“What did you do that for?” she raged. “Look at them, they’re all shook up and beginning to scatter.”
But it was not Jeebee alone who had answered. So had Greta.
Merry stared increduously at the dog, then put her horse in motion.
“Help me!” she shouted over her shoulder at Jeebee. “We’ve got to get these horses back together again.”
It was not until they two and the dogs had managed to get the stock bunched up once more in its usual pattern that Jeebee noticed that the yellow female was no longer with them.
“Look,” he said to Merry, “she’s gone. Greta’s gone.”
“Greta?” Merry reined in her horse and looked around. “I don’t believe it!”
But Greta was indeed gone. Jeebee waited a little while for the fact to sink in, before he mildly offered a suggestion.
“I think she’s gone up into the woods to meet Wolf,” hesaid.
“She wouldn’t do that—” Merry broke off. She stared angrily at Jeebee. “Hell! Watch the stock!”
She wheeled her horse about and galloped up to the front of the wagon. There were a few moments in which Jeebee could hear a conversation between Paul and his daughter, but could not make out exactly what they were saying. The voices ceased and the wagon came suddenly to a stop. Merry came back to the tail of the wagon again.
“You make sure the stock stays together,” she said. “I’m going up after her and bring her back.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said Jeebee.
She literally glared at him.
“You know, this is all your fault!” she said. “You and that wolf! Why shouldn’t I go?”
“Why?” Jeebee echoed. “Because if you start up there, Wolf is going to run away when he sees you coming. And Greta’s already shown that she’s going to follow him, so you’re likely to lose them both. You’d be surprised how hard it is to find a couple of animals like that if they want to get away from you and hide.”
He stopped. He felt sorry for her.
“It’s all right, you know,” he said. “As long as we leave them alone, she’s going to meet Wolf just inside the woods there and they’ll be together for a little while and then she’ll come back to the wagon. Just as Wolf doesn’t want to leave me, she doesn’t want to leave the rest of you down here. She’s simply being pulled two ways at the present moment.”
The nearest patch of woods was up a gentle slope and about two hundred yards away. Merry looked past Jeebee at it, stared at it.
“How long will we have to wait?” she asked. Her own voice was suddenly, surprisingly calm.
“I don’t know,” Jeebee answered. “But I don’t think it’ll be long. What I’d suggest is that you stop for maybe half an hour—long enough to have lunch, say—and if Greta hasn’t shown by that time, start to move off. She’ll have been with Wolf long enough to get over her first impulse to go to him, and when she sees you leaving, she’ll be afraid of losing you. I’m pretty sure then she’ll come out and follow—in fact I’m pretty sure she’ll catch up with us right away.”
There was a long silence. Merry looked back at him.
“It makes sense,” she said, more quietly. “Look, I’m sorry I snapped at you. You made it clear enough when you joined us that you couldn’t control that animal. I don’t mean to blame you for what he does, but maybe it’d been better all around if we’d shot him on first sight.”
“If you had,” said Jeebee, “I’d probably have shot at you. I mean that.”
For a moment their eyes locked, and somewhat to Jeebee’s surprise, Merry’s face relaxed, relaxed a little more, and finally smiled.
“He does mean a lot to you, doesn’t he?” she said. “I’m sorry. I spoke too fast. I wouldn’t really have shot at him, even then. At least I don’t think I would. Dad might’ve—but I doubt even that.”
She lifted her reins and pressed with one knee. “I’ll go talk Dad into stopping for a bit,” she said—and was gone.
CHAPTER 11
To Jeebee’s surprise, Paul did not seem at all put out by the idea of a half hour or even an hour’s delay. He was discovering something more about the man who had built and operated this whole peddler’s scheme, and that was that he had a very lively curiosity about anything and everything.
There had been hints of this when he had been talking with Jeebee in the process of teaching Jeebee to drive the wagon team. Every now and then Paul would have a mild question about what Jeebee’s life had been like before he had headed west to find his brother’s ranch. At first these questions passed almost unnoticed by Jeebee as he answered them. Later, he began to realize that Paul was slowly and quite subtly drawing out of him his personal history. The questions invariably came after Paul had told Jeebee something about his own background, so that it was difficult not to reciprocate.
At first Jeebee thought that Paul was simply interested in what kind of man he’d picked up by the roadside. Then he began to discover that Paul was genuinely interested in the work of the study group. Jeebee tried to explain this in words that would be understandable to the other but Paul shook his head.
“Most of it I can’t follow,” he said finally, “but unless I’m wrong, what it all adds up to is that you saw this coming almost as early as I did and didn’t do a thing about it. Particularly you didn’t do anything to save yourself until you darn near got smoked out of your own home by neighbors that had set out to kill you.”
Jeebee nodded.
“Why?” Paul had said. “Why, when you could see it coming, wait like that?”
Jeebee hesitated. It was not that he did not know the answer. It was just difficult to explain. Finally, he shrugged.
“If you’re any good as a scientist,” he had said, “you have to learn a certain detachment from what you’re studying. If you don’t, it’s too easy to see what you want to see in the numbers. Anyone who studies social behavior has to learn to treat social processes and dynamics as pure abstractions that’ve got nothing to do with him personally. What happened in Stoketon was a truck that ran us down while we were still busy calculating, from its speed and weight, just how hard it could hit.”
He could hear his own words and they sounded a little stiff and academic in his ears. But they were all true—all what had actually happened.
The day was bright and warm, so that the little air stir resulting from their passage was pleasant. Neither he nor Paul said anything for a moment.
“You and this brother of yours pretty close?” Paul asked.
“Yes,” Jeebee said, and then hesitated.
He had never stopped to think about it, but he realized now that he had always thought of Martin as a sort of lesser and more distant father, lost somewhere behind the shadow of Carey, the actual father of both of them.
“That is,” Jeebee went on, “when we were younger. There’s eighteen years between us. He’s the older. I used to visit up at the ranch and he’d visit us—my father, my mother, and me—sometimes. After my father died—well, actually, after my mother’s death, when I was sixteen—we fell out of touch a bit; though we still wrote letters every so often. But I haven’t seen him since I was about—oh, fourteen or fifteen years old.”
“How come your father moved away from the ranch?” Paul asked.
“It really wasn’t what he wanted,” Jeebee said. “My grandfather did, and Martin did. But Dad really didn’t care for it too much. He stuck with it until the Vietnam War came along. He’d already had Martin, but he joined up and went off to the war anyway. He told my grandfather that he was giving up all claim to the ranch so the way would be clear for Martin in case anything happened to him while he was gone.”
There was another long pause as the wagon rolled and jolted on its way.
“Afterward,” Jeebee said without prompting, finding a sudden relief—almost a pleasure in telling this to someone, finally—“there was the GI Bill. He always liked architecture. So he went to school to become an architect.”<
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“Architecture,” Paul said thoughtfully, “a far call from ranching.”
“Oh, Dad was always a hands-on man,” said Jeebee. “He liked to build with existing materials. If he saw a rocky hillside lot, he’d immediately be taken with the idea of building a house with the rock. A house that would seem to grow right out of the hillside, there. An interesting piece of wood could give him an idea for pegged, instead of nailed houses—even log houses.”
“He try to push you toward architecture at all?” Paul asked.
Jeebee shook his head.
“No,” he said thoughtfully. “Neither he nor my mother really pushed me anywhere. They loved me, all right. But they were a couple of strange people, in some ways. They didn’t show much in the way of affection, to me or even to each other. My mother was an academic. She taught history on the university level. Usually she was stuck in her job someplace, and I moved around the country with Dad. It was that way most of the time I was going through grade school and high school.”
He remembered it now, with a particular sharpness. He had been taller and skinnier than most boys his own age, and uncoordinated. Each new schoolroom had become an arena in which he knew in advance he would be tried, tested, and found wanting. Schoolmates his own age, but much smaller and better coordinated, were able to bully him, making him in his own eyes, as well as those of others, a weakling.
He had grown into adulthood coming to think of himself as that, to accept the fact he could not compete with the rest of the world physically. Then his mother had died suddenly of viral pneumonia when he was sixteen. And then, when he was away at college, his father was killed in a construction accident.
He told Paul something about this.
“Pretty much a loner, weren’t you?” said Paul.
That was true enough, Jeebee thought. Among the study group at Stoketon he had been a maverick, more than slightly suspected as the recipient of special favor from Bill Bohl, the director, but respected nonetheless.
“I guess you could say so,” he said to Paul. “I took sociology as an undergraduate. But there was always something lacking in it for me.”
“How do you mean, lacking?”
“Well, I came to understand it later,” said Jeebee, slipping unthinkingly into a more academic way of talking. “Sociology was really badly indifferent in some ways to the ecological factors in which social and cultural processes are rooted. Besides that, it was unsophisticated in the development of mathematical models of the kind that were revolutionizing other social sciences.”
“So?” said Paul. “What did you do?”
“Well, I’d already decided that I wanted to be an academic,” Jeebee said. “By the time I was ready to apply to graduate schools, economic geography seemed the best approach for me to the questions I was after.”
“And where was this?” Paul asked.
“This was at the main campus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor,” said Jeebee. “I was very lucky. I got Dr. Bill Bohl for an adviser.”
“Bill Bohl?” echoed Paul. “Don’t think I ever heard of him.”
“Probably you wouldn’t, unless you were an academic yourself, and working in the same area or a related area,” Jeebee said, “but it was the best thing that ever happened to me. He was tremendous. He was fifty-two years old at the time I met him, and he was widely known and respected for his contributions to classical economics and innovative applications of general-systems problems in social ecology.” Jeebee laughed.
“You wouldn’t think he carried all that clout to look at him,” he said. “He was young looking for his years, but bald as an egg, and he had a face like a bulldog with a body like an undergraduate fullback. Meeting him, you probably wouldn’t have liked him, first off. He was direct to the point of being almost brutal.”
“Well, wasn’t he what he seemed to be?” Paul asked. Jeebee shook his head.
“I got to know him very well,” he said. “Behind the way he talked and acted he was really very sensitive to the human realities underlying the abstractions with which we all worked. In fact, I still think he’d deliberately cultivated that tough appearance of his to hide his sensitivity toward the people he had to work with.”
“So you liked him,” Paul said.
“Yes,” said Jeebee, “and he liked me—strangely enough.”
“Why, strangely enough?” said Paul. “People like each other or they don’t. You can’t pin down reasons.”
“Oh, he told me some reasons he liked me, from time to time,” Jeebee said. “He thought I had a remarkable enthusiasm, and he told me I had a highly unusual, intuitive ability to represent social processes in the language of mathematics.”
“Did you?” asked Paul.
“Yes,” Jeebee said slowly. “At least as far as the mathematics went, I guess I did. At least compared with the people I worked with.”
There was another stretch of silence. It was a comfortable silence during which Jeebee was thinking of his academic days and of Bill Bohl. He was brought back to the present by Paul.
“Well, there you were, studying for your doctorate with this Bill Bohl as an adviser,” said Paul. “How did you get from there to Stoketon?”
“Stoketon was a real break for me,” Jeebee said with enthusiasm, “and something I never would have got if Bill hadn’t had such a high idea of me. You see, even before I’d finished my doctoral thesis, Bill had let me work with him on half a dozen articles that promised to open new avenues of approach to mathematical modeling. The articles got quite a bit of attention.”
“That’s important?” said Paul.
“That’s very important,” Jeebee answered, “particularly for someone at the stage I was at, then.” He paused.
“Then, when I finished my doctoral thesis, Bill talked me into staying on at the university, on a postdoctoral fellowship. It paid next to nothing, but the main thing was it let me go on working with Bill; and this paid off handsomely later on, when Bill was awarded a founder’s grant to establish the Center for the Study of Quantitative Sociodynamics—the Stoketon Group.”
“He invited you in on that, did he?”
“He did more than just invite me,” Jeebee answered. “He’d actually written me into the grant, with the grant paying my salary. All that was required after that was for the university to give me its blessing—award me a nominal academic title that made me eligible for fringe benefits and gave me access to their libraries; that went along with the faculty post. At Stoketon, I was a resident research fellow with a permanent position—as distinguished from the experts we had, who came, stayed for a while, and then left.”
“I get the idea you liked it there,” said Paul.
“I did,” Jeebee said, remembering, “I really did. I was kind of a maverick, or at least, a lot of them thought of me as sort of an oddball. But it’s great working with people who are good themselves; and we all got along very well. I think I really turned into something at Stoketon. Pity was, it was only along the lines of the academic work I was doing. As far as the outside world was concerned—the kind of thing I need to survive nowadays—I was just as much a loner and as much an innocent as I’d ever been. That was one of the reasons my neighbors chased me out, finally.”
“You weren’t going back to your brother’s until that happened?” said Paul.
“Oh yes. Of course I was,” said Jeebee. “The Collapse had hit. We’d no connection with any of the cities around us anymore. The water was off. There was no more electricity. Stoketon was turning into a little, tight, armed community. The thing was, I wasn’t really part of it. I’d almost been part of it, when a woman who lived there worked for me. But when she quit, it was a signal—even though I didn’t know it at the time—that I was being cut off and labeled an outsider. Luckily, I’d already started accumulating some things to go west with—including an electric-driven bike. Anyway, when I finally did leave, it was with some of them shooting at me.” He hesitated.
“I lost the
bike a couple of weeks back in a small town, where I stopped, thinking maybe I could do some trading. That was the same town where I picked up Wolf.”
He fell silent again, remembering.
“Well,” Paul said at last, his eyes on the ears of his horses, “I’d say you’ve done some growing since you left that Stoketon of yours.”
After that they had driven on in silence for some little while before talking of something else.
Now, Jeebee found them pausing as he had recommended to Merry, and it turned their early lunch into something almost like a picnic. Normally lunches were eaten as they moved—sandwiches and hot coffee, and occasionally a piece of pie or cake baked the evening before. In this case, Nick, whose turn it was to cook, again set up a folding card table on the grass beside the wagon, with chairs at it for all of them, and served them soup, fried potatoes that had been roasted in the open fire the night before, and ham, covered with a homemade but very tasty gravy.
Jeebee did not require telling that part of all this, including the table outside on the grass, was intentional. The smells of the cooking were meant to reach up and tickle the noses of Greta and Wolf, back among the trees.
How much of what followed was due to this, or to other factors, was impossible to tell, but they were just finishing up their food when Greta showed herself at the edge of the trees. She came backing out of the woods with her tail wagging furiously.
She dropped to her elbows, her hindquarters still high, as though bowing to an unseen playmate, then darted in and out of the woods in a series of clownish dashes.
Jeebee went to get his binoculars and stood by the table, trying to focus on the darkness of the woods. He was positive that Wolf was in there, and that this behavior of Greta’s was addressed to him. But the difference between light and shadow, particularly in the bright noonday, kept him from seeing very far in among the trees, even with the help of the binoculars—though they were little enough help at that.
After a moment, he felt the binoculars taken out of his hands and something round and a good deal heavier pushed into them. He looked down, and saw that Paul had handed him a pair of good binoculars, much larger and heavier than the opera glasses.
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