Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  My hunger hurried my lifting for home so much that I had to activate my personal shield to cut the wind.

  Before I even got in sight of the ranger station where we were spending our summer in our yearly required shift for the Group, I felt Remy calling for me. Well, maybe not me by name, but he was needing comfort in large quantities and who better than his shadow to give it to him. So I zeroed in on our walnut tree and stumbled to a stop just behind him as he sat hunched morosely over himself.

  “I’m grounded,” he said. “Ron says not to come back until I’m Purged. Father says I can start clearing brush out of the campsites tomorrow.”

  “Oh, Remy!” I cried, dismayed for his unhappiness. “Why?”

  He grinned unhappily. “Ron says I can’t learn as long as I’m trying to learn for the wrong reason.”

  “Wrong reason?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He said I don’t want to be a Motiver just to be a Motiver. I want to learn to be one so I can show people up, like Father and you and the Old Ones. He says I don’t want to get into Space because of any real interest in Space, but because I’m mad at The People for not telling the world they can do it right now if they want to. He says—” Remy pulled a double handful of grass with sharp, unhappy yanks “—he says he has no intention of teaching me anything as long as I only want to learn it for such childish reasons. What does he think I’m going to do, drop another Hiroshima bomb?”

  I checked firmly the surge of remembered sorrow at his words. “One of us was there in that plane,” I said. “Remember?”

  “But he didn’t use any of the Designs or Persuasions in the dropping of the Bomb—”

  “No. If he had, we probably never would have been able to help him out of the Darkness afterward. Maybe Ron’s afraid you might do something as bad as that if you learn to be a Motiver and then get mad.”

  “That’s silly!” cried Remy. “I wasn’t even born when the Bomb fell! And as if I’d ever do a thing like that anyway!”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t, but if you don’t know how to be a Motiver, you can’t. Remember, every person who ever did anything bad was seventeen once, and anger starts awfully early. Some kids start to crook their trigger fingers in their cradles—”

  “I still think it’s a lot of foolish fuss over nothing—”

  “If it’s nothing,” I said, “give it up.”

  “Why should I?” he flared. “I want—”

  “What’s the matter with you this summer, Remy?” I asked. “Why are you so prickly?”

  “I’m not—!” he began. Then he flushed and lay back against the hillside, covering his eyes with his arm. “Sorry, Shadow,” he said gently after a while. “I don’t know what it is. I just feel restless and irritable. Growing pains, I guess. And I guess it bothers me that I don’t have any special outstanding Gift like you do. I guess I’m groping to find out what I’m supposed to do. Do you think it’s because we’re part Outsider? Remember, Mother’s a Blend.”

  “I know,” I said, “but Mother managed to work out all her difficulties. You will too. You wait and see. Besides, a lot of kids that aren’t Blends don’t develop their Gifts until later. Just be patient.” Then I sighed without sound, thinking that to tell Remy to be patient was like telling the Cayuse to flow uphill.

  ~ * ~

  It wasn’t until we were at the supper table that I remembered my find of the day. “I found gold today!” I said, feeling a flush of pleasure warming my face. “Real unmanufactured gold!”

  “Well!” Father’s fork paused in mid-air. “That’s pretty good for a second week. When do we start carting it away? Will a bucket do, or shall I get a wheelbarrow?”

  “Oh, Father, don’t tease,” I said. “You know this isn’t gold-like-that country! It was just a short wire of it, six feet inside a granite slope. But now I know what gold feels like—and silver and—and something slender and shiny—”

  I broke off, suddenly not wanting to detail all my findings. Fortunately my last words were swallowed up in activity as Remy cleared the table so Mother could bring in the dessert. It was his table week and my dishes week.

  Remy put in the next morning hacking and grubbing to clear the underbrush out of some of the campsites along Cayuse Creek. Very few people ever come this far into the wilderness, but the Forestry Service has set up several camp places for them just in case, and Father had this area this summer. Any other year he’d be spending his time in his physics lab back with The Group, trying to find gadgets to help Outsiders do what The People do without gadgets.

  Anyway, Father released Remy after lunch and I talked him into going metal Sensing with me.

  “Shall I bring Father’s bucket?” he teased. “It might be diamonds this time!”

  “Diamonds!” I wrinkled my nose at him. “I’m metal Sensing, goon-child. Even you know diamonds aren’t metal!”

  I didn’t do much Sensing on the way out, what with his chasing me over the ridge for my impertinence to my elders—he’s a year older—and my chasing him up-creek for chasing me across the ridge. We were both laughing and panting by the time we got to the Chimneys.

  The Chimneys? “Wait—” I held out my hand and we stopped in mid-flight. “I just remembered. Remy, what’s slender and shiny and not iron and complicated?”

  “What do you mean, slender? How slender? How complicated?” Remy sat cross-legged in the air beside me. “Is it a riddle?”

  “It’s a riddle, all right, but I don’t know the answer.” And told him all about it.

  “Well, let’s go over and see,” he said, his eyes shining, his ears fairly quivering with interest. “If it’s something at the Selkirk, at least we know where it is.” We started off again. “Can’t you remember anything that’d give you any idea of its size?”

  “No-o-o,” I said thoughtfully. “It could be most any size from a needle up to—up to—” I was measuring myself alongside my memory. “Gee, Remy! It could be higher than my head!”

  “And shiny?” he asked. “Not rusted?”

  “Shiny and not rusted.”

  We were soon hovering over the old Selkirk mine, looking down on the tailings dump, the scant clutter of falling-apart shacks at the mine opening.

  “Somewhere there—” I started, when suddenly Remy caught me by the arm and we plummeted down like falling stars. I barely had time to straighten myself for landing before we were both staggering into the shelter of the aspens at the foot of the dump.

  “What on earth!” I began.

  “Hush!” Remy gestured violently. “Someone came out of the shack up there. An Outsider! You know we can’t let Outsiders see us lifting! And we were right overhead!”

  “I didn’t even know there was anyone in the area,” I said. “No one has checked in since we got here this spring. Can you see them from here?”

  Remy threaded his way through the clump of aspen and was peering out dramatically, twining himself around the trunk of a tree that wasn’t nearly big enough to hide him. “No,” he said. “The hill hides him. Or them. I wonder how many there are.”

  “Well, let’s stop lurking like criminals and go up and see,” I said. “It’s only neighborly—”

  The trail up to the Selkirk was steep, rocky, and overgrown with brush and we were both panting when we got to the top.

  “Hi!” yelled Remy. “Anybody home?” There was no answer except the squawk of a startled jay. “Hey!” he yelled again. “Anyone here?”

  “Are you sure you saw someone?” I asked, “or is this another—”

  “Sure I saw someone!” Remy was headed for the sagging shack that drooped against the slope of the hill.

  It was too quick for me even to say a word to Remy. It would have been forever too late to try to reach him, so I just lifted his feet out from under him and sent him sprawling to the ground under the crazy paneless window of the shack. His yell of surprise and anger was wiped out by an explosive roar. The muzzle of a shotgun stabbed through the window, where smoke was eddying.
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  “Git!” came a tight, cold voice, “Git going back down that trail. There’s plenty more buckshot where that came from.”

  “Hey, wait a minute.” Remy hugged the wall under the window. “We just came to see—”

  “That’s what I thought.” The gun barrel moved farther out. “Sneaking around. Prying—”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t yell ‘hi’ when you’re sneaking. We just wondered who our neighbors were. We don’t want to pry. If you’d rather, we’ll go away. But we’d like to visit with you—” I could feel the tension lessening and saw the gun waver.

  “Doesn’t seem like they’d send kids,” the voice muttered, and a pale, old face wavered just inside the window. “You from the FBI?” the old man asked.

  “FBI?” Remy knelt under the window, his eyes topping the sill. “Heck, no. What would the FBI be wanting up here?”

  “Allen says the government—” He stopped and blinked. I caught a stab of sorrow from him that made me catch my breath. “Allen’s my son,” he said, struggling with some emotion or combination of emotions I hadn’t learned to read yet. “Allen says nobody can come around, especially G-men—” He ran one hand through his heavy white hair. “You don’t look like G-men.”

  “We’re not,” I laughed. “You just ask your son.”

  “My son?” The gun disappeared and I could hear the thump of the butt on the splintered old floor of the shack. “My son—” It was a carefully controlled phrase, but I could hear behind it a great soaring wail. “My son’s busy,” he said briskly. “And don’t ask what’s he doing. I won’t tell you. Go on away and play. We got no time for kids.”

  “We just wanted to say ‘hi,’ “ I hastened before Remy could cloud up at being told to go play. “And to see if you need anything—”

  “Why should we need anything?” The voice was cold again and the muzzle of the gun came back up on the sill, not four inches from Remy’s startled eyes. “I have the plans. Practically everything was ready—” Again the hurting stab of sorrow came from him and another wave of that mixture of emotions, so heavy a wave that it almost blinded me, and the next thing I knew, Remy was helping me back down the trail. As soon as we were out of sight of the shack, we lifted back to the aspen thicket. There I lay down on the wiry grass and, closing my eyes, I Channeled whatever the discomfort was, while Remy sat by sympathetically silent.

  “I wonder what he’s so tender of up there,” he finally said after I had sighed and sat up.

  “I don’t know, but he’s suffering from something. His thoughts don’t pattern as they should. It’s as though they were circling around and around a hard something he can’t accept nor deny.”

  “Something slender and shiny and complicated?” said Remy idly.

  “Well, yes,” I said, casting back into my mind. “Maybe it does have something to do with that, but there’s something really bad that’s bothering him.”

  “Well, then, let’s figure out what that slender, shiny thing is, then maybe we can help him figure out that much— By the way, thanks for getting me out of range. I could have got perforated, but good—”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think he was really aiming at you.”

  “Aiming or not, I sure felt drafty there when I saw what he was holding.”

  I smiled and went on with the original topic. “If only we could get up closer,” I said. “I’m not an expert at this Sensing stuff yet.”

  “Well, try it anyway,” said Remy. “Read it to me and I’ll draw it and then we’ll see what it is.” He cleared a little space, shoving the aspen litter aside, and taking up a twig, held it poised.

  “I’ve studied hardly a thing about shapes yet,” I said, lying back against the curve of the slope, “but I’ll try.” So I cleared my mind of everything and began to coax back the awareness of whatever the metal was at the Selkirk. I read it to Remy—all that metal so closely surrounded by the granite of the mountain and yet no intermingling! If you took away the metal there’d be nothing left but a tall, slender hole—

  My eyes flipped open. “The mine shaft!” I cried. “Whatever it is, it’s filling the mine shaft—the one that goes straight down. All the drifts take off from there!”

  “So now we have a hole,” said Remy. “Fill it up. And I’ll bet it’s just the old workings—the hoist—the cage—”

  “No, it isn’t.” I closed my eyes and concentrated again, Sensing diagonally up through the hill and into the Selkirk. Carefully I detailed it to Remy contour by contour.

  “Hey!” I sat up, startled at Remy’s cry. “Look what we’ve made!” I leaned over his sketch, puzzling over the lines in the crumbly soil.

  “It looks a little like a shell,” I said. “A rifle shell. Oh, my gosh! Do you suppose that’s what it is? That we’ve spent all of this time over a rifle shell?”

  “If only we had some idea of relative size.” Remy deepened one of the lines.

  “Well, it fills the hole it’s in,” I said. “The hole felt like a mine shaft: and that thing fills it.”

  “A rifle shell that big?” Remy flicked a leaf away with his twig. “Why, that’d be big enough to climb into—”

  Remy stiffened as though he had been jabbed. Rising to his knees, he grabbed my arm, his mouth opening wordlessly. He jabbed his twig repeatedly at the tailings dump, yanking my arm at the same time.

  “Remy!” I cried, alarmed at his antics. “What on earth’s the matter?”

  “It’s—” he gasped. “It’s a rocket! A rocket! A spaceship! That guy’s building a spaceship and he’s got it down in the shaft of the Selkirk!”

  Remy babbled in my ear all the way home, telling again and again why it had to be a spaceship and, by the time we got home, I began to believe him. The sight of the house acted as an effective silencer for Remy.

  “This is a secret,” he hissed as we paused on the porch before going into the house. “Don’t you dare say a word to anyone!”

  I promised and kept my promise but I was afraid for Remy all evening. He’s as transparent as a baby when he gets excited and I was afraid he’d give it away any minute. Both Mother and Father watched him and exchanged worried looks—he acted feverish. But somehow we made it through the evening.

  His arguments weren’t nearly so logical by the cold light of early morning, and his own conviction and enthusiasms were thinned by the hard work he had to put in before noon at the campsites.

  Armed with half a cake and a half-dozen oranges, we cautiously approached the Selkirk that afternoon. My shoulders felt rigid as we approached the old shack and I Sensed apprehensively around for the shotgun barrel—I knew that shape! But nothing happened. No one was home.

  “Well, dern!” Remy sat down by me on a boulder near the door. “Where d’you suppose he went?”

  “Fishing, maybe,” I suggested. “Or to town.”

  “We would have seen him if he were fishing on the Cayuse. And he’s an Outsider—he’d have to use the road to go to town, and that goes by our place.”

  “He could have hiked across the hills instead,”

  “That’d be silly. He’d just parallel the road that way.”

  “Well, since he isn’t here—” I paused, lifting an inquiring eyebrow.

  “Yeah! Let’s go. Let’s go take a look in the shaft!” Remy’s eyes were bright with excitement. “Put this stuff somewhere where the ants won’t get into the cake. We’ll eat it later, if he doesn’t turn up.”

  We scrambled across the jumble of broken rock that was the top of the dump, but when we arrived where the mouth of the shaft should be, there was nothing but more broken rock. We stumbled and slipped back and forth a couple of times before I perched up on a boulder and, closing my eyes, Sensed for metal.

  It was like being in a shiny, smooth flood. No matter on which side of me I turned, the metal was there and, with that odd illusion that happens visually sometimes, the metal under me suddenly seemed to cup upward and contain me instead of my perching ove
r it. It was frightening and I opened my eyes.

  “Well?” asked Remy, impatiently.