American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56

by Gary K. Wolfe

“Change is always a sorry thing,” said Hostetter. “You get used to doing things in a certain way, and it’s always a wrench to break it up.”

  A thought came to Len which had curiously enough never come to him before. He asked, “Do you have a family in Bartorstown?”

  Hostetter shook his head. “I’ve always had too much of a roving foot. Never wanted any ties to it.”

  They both, unconsciously, looked forward along the deck to where Esau sat with Amity.

  “And they’re so easy to get,” said Hostetter.

  There was something possessive in Amity’s posture, in the way her head was bent toward Esau and the way her hand rested on his. She was getting plump, and her mouth was petulant, and she was taking her approaching, if still distant, mother hood very seriously. Len shivered, remembering the rose arbor.

  “Yes,” said Hostetter, chuckling. “I agree. But you’ve got to admit they sort of deserve each other.”

  “I just can’t figure Esau as a father, somehow.”

  “You might be surprised,” said Hostetter. “And besides, she’ll keep him in line. Don’t be too toplofty, boy. Your time will come.”

  “Not if I know it first,” said Len.

  Hostetter chuckled again.

  The barge thrashed its way on toward the mouth of the Platte. Len worked and ate and slept, and between times he thought. Something had been taken away from him, and after a while he realized what it was and why its going made him unhappy. It was the picture of Bartorstown he had carried with him, the vision he had followed all the long way from home.

  That was gone now, and in its place was only a little collection of facts and a blank waiting to be filled in. Bartorstown—a pre-war, top-secret military installation for some kind of research, named for Henry Waltham Bartor, the Secretary of Defense who had it built—was undergoing a painful translation from dream to reality. The reality was yet to come, and in the meantime there was nothing, and Len felt vaguely as though somebody had died. Which, of course, Gran had, and the two things were so closely connected in his mind that he couldn’t think about Bartorstown without thinking about Gran too, and remembering the defiant things she had said that made Pa so mad. He wondered if she knew he was going there. He hoped so. He thought she would be pleased. They tied up one night by a low bank in the middle of nowhere, with nothing in sight but the prairie grass and the endless sky, and no sound but the wind that never got tired of blowing, and the ceaseless running of the river. In the morning they started to unload the barge, and around noon Len paused a moment to catch his breath and wipe the sweat out of his eyes. And he saw a pillar of dust moving far off on the prairie, coming toward the river.

  Hostetter nodded. “It’s our men, bringing the wagons.

  We’ll angle up from here to the valley of the Platte, and pick up the rest of our party at a point on the South Fork.”

  “And then?” asked Len, with a stir of the old excitement making his heart beat faster.

  “Then we’re on the last stretch.”

  A few hours later the wagons came in, eight of them, great lumbering things made for the hauling of freight and drawn by mules. The men who drove them were brown and leathery, with the tops of their foreheads all white when they took their hats off, and a network of pale lines around their eyes where the sun hadn’t got to the bottom of the squinted-up wrinkles.

  They greeted Kovacs and the bargemen as old friends, and shook Hostetter’s hand warmly as a sort of welcome-home.

  Then one of them, an old fellow with a piercing glance and a pair of shoulders that looked as though they could carry a wagon alone if the mules gave out, peered closely at Len and Esau and said to Hostetter, “So these are your boys.”

  “Well,” said Hostetter, coloring slightly.

  The old man walked around them slowly, his head on one side. “My son was in the Ohio country couple-three years ago. He said all you heard about was Hostetter’s boys. Where were they, what were they doing, let him know when they moved on.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” said Hostetter. His face was now brick red. “Anyway, a couple of kids—— And I’d known them since they were born.”

  The old man finished his circuit and stood in front of Len and Esau. He put out a hand like a slab of oak and shook with them gravely in turn. “Hostetter’s boys,” he said, “I’m glad you got here before my old friend Ed had a total breakdown.” He went away laughing. Hostetter snorted and began to throw boxes and barrels around. Len grinned, and Kovacs burst out laughing.

  “He isn’t just joking, either,” said Kovacs, jerking his head toward the old man. “Ed kept every radio in that part of the country hot.”

  “Well, damn it,” grumbled Hostetter, “a couple of kids. What would you have done?”

  They camped that night beside the river, and next day they loaded the wagons, taking great care with the stowage of each piece in the beds, and leaving a place in one where Amity could ride and sleep. Kovacs was going on into the Upper Missouri, and shortly after noon they got up steam on the barge and chuffed away. The mules were rounded up by two or three of the men, riding small wiry horses of a type Len had not seen before. He helped them to harness up and then took his seat in one of the wagons. The long whips cracked and the drivers shouted. The mules leaned their necks into the collars and the wagons rolled slowly over the prairie grass, with a heavy creaking and complaint of axles. At nightfall, across the flat land, Len could still see the barge on the river. In the morning it was still there, but farther off, and sometime during the day he lost it. And the prairie became immensely large and lonely. The Platte runs wide and shallow between hills of sand. The sun beats down and the wind blows, and the land goes on forever. Len remembered the Ohio with an infinite longing.

  But after a while, when he got used to it, he became aware of a whole new world here, a way of living that didn’t seem half bad, once you shucked off a habit of thought that called for green woods and green grass, rain and plowing. The dusty cottonwoods that grew by the water became as beautiful as oaks, and the ranch houses that clung close to the river were more welcome than the villages of his own country because they were so much more infrequent. They were rough and sunbitten, but they were comfortable enough, and Len liked the people, the brown hardy women and the men who seemed to have lost some of themselves when they came apart from their horses. Beyond the sand hills was the prairie, and on the prairie were the great wild herds of cattle and the roving horse bands that made the living of these hunters and traders. Hostetter said that the wild herds were the descendants of the pre-war range stock, turned loose in the great upheaval that followed the abandonment of the cities and the consequent breakdown of the system of supply and demand.

  “Their range runs clear down to the Mexican border,” he said, “and there isn’t a fence on it now. The dry-farmers all quit long ago. For generations there hasn’t been a single plow to scratch up the plains, and the grass is coming back even in the worst of the man-made deserts, like the good Lord meant it to be.” He took a deep breath, looking all around the horizon.

  “There’s something about it, isn’t there, Len? I mean, in some ways the East is closed in, with hills and woods and the other side of a river valley.”

  “You ain’t going to get me to say I don’t like the East,” said Len. “But I’m getting to like this too. It’s just so big and empty I keep feeling like I’m going to fall in.”

  It was dry, too. The wind beat and picked at him, sucking the moisture out of him like a great leech. He drank and drank, and there was always sand in the bottom of the cup, and he was always thirsty. The mules rolled the miles back under the wagon wheels, but so gradually and through such a sameness of country that Len got a feeling they hadn’t moved. Through deep ravines in the sand hills the wild cattle came down to drink, and at night the coyotes yapped and howled and then fell into respectful silence before the deeper and more bloodchilling voice of some wayfaring wolf. Sometimes they would go for days without seeing a ran
ch house or any sign of human life, and then they would pass a camp where the hunters had made a great kill and were busy jerking or salting down the beef and rough-curing the hides. And time passed. And like the time on the river, it was timeless.

  They reached the rendezvous on the South Fork, in a meadow faded and sun-scorched, but still greener than the glaring sandy desolation that spread around it as far as the eye could reach, broken only by the shallow rushing of the river. When they went on again there were thirty-one wagons in the party, and some seventy men. Some of them had come directly across the Great Plains, others had come from the north and west, and they were loaded with everything from wool and iron pigs to gunpowder. Hostetter said that other freight trains like this came up from Arkansas and the wide country to the south and west, and that others still followed the old trail through the South Pass from the country west of the mountains. All the supplies had to be fetched before winter, because the Plains were a cruel place when the northers blew and the single pass into Bartorstown was blocked with snow.

  From time to time, at particular points, they would find groups of men encamped and waiting for them, and they would stop to trade, and at one place, where another stream trickled into the South Fork and there was a village of four houses, they picked up two more wagons loaded with hides and dried beef. And Len asked, when he was sure he was alone with Hostetter, “Don’t these people ever get suspicious? I mean, about where we’re going.”

  Hostetter shook his head.

  “But I should think they’d guess.”

  “They don’t have to. They know.”

  “They know we’re going to Bartorstown?” said Len incredulously.

  “Yes,” said Hostetter, “but they don’t know they know it. You’ll see what I mean when you get there.”

  Len did not ask any more, but he thought about it, and it didn’t seem to make any kind of sense.

  The wagons lumbered on through the heat and the glare.

  And on a late afternoon when the Rockies hung blue and misty like a curtain across the west, there came a sudden shout from up ahead. It was flung back all along the line, from driver to driver, and the wagons jolted to a stop. Hostetter reached back for a gun, and Len asked, “What is it?”

  Hostetter said, “I suppose you’ve heard of the New Ishmaelites.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, now you’re going to see them.”

  Len followed Hostetter’s gesture, squinting against the reddening light. And on top of a low and barren bluff he saw a gathering of people, perhaps half a hundred of them, looking down.

  18

  He jumped to the ground with Hostetter. The driver stayed put, so he could move the wagon into a defensive line if the order came. Esau joined them, and some other men, and the old chap with the bright eyes and the mighty shoulders, whose name was Wepplo. Most of them had guns.

  “What do we do?” asked Len, and the old man answered, “Wait.”

  They waited. Two men and a woman came slowly down from the bluff, and the leader of the train went just as slowly out to meet them, with half a dozen armed men behind to cover him. And Len stared.

  The people gathered on the bluff were like an awkward frieze of scarecrows put together out of old bones and strips of blackened leather. There was something horrible about seeing that there were children among them, peering with a normal childlike wonder and excitement at the strange men and the wagons. They wore goatskins, very much like old Bible pictures of John the Baptist, or else long wrappings of dirty white cloth like winding sheets. Their hair hung long and matted down their backs, and the men had beards to their waists. They were gaunt, and even the children had a wild and starveling look. Their eyes were sunken, and perhaps it was only a trick of the lowering sun, but it seemed to Len that they burned and smoldered with an actual glow, like the eyes he had seen once on a dog that had the mad sickness.

  “Will they fight us?” he asked.

  “Can’t tell yet,” said Wepplo. “Sometimes yes, other times no. Depends.”

  “What do you mean,” demanded Esau, “it depends?”

  “On whether they’ve been ‘struck’ or not. Mostly they just wander and pray and do a lot of real holy starving. But then all of a sudden one of ’em’ll start screaming and frothing and fall down kicking, and that’s a sign they’ve been struck by the Lord’s special favor. So the rest of ’em whoop and screech and beat themselves with thorny branches or maybe whips—whips, you see, is the only personal article their religion allows them to own—and when they’re worked up enough they all pile down and butcher some rancher that’s affronted the Lord by pampering his flesh with a sod roof and a full belly. They can do a real nice job of butchering, too.”

  Len shivered. The faces of the Ishmaelites frightened him. He remembered the faces of the farmers when they marched into Refuge, and how their stony dedication had frightened him then. But they were different. Their fanaticism roused up only when it was prodded. These people lived by it, lived for it, and served it without rhyme, reason, or thought.

  He hoped they would not fight.

  They did not. The two wild-looking men and the woman— a wiry creature with sharp shin bones showing under her shroud when she walked, and a tangle of black hair blowing over her shoulders—were too far away for any of their talk to be heard, but after a few minutes the leader of the train turned and spoke to the men behind him, and two of them turned and came back to the train. They sought out a particular wagon, and Wepplo grunted.

  “Not this time. They only want some powder.”

  “Gunpowder?” asked Len incredulously.

  “Their religion don’t seem to call for them starving quite to death, and every gang of them—this is only one band, you understand—does own a couple of guns. I hear they never shoot a young cow, though, but only the old bulls, which are tough enough to mortify anybody’s flesh.”

  “But powder,” said Len. “Don’t they use it on the ranchers, too?”

  The old man shook his head. “They’re knife-and-claw killers, when they kill. I guess they can get closer to their work that way. Besides, they only get enough powder to barely keep them going.” He nodded toward the two men, who were going back again carrying a small keg. A thin sound, half wailing and half waspish, penetrated from the second wagon down, and Esau said, “Oh Lord, there’s Amity calling me. She’s probably scared to death.” He turned and went immediately. Len watched the New Ishmaelites.

  “Where did they come from?” he asked, trying to remember what he had heard about them. They were one of the very earliest extreme sects, but he didn’t know much more than that.

  “Some of them were here to begin with,” Hostetter said. “Under other names, of course, and not nearly so crazy because the pressure of society sort of held them down, but a fertile seed bed. Others came here of their own accord when the New Ishmaelite movement took shape and really got going. A lot more were driven here out of the East, being naturalborn troublemakers that other people wanted to be rid of.”

  The small keg of powder changed hands. Len said, “What do they trade you for it?”

  “Nothing. Buying and selling are no part of holiness, and anyway, they don’t have anything. When you come right down to it, I don’t know why we do give it to them. I guess,” said Wepplo, “probably it’s on account of the kids. You know, once in a while you find one of ’em like a coyote pup, lost in the sagebrush. If they’re young enough, and brought up right, they turn out just as smart and nice as anyone.”

  The woman lifted her arms up high, whether for a curse or a blessing Len couldn’t tell. The wind tossed the lank hair back from her face, and he saw with a shock that she was young, and might have been handsome if her cheeks were full and her eyes less hunger-bright and staring. Then she and the two men climbed back to the top of the bluff, and in five minutes they were all gone, hidden by the cut-up hills. But that night the Bartorstown men doubled the watch.

  Two days later they filled every cask,
bottle, and bucket with water and left the river, striking south and west into a waste and very empty land, sun-scorched, wind-scourged, and dry as an old skull. They were climbing now, toward distant bastions of red rock with tumbled masses of peaks rising blue and far away behind them. The mules and the men labored together, toiling slowly, and Len learned to hate the sun. And he looked up at the blank, cruel peaks, and wondered. Then, when the water was almost gone, a red scarp swung away to the west and showed an opening about as wide as two wagons, and Hostetter said, “This is the first gate.”

  They filed into it. It was smooth like a made road, but it was steep, and everybody was walking now to ease the mules, except Amity. After a little while, without any order that Len could hear, or for any reason that he could see, they stopped.

  He asked why.

  “Routine,” Hostetter said. “We’re not exactly overrun with people, as you might guess from the country, but not even a rabbit can get through here without being seen, and it’s customary to stop and be looked over. If somebody doesn’t, we know right away it’s a stranger.”

  Len craned his neck, but he could not see anything but red rock. Esau was walking with them, and Wepplo. Wepplo laughed and said, “Boy, they’re looking at you right now in Bartorstown. Yes, they are. Studying you real close, and if they don’t like your looks, all they have to do is push one little button and boom! ” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand, and Len and Esau both ducked. Wepplo laughed again.

  “What do you mean, boom?” said Esau angrily, glaring around. “You mean somebody in Bartorstown could kill us here? That’s crazy.”

  “It’s true,” said Hostetter. “But I wouldn’t get excited. They know we’re coming.”

  Len felt the skin between his shoulders turn cold and crawl. “How can they see us?”

  “Scanners,” said Hostetter, pointing vaguely at the rock. “Hidden in the cracks, where you can’t see ’em. A scanner is kind of like an eye, way off from the body. Whoever comes through here, they know it in Bartorstown, and it’s still a day’s journey away.”