses said.
“My name for them,” said Enoch, “is a mark of my affection.”
“You buried this Vegan.”
“In my family plot,” said Enoch. “As if he were my own. I read a verse above him.”
“That is well and good,” Ulysses said. “That is as it should be. But the body’s gone.”
“GONE! It can’t be gone!” cried Enoch.
“It has been taken from the grave.”
“But you can’t know,” protested Enoch. “How could you know?”
“Not I. The Vegans are the ones who know.”
“But they’re light years distant from here . . .”
And then he was not too sure. For on that night the wise old one had died and he’d messaged Galactic Central he had been told that the Vegans had known the moment he had died. And there had been no need for a death certificate, for they knew of what he died.
It seemed impossible, of course. But there were too many impossibilities in the galaxy—which turned out, after all, to be entirely possible—for a man to ever know when he stood on solid ground.
Was it possible, he wondered, that each Vegan had some sort of mental contact with every other Vegan? Or that some central census bureau (to give a human designation to something that was scarcely understandable) might have some sort of official linkage with every living Vegan, knowing where it was and how it was and what it might be doing?
Something of the sort, Enoch admitted, might indeed be possible. It was not beyond the astounding capabilities that one found on every hand throughout the galaxy. But to maintain a similar contact with the Vegan dead was something else again.
“The body’s gone,” Ulysses said. “I can tell you that and know it is the truth. You’re held accountable.”
“By the Vegans?”
“By the Vegans, yes. And the galaxy.”
“I did what I could!” said Enoch hotly. “I did what was required. I filled the letter of the Vegan law. I paid the dead my honor and the honor of my planet. It is not right that the responsibility should go on forever. Not that I can believe the body can be really gone. There is no one who would take it. No one knew of it!”
“By human logic,” Ulysses told him, “you, of course, are right. But not by Vegan logic. And in this case Galactic Central would tend to support the Vegans.”
Enoch said testily, “The Vegans happen to be friends of mine. I have never met one of them that I didn’t like or couldn’t get along with. I can work it out with them.”
“If only the Vegans were concerned,” said Ulysses, “I am quite sure you could. But the situation is complicated. The Vegans have known for some time that the body had been taken. They were disturbed, of course, but out of certain considerations, they kept their silence.”
“They needn’t have. They could have come to me. I don’t know what could have been done . . . but I would have tried to do something.”
“Silent not because of you. Because of something else.”
ULYSSES finished off his coffee and poured himself another cup. He filled Enoch’s half-filled cup and set the pot aside.
Enoch waited.
“You may not have been aware of it,” said Ulysses, “but at the time this station was established, there was considerable opposition to it from a number of races in the galaxy. There were many reasons cited, as is the case in all such situations, but the underlying reason, when you get down to basics, rest squarely on the continual contest for racial or regional advantage.”
Enoch nodded. “I had a hint of this. I hadn’t paid much attention to it.”
“It’s largely a matter of direction,” Ulysses said. “When Galactic Central began its expansion into this spiral arm, it meant there was no time or effort available for expansions in other directions. There is one large group of races which has held a dream for many centuries of expanding into some of the nearby globular clusters. It does make a dim sort of sense, of course. With the techniques that we have, the longer jump across space to some of the closer clusters is entirely possible. Another thing. The clusters seem to be extraordinarily free of dust and gas; so that once we got there, we could expand more rapidly throughout the cluster than we can in many parts of the galaxy. But, at best, it’s a speculative business, for we don’t know what we’ll find there. After we’ve made all the effort and spent all the time we may find little or nothing, except, possibly, some more real estate. And we have plenty of that in the galaxy. But the clusters have a vast appeal for certain types of minds.”
Enoch nodded. “I can see that. It would be the first venturing out of the galaxy itself. It might be the first short step on the route that could lead us to other galaxies.”
Ulysses peered at him. “You, too,” he said. “I might have known.”
Enoch said, smugly: “I am that type of mind.”
“WELL, anyhow,” he said, “there was this globular-cluster faction—I suppose you’d call it that—which contended bitterly when we
began our move in this direction. You understand that we’ve barely begun the expansion into this neighborhood. We have less than a dozen stations; we’ll need a hundred. It will take centuries before the network is complete.”
“So this faction is still contending,” Enoch said. “There still is time to stop this spiral-arm project.”
“That is right. And that’s what worries me. For the faction is set to use this incident of the missing body as an emotion-charged argument against the extension of this network. It is being joined by other groups that are concerned with certain special interests. And these special interest groups see a better chance of getting what they want if they can wreck this project.”
“Wreck it?”
“Yes, wreck it. They will start screaming, as soon as the body incident becomes open knowledge, that a planet so barbaric as the Earth is no fit location for a station. They will insist that this station be abandoned.”
“But they can’t do that!”
“They can,” Ulysses said. “They will say it is degrading and unsafe to maintain a station so barbaric that even graves are rifled, on a planet where the honored dead cannot rest in peace. It is the kind of highly emotional argument that will gain wide acceptance and support in some sections of the galaxy. The Vegans tried their best. They tried to hush it up, for the sake of the project. They have never done a thing like that before. They are a proud people and they feel a slight to honor perhaps more deeply than many other races. Yet, for the greater good, they were willing to accept dishonor. And would have if they could have kept it quiet. But the story leaked out somehow—by good espionage, no doubt. And they cannot stand the loss of face in advertised dishonor. The Vegan who will be arriving here this evening is an official representative charged with delivering an official protest.”
“To me?”
“To you, and through you to the Earth.”
“But the Earth is not concerned. The Earth doesn’t even know.”
“Of course it doesn’t. So far as Galactic Central is concerned, you are the Earth. You represent the Earth.”
The Complete Serials Page 94