And her mark was on the boy; her delicate features were also his—the soft, long lashed eyes—the pure beauty of feature—the face that served as a mirror for the sensitive mind.
The train had come to rest in two sections, each half strung out to form the side of a street. All activity was in the space between. Plastitents sprang up on the red meadow; tents for living—for gambling—for drinking. Atom-charged food cookers were charged and there was sound and color and action and all these things thrilled the boy.
He had been riding all day and there was pent-up energy in his body. He dawdled for a time around the truck. Then, with a quick look at his bearded, sober uncle, he took three soft steps and was off, flying down the long street, driven by sheer animal exhuberance.
Some twenty-five trucks down, the patter of his bare feet lessened and he went slowly past a fine big GM land-cruiser. There was a yellow-haired girl in this truck. He had seen her, fleetingly, on several occasions and once he had spoken to her. But in the train, as in a town, the lines of discrimination had been drawn. There was already cat-town and shanty-town and snob-town. Cory Balleau, in his short run had crossed over and was in alien territory. These big double-traction cruisers were as inviolate as mansions on a hill.
The girl was there—leaning out through the window in the back of the truck. The boy dawdled with studied care under the gaze of her bright interested eyes.
The girl said: “Hello. I’ve seen you.”
The boy said: “I’ve seen you too My name’s Cory Balleau.” He drew a design in the dust with his foot.
“Mine’s Catherine Bates, but they call me Kay.”
There were legs moving in long strides on the other side of the wagon. The legs were clad in boots of fine leather—expensive boots.
The legs came around the rear of the truck and there was a scowl on the face of the man who wore the boots. The man said: “Get on out of here! No chance to steal anything. Get on with you!”
EACH WORD could have been the lash of a whip laid across the boy’s back. The liquid eyes widened. He paled and took one faltering step backwards. He stared at the man.
Immediately there was the sound of movement up in the big truck and a woman appeared beside the yellow haired girl. The woman had plump, cheerful beauty and she was not past her early twenties—about the same age as the man.
The woman said, “Frank! Stop it!” That was all and the man stood with a sullen look, eyeing the boy.
The woman turned to the boy. A gentle smile was there, nestling in the soft curve of her mouth. “Don’t be afraid, boy. It’s all right.”
He stood mute, writhing under this embarrassment. The woman’s smile got even softer and she said, “Are you hungry, lad?”
The yellow-haired girl brightened “Mama—can he have my dessert tonight? Can he?”
Something burst inside Cory Balleau—something wild and agonizing. Tears flooded out and his words were shrill and high: “I’m not hungry, you—you snobs! We’ve got food! We’ve got more food than anybody! We don’t take charity from snobs!”
He whirled away and was gone—blindly down the street. He smashed head on into something covered with soft purple leather, though hard as steel underneath. But there was scarcely any shock because the steel yielded like a spring, turned on a pivot, and the boy was lifted and swung back on balance and put down again.
A deep voice said, “Easy there, son.”
Cory opened his eyes. The face above his was deeply tanned. There were fine lines cobwebbing into the outer corners of the dark eyes.
This fleeting glimpse and the boy was free and again rocketing down the street. When his breathing had become a sobbing battle for air, his gait faltered and he found himself at the far rear of the train.
Here was a magically changed atmosphere—a distinct and different segment of the colorful whole. Rough cheekawood counters had already been set up, and the men who crowded around the bottles thereon were of definite mark. The process of the train’s stopping was a little like that of water whirling in a pot. As the water slowed, the dregs swiftly and surely settled to the bottom.
The boy looked around, a trifle bewildered. He had never before come this far down the train. But the bewilderment was secondary in his mind. The sting and shame of his encounter with the yellow-haired girl was still paramount. More than anything, he wanted solitude.
He found a certain degree of it beneath the tracks of a supply truck across from one of the crowded liquor counters. Here he stretched full length and pressed his face against the dust and the coarse crimson grass of the prairie.
He wept with an intensity of one who has a pain deep inside—a pain that will not come to the surface but must be burned away, bit by bit, with scalding tears.
It was not the weeping of childhood, but when it was done the sleep that followed was the sleep of the young.
The boy was awakened by a pounding upon the earth. He opened his eyes and—without turning his head—he was looking out at a myriad of legs. The legs were of all shapes and sizes, Martian legs and Terran legs, and were clad in various ways. Before his eyes there were shoes and boots and purple moccasins formed into a hollow circle. But there were no sounds. This seemed strange. His mind questioned the incongruity of so many men crowded into a circle and, at the same time, such a vast silence.
THE SLEEP faded from his eyes and he saw the two men inside the circle—a Terran and a green-skinned Martian. He raised his head.
They bore a similarity—the two men—great burly Terran with the hair on his face covering everything but cheek-bones and eyes, the cruel-eyed Martian, thewed like a gladiator. Their beards were thick with dirt. Each was in a crouching position; each had his arms bowed outward with hand spread and hooked and waiting like the talons of preying birds. They faced each other and moved in a circle within a circle. They moved cat-like, silent, deadly, and now the boy could see the hatred in their eyes and hear the jerky gusts of their breathing. He sensed the tightness in the air and his mind cringed from it.
The circling ceased, as though by common consent, and the two crashed together and a roar went up from the straining circle. The boy felt the thud of the contact in his own body. He tried to turn his gaze away from the two men, but they were a magnet, holding him.
The two stood locked together, swaying for a long moment, then they broke apart and the fists of the Terran gained an advantage. The fists lashed out like anvils at the end of pistons and there was the soggy sound of flesh being smashed and ground to green pulp against bone. Sticky life-fluid welled over the face of the Martian. He staggered back, shook his head and bellowed like a wounded bull. The Terran dropped back one step and the crouch was gone from his body. He straightened and brought up one leg in a long arcing kick. His boot, with two hundred pounds of force behind it, drove squarely into the other’s groin. The Martian doubled over as though ripped in the middle by a battering ram.
His foe leaped forward, locked his fists together and brought them down against the back of the Martian’s neck. The effect was that of a sledge hammer arced over in a full swing.
The Martian took the blow and went straight to the ground, landing squarely upon his face. He groveled, and spewed out a green sheen through a nose smashed flat and filled with dirt and flesh.
But it was not over yet. In a frenzy of triumph, the Terran screamed an odd, gargled scream and went into the air. He came down accurately, both boots crashing into the small of the Martian’s back.
The Martian’s agony squalled out through his lips in a wave of ear-tearing sound.
The boy, cowering beneath the truck, was also in agony. Never before had he known anything more violent than a reprimand from his mother. He lay stiff and terrorized staring at the spots of life-fluid that had splashed under the truck and were drying on the back of his hand. He rubbed the palm of his other hand across the spots and they became green streaks on his brown skin.
The boy raised his head as the fallen man bellowed anew. The fal
len man stayed prone and rolled across the ground, closer to the wagon. The circle was breaking into savage sound and now the Martian lay on his back not two feet from the boy.
The Terran was still not content. The viciousness within him still demanded. He crossed the circle, and was upon his foe, astride him, with knees on his chest. The boy saw two rigid thumbs poked downward. He saw the look of horror on the Martian’s face. He heard the scream and then managed to close his own eyes. But it was too late. The earth pitched and rolled beneath him and he knew they were helping the Martian up and taking him away.
And he knew also, that they were leading a blind man.
He fainted—
THERE WERE arms lifting Cory Balleau and he opened his eyes. There was the face tanned dark and the fine cobweb lines, and he could feel the soft purple leather and the steel underneath.
Cradled in two arms, he could look up at the man and hear him say: “Where do you belong, son? Your folks’ll be wondering won’t they?”
The boy was wondering too, but about something far different. There was a new feeling in his mind and in his body. His mind could not define the difference but it could note the outward signs of change.
Before, he would have smiled at this stranger and said hello and when I get big I’m going to have a shirt like that. But now he lay stiff in the stranger’s arms and did not smile. He said, “I’m Cory Balleau. Up at the other end of the train. Put me down.”
“My name’s Nate Goodrow,” the stranger said. He put Cory on his feet. “I’ll walk along a piece with you.”
“You’re a scout,” Cory said.
“That’s right—one of them. We sort of keep an eye out. I saw you kiting down the trucks and I’m going that way. So when I see you snoozing under that wagon I took notice.”
The other Cory Balleau would have been thrilled at walking past the trucks with a scout. They were fabulous creatures from whom one was grateful for a nod or a word.
The other Cory Balleau would have been thrilled.
“Who were those men?” the new Cory asked.
“Oh, you saw that, did you? Thought maybe you’d slept through it. A couple of maintainers.” He glanced sharply down at the boy. “Those things—happen,” he said.
Cory could see the home truck now. Uncle John had an atom cooker going in front of it and was standing by the cooker looking anxiously up and down the thoroughfare. Then Cory saw Uncle John step back into the shadows and kneel down beside what looked like a deeper shadow.
There was panic in Cory’s heart and he was running.
The deeper shadow was a mattress stretched on the meadow ground and Faith Balleau lay on the mattress with John Balleau bending over her, wiping blood from her lips. He looked up;
“Your mother had a hemorrhage—a bad one.”
Cory dropped to his knees beside the mattress.
“Mom—. Mom!”
Her eyes opened as though by great effort. She smiled and raised a slim white hand and passed it over her son’s tousled curls. “You went away. I was worried.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
John Balleau had moved back and Cory saw that he was talking in low tones to Nate Goodrow, the scout. They talked for some minutes and then Nate Goodrow turned and hurried away. John Balleau came back and knelt by the side of his sister-in-law.
After a while there were footsteps and another man came to the truck. He carried a medical kit and he seemed tired but his voice was not unkind when he said: “You go with your uncle, son. You take a little walk with your uncle.”
CORY WENT out back of the trucks with his Uncle John and they walked back and forth in the darkness.
“Is Mom going to die?” Cory asked, and in his mind it seemed a strange thing for him to say.
“Of course not. Don’t talk like that.”
“She looked—bad. So white.”
“That’s because she lost blood. She’s got to have rest.”
The doctor called them and they started back toward the train. He came to meet them. His manner was petulant.
“That woman has got to have shelter! You’ve got to get her up off the ground—into one of the atom-drives.”
Cory looked at their own sorry truck with the warped floor. A cold shudder swept him.
“Nate Goodrow went to see,” John Balleau said. “He’s talking to some of the people. He’ll be back soon.”
Cory Balleau went back and sat down on the ground beside his mother. He took her hand and held it in his own. It was cold and he rubbed it gently, warming it. His mother lay with her eyes closed, her face pointed straight upward toward the stars.
Cory sat there for a long time while the stars burned and from up and down the street came the sounds of people moving and laughing and talking and living.
He sat there for a long time and then he knew that his mother was dead.
He got stiffly to his feet and walked a little way down the street. He stopped and put out his hand and leaned against a truck.
There was a voice he could hear and he looked up and saw Nate Goodrow walking by in the gloom, going toward the Balleau truck. Another man was with him.
Nate Goodrow said: “I shouldn’t have told them it was marsplague, I guess. They’re touchy about havin’ their trucks—”
The voice trailed off and was gone, but Cory knew. No trucks for his mother to die in. In this ghastly new world where men fought like animals and gouged out each other’s eyes, there was no one who cared to give a woman the comfort of a dry warm death bed.
Cory Balleau, aged eleven, stood on the Martian prairie and sampled the taste of hatred.
When he returned to the truck a woman was there—a plump, pretty woman with a shawl over her head. She was scolding Nate Goodrow: “Why didn’t you talk to me? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Nate said: “I talked to your husband, ma’am.”
The mother of the golden-haired girl bit her lip as she turned and saw Cory. She went to him and put her arms around him. “You poor boy! Poor lad!” Her sympathy was deep and genuine and the old Cory would have known and responded. The new Cory understood, but he could not respond. He said:
“Take your hands off of me!”
Startled, she looked into his eyes and saw the blaze of hatred. One so young—
“I said lake your hands off me!”
He turned from her and her arms dropped to her sides. She stared after him as he walked away.
“What an odd child. What a very odd child!”
JOHN BALLEAU had an eye for the soil and a love of growing things. In the years before the Third Atomic War, he had owned Willowrood, jointly with his brother, Robert Balleau, in the State of Mississippi. On Willowrood, the buildings were trim and neat; the family mansion gleamed white behind its massive pillars; the crops were the largest, by far, of any for miles around.
John and Robert Balleau were an ideal team. The fiery Robert maintained the social standard. He dashed about in fine racing cars, swept his wide-brimmed hat off to smiling ladies, and practiced the old arts of sword and pistol so full of ceremony and elegance. He married the most beautiful girl in all Mississippi as he was indeed expected to do and brought her home to Willowrood in a sleek jet from a European honeymoon. He sired one child, a son he named Cory, and was visibly disappointed when the boy, even at an early age, showed a bent toward the gentler, more dreamy nature of his mother.
John, on the other hand, stayed in the background, and was quite content to give the stage to his brother. John preferred to live with the land. He was far more interested in the strength of a green stalk than in the burnish and temper of a sword blade. Over the sprained leg of a horse he was sure and gentle but bending over the hand of a woman he acquired a clumsiness and redness of skin that ill became a gentleman.
As the war lumbered toward its outbreak, Robert Balleau was in the forefront of the flaming west-hemisphere vocalists. He flung defiance around the globe with fine gestures while John surveyed the fields in glum silence.
The declaration of war found Robert at the head of a parajet regiment. He faced the future as a great adventure from which nothing but great reward could come. John accepted his captaincy without flourish and rode away wondering if the steel-dust mare could foal safely in his absence.
The Battle of Greenland, and elation swept the west. It would soon be over. But the east hurled its legions into the air and the war went on. One year. Robert died at the annihilation of the Second Lunar Platform. Two years. Sky raiders appeared and Faith Balleau stood in silence with Cory in her arms and watched the mansion flash into nothing. There was hunger and deep silent grief and time passing. The hordes of Gardis moving west unchecked. Surrender at Portland, and John Balleau came limping home. He stopped on the rise overlooking the broad acres and more of him died than had died in the war because now his one last hope had fled.
Willowrood was done. The Balleaus were penniless.
John Balleau put his hands to tools and worked a small strip of the land for vegetables, for immediate food, and a tiny spark of hope was revived. It would be a bad time stretching on ahead, but there was reconciliation. John Balleau had read the New Code, lie had memorized passages from the Second Inspirational Address and he decided the wounds would be healed.
But with the New York Massacres the spark of hope in the breast of John Balleau.
HE DROPPED his tools and turned his eyes skyward. As always, he thought in terms of the land, the soil. There were acres on Mars to be had for the homesteading. He broached the subject to his sister-in-law, Faith. She shrugged. It made little difference. Mississippi. Luna, Venus, Mars. In truth, she had died with Robert Balleau.
They left Willowrood without a backward glance. They bought passage on a slow space-freighter at Panama and found—upon reaching Marsport—that others also had had the dream. They bought a delapidated truck for three times its value and joined a guarded train for the southward trails.
After the crossing of the River—where Faith Balleau surrendered almost gratefully to the flame in her lungs—John dug a grave, after which he put the boy Cory on the seat of the truck and resumed what—to him—had become a sort of pilgrimage.
The 47th Golden Age of Science Fiction Page 26