by C. L. Moore
The contralto voice broke in. “I think,” it said, “that we might take the mask off him now.”
There was flurry of voices starting to protest. The contralto was firm. “I think he should see our faces. He should know we trust him.” There was a short silence in which I thought I sensed unspoken messages flashing from eye to eye around the room. Then a cool hand touched my cheek and peeled the blindfold pad away. When I breathed, I breathed the smell of disinfectants and flowers. When I opened my eyes, I looked into a woman’s face bent over me, her black eyes intent on mine.
She wore a doctor’s white coat, buttoned smooth over smooth, full breasts and tight to a narrow waist. She had a tanned face with good planes to it, and her black hair was slick to her head and drawn back in a coronet of braids so tight it seemed to pull her face smooth at the sides and made her black eyes tilt.
She had sounded calm and controlled. But the black eyes watching me managed to suggest that all tins might become very exciting. I looked away. I didn’t want to respond to feeling any more. I was already repressing all response to Cressy Kellogg and I pushed all reaction to this woman away too. I had troubles enough as it was.
Harris had a round face, round eyeglasses, and a receding hairline. There was a man beside him with aquiline features and a ragged brown sweater. Two more members with no notable features made up the Freedom Committee. I gazed at them with disappointment. I don’t know what I’d expected. Beared anarchists? Lean Leatherstockings with flintlock rifles? Still, I don’t look too much like a rebel myself either, and from then on, I supposed, I was as revolutionary as any of them. Or was I? I didn’t know.
I looked down at the transparent jacket, seeing my own cuts and bruises on the bare skin under it. I was a little surprised at how many there were. I looked at the table beside me with its bank of dials and quivering needles. Something about them touched a chord of memory, and I looked at the woman again, a twinge of recognition stirring.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“This is Dr. Elaine Thomas,” Harris told me. “You know me. The others——” He told me their names too, and I forgot them at once. I was still looking at the girl. Faintly, faintly, I seemed to see letters of fire circling in an abyss.
“I know somebody who looks a lot like you,” I said. “A doctor with the psycho-screening division of Comus in New York. He put me through the mill a couple of days ago—I think. Any relation?”
The girl flashed me a quick, dark, troubled look.
“My brother,” she said briefly. There was an awkward little silence in the room, as if I’d said something gauche. The girl went on quickly, as if she wanted to change the subject. “We want you to know you can trust us. You know our names and faces now. You could turn us in.”
I nodded. “I won’t. Not now, anyhow. What is it you people want me to do?”
Harris cleared his throat. “We’ll find you a job or two just to see how you work out. For a starter, do you know how to drive a hedgehopper?”
“Yes,” I said. “But——”
“We’ll arrange for you to steal one from the next “hopper patrol,” Harris said calmly. “After you’ve stolen Comus property we’ll feel we can trust you further.”
I drew a deep breath and watched it register on a dial. “Is that all?”
“Oh no,” Harris said quickly. “That’s just your insurance.”
“But I get my entertainment permit?”
I thought it over. “Well, no, it doesn’t. Maybe not.”
“Have you ever looked inside it?”
“No,” I said.
The man in the brown sweater said, “I’d like to have a look myself. Unless it’s something pretty subtle or new, I can probably spot something. We’ll have to think of something before you put your show on.” He met my eye, frowned a little, and added, “You hedged when we asked you a question a while back, Rohan. Before you get out of the jacket, can you promise you won’t work against us or give away anything we’ve said? No hedging. Yes or no?”
I gave him scowl for scowl. “How do I know what’s going to happen after this tour?” I asked. “What do I do if a Prowler picks me up and asks me questions under another lie-box jacket? Remember, none of this is my idea. You people gave me a rough time. I didn’t like it. Your goals aren’t my goals. You want me to say I’ll die a martyr’s death for you?”
He searched my face with a steady gaze. In a gentle voice he said, “Men do give their word, Rohan. Even if they don’t always agree with the cause, they might value the keeping of the word. Some men.”
“Not me,” I said.
He looked at the jumping dials. “All we want,” he said, “is free elections back again. Our own choice of our own government. Does that sound worth having?”
I shrugged under the cold, smooth jacket. “You’re a Jeffersonian. Advanced thinkers go along with Hamilton where I come from. He’s just as good an American and a lot more realistic. He believed in a lifetime President and Congress, just like what we’ve got now. I’m not sure I care much for representative government, mister. Under any rule the guy who has what it takes rises to the top. The rest—well, they won’t amount to much under any system. That’s the way I feel about it, so now you know.” I looked at the steady needles. “You wanted the truth. That’s it. You know what I can and can’t do for you. I’d lie if I could. I’ve got to make a success of my job. Until it’s done I’m your man. After that I’m my own man again.”
Nobody spoke for a while. Then Harris said briskly, “Well, you steal the ‘hopper for us and we’ll know we can trust you. Up to a point, anyhow. We’ll get word to you. Meanwhile you can go ahead with your show.”
I looked from face to face. “I will. I don’t understand just what’s going on here. I know there’s more in it than meets the eye. A lot’s going on that—just eludes me. Anybody want to say anything?” I let my gaze travel from face to face. No answers showed anywhere. I sighed. “Okay. This is Tuesday. We open here in town, at the corner of Main Street and the square, on Saturday night. Now let me out of this strait jacket, will you? I’ve got a lot of work to do between now and Saturday.”
CHAPTER X
I SAT ON THE RAIL beside the broad black highway watching the trucks go by and waiting for Guthrie. Between trucks it was very still up here. The wind had a bland, sweet fragrance and the day balanced straight overhead in a flawless sky, just on the turn, not quite ready yet to wing over toward afternoon. High up in it a white gull wheeled, and I remembered with a little surprise that the ocean lay deep blue, deep-breathing, just beyond the mountains.
I chewed a yellow wild mustard head, liking the punget burning taste, and wondered what was going to become of Howard Rohan. I thought of the young doctor’s bright, expectant gaze and they way her body curved from rich fullness down to a narrow waist. I thought of Cressy. Imperceptibly in the last half hour the world had turned real around me again. The sunlight was luminous, not brass. I and the day and world were all alive. That oppression of the spirit had only drawn back to wait. It would come again. And now that my mind wasn’t focused hard on any one thing, the desire for alcohol floated to the top, a physical need and a longing for the spiritual solace that only indifference can give. But for now the world was real and I was more than sorry.
And what about Howard Rohan? What about the dream that could hardly have been a dream? And the rebels—what was I going to do about them? I could play along. Maybe I would report to Ted Nye when I’d found out enough. Something told me I’d better not notify him until I did have information to balance against what I’d spilled. There was a chalk line to walk and I’d better not fall off on either side. Had I wrecked the whole theater project in California by talking too much? I doubted it. Nobody had been very much surprised at my big news. I thought about that, getting nowhere.
I thought about Comus, vast and rigid, humming at my feet in singing power lines that knit the nation tight. How curious to know that all around me in the mountains, may
be watching me now from the high wild mustard, were people who had taken up arms for the first time in almost a whole generation. People who had to stand ready at a moment’s notice to grab their guns, black their faces, and stand up to whatever might happen. It seemed wild and unreal and in a way romantic, like a movie. Life isn’t like that here under Comus. People die of old age or accident or disease. Not in battle.
It gave me a shaken feeling inside. And yet—I liked it. I felt fresh and alert in a new way. The world had clearer colors and sweeter smells and purer sounds than before. The smell of trouble in the air made everything tense, and I found myself liking the newness of it.
I wondered—oh, the hell with wondering. Stop thinking, Rohan. I looked up into the dizzy depths of the sky. My mind took two or three random swings and then circled back, as always, to Miranda. The restless ghost that would never leave me because somehow, somehow, it was my fault she died. Because of what I’d done or hadn’t done and would never know. I thought large, formless thoughts. Miranda, wherever you are … If you are …
The big emptiness and the sweet bland wind and the memory of Miranda. My mind balanced away up over me with the balancing afternoon and the gull that could see the ocean from where it floated. Lazily through my thoughts went plans about the play. Rehearsals. The deep silence of the redwoods. Cressy Kellogg’s face. Now and then a truck went by with a boom. Sometimes the drivers waved at me. Sometimes I waved back.
* * *
Guthrie was late. It seemed there’d been some excitement at camp. One of the gigantic transport trucks with a load of lettuce had turned over and caught fire on the road just above the grove. The troupe had had to swarm up and help pull the driver out before the thing exploded. Big excitement.
“Maybe we’ll get some local publicity out of it,” I said, settling myself into the seat, favoring my bruised side. The doctor had sprayed me with germicide and given me some pills to deaden the ache, but I still knew I’d been in a fight.
“We’re set to open in San Andreas on Saturday,” I told Guthrie. He gave me a sharp look.
“So. How’d you work that?”
“Fast talk to the right people. Your boy Swann just didn’t have the right approach.”
“Mr. Nye may want a report on how you did it,” Guthrie said. Rather belatedly he added, “Good work, Mr. Rohan.”
I nodded at him. “One thing,” I said. “I thought I saw that girl Cressy in town today. What do you know about her?”
“Why?”
“No reason. I just wonder why she wanders around town when she’s supposed to be in camp working on her part.”
Guthrie looked at me, started to speak, stopped himself. Finally he said in a rather strained voice, “She’s a nice girl, Mr. Rohan. A very nice girl. We all like her.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “But——”
“If she was in town she had good reasons,” Guthrie told me, still stiffly. “She’s a very nice girl. I hope you won’t——” He stopped. I looked at him and laughed.
“Nice girls are perfectly safe around Rohan,” I said. “What’s the matter, you think I take droit du seigneur over my troupes?”
“What?” he asked.
I laughed again, flushed a little and looked straight ahead. “She’s a very nice girl,” he repeated stubbornly, as if I’d doubted it.
* * *
The wrecked behemoth lay across two lanes of the highway just above camp, still smoking. Lettuces paved the road and two smaller trucks were loading up with salvage. The men working them looked grim. I wanted to ask if this had been sabotage by the rebels, but nobody seemed very talkative and it didn’t seem to matter much anyhow.
Roy Copley was hunched over his script spread out on one of the tables. He looked up and scowled, ostentatiously nursing his bandaged hand. I scowled back. I didn’t like him much, but he was a good choice for the juvenile lead. He had the kind of good looks that keep the illusion of youth for a long time. Maybe he had that kind of personality, too. An essential boyishness in his face and his motions made you feel he’d never quite accepted the responsibility of growing up.
Polly bent her glistening red head over a salvage lettuce she was washing under the faucet. She shook the water off in a shining shower, not much caring if some of it fell on me. She looked haggard under the greenish light under the trees. It occurred to me that Roy might not actually be as much younger than his wife as I’d thought. She could have aged more than he. She had that kind of features. For an actress this is a serious problem. I could see why she seemed to be in a temper most of the time. I didn’t have to like her, but I thought I could understand her. Partly, anyhow.
“You look terrible,” she told me with satisfaction.
“I feel fine,” I said. “Everything’s set in San Andreas. We open Saturday.”
“How do we know?” She sounded quarrelsome. “You don’t look so good to me.”
“What would I gain by lying, for God’s sake?” I asked. “We’ve got about three weeks’ work to do in three days, so I want to start rehearsals in about half an hour. Where’s Cressy?”
Polly gestured toward the river. “Swimming.”
Guthrie watched me with some anxiety as I walked across the clearing toward the river path, but he didn’t say anything. I started downhill, my jaw set and my mind set with it. I changed a good deal since yesterday. Since this morning. I couldn’t have said how I’d changed, but the difference was there inside. I wanted to test my own reactions. I wanted to look straight at Cressy. I wanted to talk to her. Maybe I was beginning to feel that it was possible to exorcise ghosts.
I found I was whistling between my teeth as I went down the steep path that doubled back and forth on itself on the way to the river. “Now may all clouds of … sorrow depart … Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me.”
The neat, cleft tracks of deer marked the powdered dust, and a chipmunk whisking across the path paused for a moment to defy me at one bend, sitting upright and chirring at me, his shoulders heaving convulsively at every chirr. Like a rebel defying Comus, I thought. Or maybe not. That depended on the Anti-Com, whatever it was worth.
I heard water splashing and saw through trees the level surface of a pool where the river widened. I called, “Cressy?” and heard her voice saying, “Here I am,” with that hollowness voices have sounding over water. I walked out from the trees over the pebbly verge. The broad brown pool was green in the shadows, with ripples running nervously all over its surface. Cressy stood—or was she sitting?—up to her shoulders in the water. Her shining hair was knotted on top of her head and she seemed to have no body beneath the surface, only the reflection of the same head and shoulders upside down in the pool, like a playing-card queen.
I made myself look directly at her. Miranda’s pale copy, I thought. Living flesh and living bone, a girl with her own life to get through, her own problems to solve. Nothing to do with me. Just raw material I had to weld into the cast and use to make a play from. I could look at her and not feel much hurt. She wasn’t even so very like Miranda, when you come right down to it.
“What were you doing in town today?” I asked her flatly.
She started to say, “Isn’t that my business?”
“Damn it, answer me!” I said. “Why were you there?”
She flushed a little and moved uneasily in the water, the ripples she made breaking up the inverted reflections. With some dignity she said, “This job means a lot to me, Mr. Rohan. It does to all of us. We don’t want to get lynched, but we don’t want to give up the tour either, unless we have to. I’ve got—well, acquainted with a few people since we got here. I wanted to do some checking up on my own.”
“You thought I couldn’t handle things?”
“Paul Swann muffed it, “she said. “How did I know?”
“Why didn’t you get a permit for the troupe yourself?” I asked. “You don’t seem to have any trouble in San Andreas. I thought you were all so scared you wanted to disband. It doesn’t add u
p.”
She shrugged in the water, making her reflection shudder. “Politics,” she said. “Rebel politics—that’s where the trouble is. I hear you found that out this morning. I hear you worked it out fine. I’m not asking any questions. I just know it was a problem for you and the local big shots, not me. I had that made perfectly clear.”
“By whom?”
She gave me a fleeting smile. “Some of my local friends. I get around. I’ve had a couple of dates with a Comus trucker up at the restaurant. I ent to a dance with a rancher from San Andreas, the same one who bought me lunch today. Oh, I hear most of the talk that’s going around. As long as I’m with the local boys I’m safe enough. But getting up on the stage without a permit would be something else again. Sure we were scared. We had a right to be.”
“Are you scared now?”
“I hear you got to the right people. It’s okay now.”
“You might tell Polly,” I said. “She’s not so sure.”
“Polly,” she said delicately, pursing her lips.
That reminded me. I kicked a pebble into the water and scowled. “I don’t want any trouble in this cast. Suppose you stay away from Roy Copley. Understand?”
She gave me a flat-eyed look. “I mean it,” I said. “You could be a trouble center in this troupe, and I don’t want trouble. I don’t want Polly throwing boiling coffee in your face someday when she catches you with Roy. You’ve even got Guthrie worried for fear I’ll make a pass at you. I don’t want him missing his cues because he’s trying to save you from corruption. You stick to your farmers and truck drivers and we’ll all get along fine.”
She met my eye with a sudden, dimpling flicker of humor that vanished almost instantly, like a breeze running over water. “We’ll get along. We’re pretty good, really. We may surprise you.”
I gave her a measuring look. “What’s your background?” I asked. “Where are you from?”
“Chicago Area. I’ve done a lot of stock playing and that’s about it. Maybe you know. It’s hard to get past a certain point. What I really want is a work card for Hollywood. Without one I haven’t a chance to get very far. I’ve made two big plays for a card. No luck so far.” She smiled at me. “When Comus offered this part I held out for a Hollywood card and they promised me one. If we finish this run.”