Baby Is Three

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Pull ’way over,” said Guinn. “Far enough so that Chrysler can get out if he wants to. But keep your eye on him.”

  There was a sound from Lynn—a quickly checked almost-syllable. Guinn swung around.

  She was staring at the convertible, sitting bolt-upright, and her green eyes were round. “What is it, Lynn?”

  “I could be wrong, but I think that’s the—the fellow who—”

  “We’ll take care of him.”

  “Oh, please. I don’t want any trouble.”

  Garry turned around and said jovially, “Oh, it won’t be any trouble, miss.”

  He tooled the car between the trees and got it off the road. Guinn watched him narrowly. He’d known that combination of joviality and slitted eyes from ’way back. “Garry—”

  “I don’t like to see women pushed around,” said Garry. He switched off.

  Guinn got out, closed the door, leaned his elbows on the window ledge. “Lynn …”

  She took her apprehensive eyes from the convertible. “Mmm?”

  “You’ll be all right with Garry. He’s harmless. He likes to look, but he’s afraid to touch.” He thumped Garry’s shoulder. “If anyone shoots at you,” he told him, “try to catch the slug in your head, where it won’t make any difference.”

  Garry laughed with the same ominous cheerfulness. “How soon’ll you be back?”

  “Shortly.” He turned away and struck into the woods at about forty-five degrees away from the road.

  He worked his way carefully, keeping a constant watch on the convertible and on the area between it and the rocks. Nothing moved. There was no one in sight in or around the Chrysler when he drew abreast of it. He made no attempt to get closer, but moved steadily toward the rocks. Once he stopped and listened. He made another fifty feet and stopped again. There was a high, thin cry, faint and close. It sounded like a hoarse-voiced three-year-old child repeating a single vowel sound: Ei-ee! Ei-ee!

  He stepped into the clearing around the rocks. Out of the corner of his eye something dark flashed out of sight around a projection in the gray stone.

  Guinn slid back into the brush and waited. He reached inside his jacket and fingered the butt of his .32.

  The black thing barely showed, disappeared again.

  Hollow, faint, near, insistent came the childlike Ei-ee … ei-ee … ei-ee …

  Guinn lifted his gun, kicked off the safeties, crouched lower.

  Explosively, the black thing leaped out into the open. Guinn’s breath caught in his throat and he quelled the trigger reflex of his right hand by an enormous application of will. A black goat kid pranced into the open, ran and leapt high over some invisible obstacle created in its own fantastically playful imagination, hit the ground with all four feet together, back arched, head down. It gave an infantile snort and raced away, its little hooves making astonishingly soft little sounds on the rocks, like a cat’s feet on parquet flooring.

  “Percival!” Guinn called.

  Ee-ee … ei-ee …

  From the woods came the sound of a starter. Not the station wagon, for the motor turned over all of four times before it caught, a delay that Garry wouldn’t stand for in anything he drove. Must be the Chrysler.

  Guinn hesitated only a second, recalled that Garry was between the Chrysler and the outside world, then stepped out into the clearing. He heard the convertible grind into reverse, cut into low and then a dwindling second. He shrugged and moved across to the rocks and around them, swiftly and watchfully. Nothing moved. Somewhere a goat bleated, and another answered.

  Then there was a wide cave-mouth.

  “Percival?”

  No answer, except that repetitive, high-pitched cry.

  Guinn ducked into the cave and sprang to one side, feeling for that silhouetted second like a towed artillery target. A sixth sense told him there was nothing human inside. He shut his eyes tight as if to squeeze the residual sunlight out of them like some dazzling juice.

  At last he could see. Book rack. A hard mattress on the scrupulously leveled and swept clay floor. Goatskins. And back in the corner, something small and white that wept and wept.

  He crossed, knelt beside it. It was a newborn goat kid, a day or so old, its wobbly and beseeching head stretched toward the light.

  He patted its neck and it slapped his wrist with a tongue as rough as a finishing rasp. Then he flicked his gaze over the cave again. He ran his hand over the books, glanced at their titles. Krishnamurti, Malory, Tennyson, Gibrahn, Swedenborg. White’s The Sword in the Stone, C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. Theosophy, anthropology, Ancient British Landmarks.

  “Busy boy,” he muttered. He turned to the mattress, touched it.

  It was wet.

  He could detect, as he bent over it, the acrid not unpleasant odor of fresh clean perspiration. He threw off the shaggy goatskin. Under it the mattress was sopping. But this wasn’t perspiration.

  It was blood.

  “Ei-ee …” mourned the kid.

  “Hold tight, baby,” he soothed. He knelt and scrutinized the floor carefully in the band of sunlight which streamed in through the cave-mouth.

  “Um-hm!” Blood again; a spot, a starred droplet, a smear. Once he had seen them it was easy enough to follow them outside (“I’ll be back, baby,” he told the kid), across the clearing, through a band of woodland (where, on a flat rock, there was a full scarlet handprint) and into the meadow behind the outcropping.

  The goats were there, massed together like a bed of flowers, their heads all turned toward him, their eyes like shining seeds. He stopped, and here a head fell, and there, and one by one they began to graze absently. But none of them wandered far from the still figure on the grass.

  He went to it and the goats fell back before him, warily and attentive.

  Percival lay face downward on the grass. Guinn knew it was Percival because of the single length of white linen wrapped around his waist, and because of the tumbled gray shoulder-length hair. The hair had blood on it.

  He turned the body over, and Percival moaned. He wasn’t dead, and that, under the circumstances, was a pity.

  Guinn took out his carefully folded display handkerchief, shook it open, and wiped out the blood-filled eyes. “It’s Hadley Guinn,” he said softly. “You’ll be all right now.”

  “Mo,” whispered Percival. No one could have made an ‘n’ sound from a mouth and tongue in that condition.

  “Who did it?”

  Percival breathed deeply, twice, and his eyes began to glaze. Guinn shook him, almost roughly. “You’ve got to tell me who did this to you.” He turned the handkerchief, dabbed very gently at the tattered mouth.

  Slowly the eyes regained some life. “Gwim?”

  “Guinn, yes; Hadley Guinn. I’ll help you, Percival. Who did this to you?”

  “Gwim … g o o’ boy, Gwim.” He coughed. Guinn caught the blood. “Who … fent … oo?”

  Guinn closed his eyes and ran over forty possibilities. Then, “Who sent me? Never mind that, Percival, man. Tell me, you’ve got to tell me—”

  Percival tossed his head impatiently. “Who? Who?”

  “All right. It was a dame called Morgan.”

  The painful distortion of the wrecked mouth might have been a smile. Percival nodded. “Gh-h-issen …”

  Guinn translated this as listen … “I’m listening, Percival,” he said softly.

  Percival’s gnarled hand came up, pointed. The sharp old index finger dug into his knee to punctuate the crippled, halting speech. “… Hynd guh ghuid umgh-ozhiush …”

  Watching those tortured eyes, Guinn felt grief and panic mount. He tried. He tried desperately hard. “Wait: you say hy … hie … fi … find … guh … duh … the? The. Find the. Find the what, Percival?”

  “Ghuid … Dhuid …”

  “Doo-id? D … Druid?” Is it Druid, Percival?”

  Percival nodded weakly, rapidly. His hand patted Guinn’s knee as if in vast approval. “Um … amgh-ozhiush.”
r />   “Amgh … Amgrozihi-ess …”

  Percival spread his hand in a helpless gesture. Guinn said, “Was that close? Is that almost it, Percival? Amghrozhi-ess?”

  Percival nodded weakly. Guinn could all but see his soul leaving his body. “Who did it? Who, Percival—who?”

  “M-m-m …”

  “Please, please … try.”

  “Mugh-gug.”

  “Mur … murdered. Murdered. Yes, Percival—who did it?”

  “M-m-m …”

  Guinn put the great head down softly and stood up. He hurt. He hurt away down inside where his roiling anger lived—way under anything he could control.

  He hurt enough to measure his wonderment when as a kid with a dog he had run into Percival and his goats; when he used to sit in the cave and hear that great rolling voice tell tales of ancient times, and the gods men worshipped when the world was younger, when faith had the place that knowledge has now. There were great tales of the future, too, when the reverence now given knowledge will be replaced by understanding.

  He hurt enough to measure his delight when Percival would gravely give him his choice of goat’s milk or turnip juice to drink, and when the hermit gave him a great white ram’s skin for his own. (It lay over the foot of his bed to this day.)

  He hurt enough to measure his shame when as an enlightened teenager he had been part of a gang that went up to jeer and throw mud at the “nekkid looney.” (For Percival lived naked in the warm weather and in goat-skins in the cold, always courteously donning his strip of linen when anyone came by.) They’d taken pictures and had themselves a hell of a laugh over it; and Guinn couldn’t live with it and went up to apologize, and the hermit greeted him as a friend.

  Percival was part of the mountain—part of the world. He was part of a very real world of rocks and flowers, wind and winter and eternal wildness—a world on which chrome and neon and nuclear energy and power politics grew like acne on a great calm face. He had never done harm to a living soul. He had never sought a human being out nor turned one away. He was on the mountain when Guinn was born and he should have been there when Guinn died, because he was part of the eternity that every man should have, somewhere, to turn to when he needs it.

  Something died and was born in Guinn as he stood looking down at the great torn face. “Take care of him,” he said to the goats. “I’ll send somebody up …”

  From the cave the kid cried and cried.

  “Oh, yes, baby. You’ve got it just right.”

  He scooped up a startled nanny and headed for the cave. As he reached the entrance he heard a shot from the woods.

  “Sorry, lady,” he said. He flung the nanny through the cave-mouth with one fluid sweep of his two arms, hoping against hope that she and the kid would get together, and sprinted for his car.

  As he passed the place where the Chrysler had been parked there was another shot, and the moan of the Town-and-Country’s motor. He pounded up to the station wagon just in time to see the convertible break through the underbrush and disappear into the meadow.

  Lynn was gone. Garry lay beside the car. There was a hole in the side of his head and another at the back, and he was very bloody.

  Guinn was around at all largely because he had the knack of selecting priorities among simultaneous emergencies, and because, having been born with the knack, he’d spent most of his life developing it.

  When he knelt beside Garry’s body he knew he had feelings about it, but he filed them away for later. The priority he noticed immediately was a smell and a sound; a steady trickle of liquid on dead leaves, and the acrid fumes of gasoline.

  He dropped to his belly and looked under the car. A stream of gas the size of a pencil lead was flowing out of the tank. He pulled himself up by a doorhandle, opening the door as he moved, scooped up the rear seat and got a folding bucket from under it, and ran around to shove it under the tank. He felt the hole, a jagged oval rip cut by a .32 or something larger.

  “Don’t go away,” he said to Garry.

  He opened the right rear door, pulled at the scarred upholstery. It came off its snap-fasteners with a sound like teeth going into peanut brittle. In the shallow space between upholstery and the outer panel were row on row of parts, neatly clipped with spring clamps. There were spark plugs, three spare distributor caps, ignition wire and a number of other things that it’s better to have and not need than need and not have.

  Guinn’s hands were a blur. He found what he was looking for: spider-expansion bolts and washers, and a screwdriver. He dove under the car, slipped the bolt through the washer and a gasket, and forced the bolt into the hole in the tank. He spun it with the screwdriver with a palm-on-palm technique he had learned in his wartime stretch in an aircraft factory, until the spider inside spread and the washer seated tightly over the hole. The he wrenched off the tank cap and slopped in the fuel which had been caught in the bucket.

  The whole operation had taken somewhat over ninety seconds.

  Guinn hurled the bucket, screwdriver and upholstered panel into the back of the station wagon. He lifted Garry swiftly and gently and spread him out on the seat behind the driver’s. There were cargo straps. He whipped one around Garry’s chest, one around his thighs, and cinched them down. He took one precious moment to touch the youth’s head with big, sensitive fingers, feeling carefully between the two holes. He pursed his lips worriedly, slid under the wheel and kicked the motor over. A patient rear fender took yet another wound-stripe as he slithered the car around, caromed off a tree, and headed out. He leaned forward, his hands placed lightly at “ten and two” like a racing driver’s. He let the wheel shimmy through his fingers, and he drove.

  Two shots. Garry got one. The gas tank got the other. The man who had cut up Percival’s face had Lynn. Hadley Guinn was out to get that man.

  On the third hairpin turn he craned over the edge as his wheels kicked stones out into space. Down below him he saw a dust cloud. He let his foot give four more ounces to the accelerator.

  On the fourth turn he actually saw the convertible taking the last straightaway into the Spur road. Guinn groaned. He had two more hairpins to negotiate.

  Or had he? The road zig-zagged down the mountain face, but that didn’t necessarily mean he had to …

  This far down the hill, the grade flattened out. From this stretch there was about a four-to-one slope to the road below. From that road the grade was a mere thirty degrees or so.

  “So what the hell,” he growled, and pulled on the wheel.

  For an endless second he had strictly a bird’s-eye view all across the windshield. Then the front end came swooping downward. There was a nasty crunch as the road shoulder ground into the muffler pipe under the car’s center of gravity, and then he was off the road, headed down the slope.

  There wasn’t time to think. There was just time to fight. He locked the brakes when the machine would slide straight, let it roll when it wanted to turn. He diddled the brakes and outguessed the wheel. A small avalanche accompanied him, and a rising cloud of dust joined hands with the growing dusk to make seeing tough.

  Then the front wheels hit the shallow ditch of the next level of the switchback road. There was a harrowing snap as the bumper bulldozed into the ditch and broke off, and then the car was slanting across the road and down again off the other side. The underside took another blow, though not as severe this time, as the car levered over the edge. And once more the nightmare of rolling too fast and not sliding straight enough.

  There was no appreciable ditch at the bottom, and it was a blacktop road. Guinn hauled the wheel over and the rubber screamed as he gunned down the Spur road. Looking across country he could see the convertible streaking along the township highway that would take it across the river and into the city.

  Guinn bore down to the floor, and the station wagon laid its ears back and went. With it, it carried an unholy din of scraping metal which suddenly ceased as the muffler and exhaust stack tore loose and skittered into the ditch. The
car bellowed with an open throat. Guinn nodded grimly. Made to order; he could crowd six or seven miles more per hour out of the old dog without that manifold back pressure.

  He took the turn into the township road altogether too fast, and had the rear end into and out of the ditch on the far side of the turn. And then he was on the straightaway, and with the convertible a distant beetle ahead of him. He glanced back at the mountain, grinned tightly as he saw the long scar of his tracks straight down its naked face. He’d gotten a half-mile jump on the Chrysler by short-circuiting those two hairpins.

  He checked ahead for traffic and then twisted to look back at Garry. The youth lay limp and pale in his straps. The bleeding seemed to have stopped for the time being. Guinn prayed that his probing fingers had been right.

  Glancing ahead again, he felt a leap of joy as he saw that he was gaining on the convertible. Traffic was light, happily, and there was nothing between him and the other car. He pulled out the choke lever a tiny fraction and did his best to put his foot through the floorboards. He took his right hand off the wheel, fingered his gun out of its holster and wedged it between his right buttock and the seat.

  Suddenly he stiffened, peered. The convertible was just about to gain the bridge, which carried the road on its own level as steep banks fell to the water below. And at the other end of the bridge, coming toward them, was the great hulking mass of a lowboy trailer carrying a fifty-ton power shovel. The bridge was wide enough for two lanes of ordinary traffic, but getting the Chrysler past it was going to be a trick.

  He saw a single flicker of the convertible’s brake lights, and then its driver apparently decided to bull through. Guinn saw the lowboy tractor lumbering as far over to his side of the bridge as it could, and the trailer reluctantly following. The swelling sides of the shovel’s cab bulged far over the center-line of the roadway.

  The brake lights flared again. The convertible would clear the tractor and probably the side of the shovel, but the rear end of the trailer was still slightly angled across the road.