“Nah, they got their own troubles.”
“Because you don’t know anything. They must believe you that much. But if you did know—”
“Then I’d have troubles.”
“He couldn’t be shielding.”
“No. Shielding’s a kind of faint scrambler buzz you can’t place or understand. You know the shielder’s somewhere in range, you might have some kind of vague idea where he is, but you can’t tell what he’s thinking. With Doydoy now there’s just nothing. I had to tell them the truth. Two-three hours is the most, and he got away from them that long before dawn.”
“Then the Dumplings must know about your psi friends by now.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t matter. I told you they’re not in Doydoy’s class. Look, Shandy, I’m hungry and—”
“Wait a minute, Jason. Please! I have to know—is he still worthwhile?”
“Who?” Suspicion was growing on his face. “What are you talking about?”
“Doydoy… I wondered…oh—” She gave up. “Never mind. Let’s go and eat.”
He grabbed her arm. “Now you just wait a minute. I want to know what you’re getting at. That look in your eye says you got something up your sleeve, and I’m damn well not gonna go through all that business like last night again. Out with it!”
“I don’t want to cause any more trouble, Jason, I don’t!” She was near tears. “It’s just—I think I have a pretty fair idea where he is!”
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The pandora’s box was open. His hand tightened on her arm. “What do you mean, you think you know where he is?”
“Stop pulling me around like that! You don’t like it when Prothero does it to you.”
“This is different.” But he dropped his hand. “Come on, if you got anything to say—”
“Do you want him back in the Dump? Do you?”
He grinned at her vehemence. “Pull in the claws…now look, you better get it straight. What I feel about Doydoy doesn’t matter around here. Nobody gives a good goddam. What I think and what I do are two different things. If you want the truth, I think hanging around here and getting beaten up is one hell of a way to make a living. If you know where Doydoy is and we find him he goes wherever Prothero wants him put.”
She lowered her head and started up the stairs again. “Shandy…do you realize how much Prothero hates me?”
She stopped halfway up, without turning. “Colin’s a Dumpling and you’re not. What difference does that make? He can’t hate every other kid in the world.”
“It’s not only that. I’m like him. I’m much more like him than Colin is. And I’m nothing. Nothing to him, anyway, because I didn’t come from any long line of fighting men out of military and naval academies. My people were farmers and mechanics and my father left school at sixteen to operate a lathe in a factory. According to him I haven’t any right to be his son’s superior. And he knows all this. He’s worked up a good case of high blood pressure, trying to suppress it. Jeez, I got nothing against him—I even like him. But it doesn’t help.”
“What’s all this got to do with Doydoy?”
“Look, Shandy, I’ve got to stay here as long as I have the psi. If I try—”
“But he’ll just get shoved back in the Dump, and the Pack’ll find out and come down on us.”
“I can’t help that.”
“If we could hide him—”
“How long could that last? Then we’d have to deal with the Dumplings and the MP—and there’s no place to hide. I told you I can’t leave here. And I don’t want to have to run away from a court-martial. It’s not only my family, it’s my friends—and the psi itself. You don’t know how it is to have this thing. I’ve got to learn how to live with it, and find out what it’s good for, and I can only do that by being where the other psis are. I can’t leave Sorrel Park and go out there where…”
Where it’s so lonely.
“It”—he shrugged:—“it sounds loony, but…it’s my life’s work.”
“At least you know what it is,” she said, not without envy.
“Yeah. It’s one hell of a consolation. Now let’s get that lunch. We can figure this out later.”
* * * *
“—could lob a nerve-gas bomb into Pringle’s Post in two minutes,” Prothero was saying.
“And they would be gone by the time it got there,” said Marczinek dryly.
“They’re too nervous to stay in one place anyway,” Urquhart said.
It was true. The Pack was going to do something soon, and if it was too disorganized to plan without Doydoy it would lash out in irrational savagery—and not only within the small sector which had been shut off from the world for thirty years.
“It’s hard to imagine Doydoy being able to hide from them.” Urquhart sighed. “We could certainly use him working with us.”
Prothero snorted. “You kidding?” Shandy stole a look at him. His eyes were still red and his face had a look of suffused fury at being hoodwinked by the Dumplings in the way Jason had never dared to do. “I tell you, if we ever get out of this mess it’ll be a damn long time before I push for opening Sorrel Park again.”
Marczinek said patiently, “The sugar, Jason, the sugar. I already have the cream.”
* * * *
“You never saw the inside of the Dump,” said Jason.
“I never wanted to.”
“Well, you’re gonna see it now. It’s the best place to talk.”
“The guards will want to know why I’m going in.”
“They won’t see you.”
She had the eerie feeling of being invisible, even nonexistent, as the guards unwired the heavy doors with foot-thick windows salvaged from the reactor.
There was not a blade of grass in the Dump. The hard beaten earth had the charred look of the scorched flowerbed, and the gray weathered walls of the prefabs were streaked with flaky black. She had imagined a place littered with filth and rubbish, but it looked scoured by fury.
“They burn what they don’t want,” said Jason. “I guess fire’s a good enough expression of hate…anyway, Doydoy isn’t hiding here.”
There was nothing there, aside from the buildings. Nothing.
“Even poverty puts out garbage,” said Shandy. “What do they do for love?”
“Nothing I’ve ever been able to figure out. Even sex isn’t love to them.”
“Did they ever have any babies?”
“Babies! Urquhart’d’ve been crazy with joy if any two of them stayed together long enough to want a kid.” He turned to the buildings. “Want to see the inside?”
She grimaced. “No. Why doesn’t Prothero set up headquarters in here?”
“Because if he ever cornered the Pack long enough to drive them in here, it’d be hard getting out on short notice.”
“Jason,”—she scuffed at the hard earth—“this idea of mine might be all wrong.”
“Maybe…but if you’re right—”
“The Dumplings will know it.”
“Yeah…and he’ll let Doydoy rot here as long as Colin’s dangerous. His life’s work!” The gray earth. The blackened walls. They seemed to stain the sky above them.
“Suppose it was LaVonne or Quimper instead of Doydoy? Would you feel the same?”
“I’m half a Dumpling myself. I don’t like the idea of anybody being kept in here.”
“But Doydoy’s so different—”
“Nobody will hurt Doydoy. You don’t have to worry about that. But if you’re right, and you tell me anything the first person the Pack’s gonna be after is me.”
“I don’t want you to be—”
“I know. I’m not whining.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “But you sure are a funny kid. First you save me from the Pack, and now…”
She shrank inside a little. “You
don’t owe me a thing. Just get me back into Sorrel Park. I’ll disappear and you won’t have to see me again. Then you can forget what I said.”
“No, I can’t. It’s a living problem, not just a lot of gobbledygook you can rub off a blackboard, and it’s got to be lived out to the end.”
“Then maybe I’ll let you figure out for yourself where Doydoy is!” She was angry enough to add, “Maybe I haven’t picked sides yet.”
He only grinned. “Not even when you took a swing at LaVonne and the Kingfish?”
She said acidly, “If you’d been sitting on one of them, maybe I’d have swung at you!”
“I bet that would have been worth seeing, too. But I’m not gonna sit on you to get you to tell me where you think Doydoy is. I’m not that much of a Dumpling, and I haven’t got time to waste. It’s your decision. But if we find Doydoy, he gets handed to Prothero…now what’ll it be, kiddo?”
“I—” She swallowed. She couldn’t let Doydoy starve. “I should have gone myself. I could’ve—”
“Not without being seen. You’re not inconspicuous here.”
“All right. Come on.”
Underground in the vault beneath the redbrick ell there was nothing but a vast expanse of flooring that echoed cavernously to the footstep. The ceiling was a tangle of pipes and wires from which the occasional electric bulb dangled, pocking the gray floor with scrofulous light. There was nothing left in the place but dusty tread marks where the tanks and trailers had ridden out.
“Over there,” Jason whispered. He pointed to the dark corner nearest the ramp, and as she strained her eyes at it she began to see. It was there, knobs, rods, antennas and wiring. The cage.
“I guess I couldn’t have found it by myself…oh well. It’s on, isn’t it?” She could hear the faint hiss and crackle of the Field.
“All the time. They run the connections underground to the Dump.”
They moved silently toward the corner. Shandy’s heart was racing, and it seemed as if its vibrations were replicating in the great echo-space around her.
Halfway there, they paused. A shape had become discernible on the cage floor. A blot of darkness, with nothing to recognize in the crumpled form but the great black boss of the hump, rising and falling against the crosshatching of the mesh. Doydoy was asleep.
Jason raised a hand, and they moved back. “You were right.”
“I wish I hadn’t been…there just wasn’t any other place.” They stared at the cage in its shadowed corner.
“…I wonder if he’s so bright, after all,” said Jason. “There isn’t any way of getting out of that thing from the inside.”
“He was just awfully tired and desperate, I think.”
“Yeah.” He rammed his hands in his pockets and muttered, “I’ll get Prothero.”
But instead he moved silently toward the cage again, and she followed. He knelt beside it and twisted his hands in the interstices from the outside as Colin had twisted his from within.
Doydoy was sleeping with his body bent at an angle to conform to the shape of the cage. His limp legs were sprawled out like a rag doll’s and Shandy saw in the dim light that the soles of his shoes were unworn. His face was pale and there were metal-rimmed glasses perched crookedly on his nose; a white blotch on his neck resolved into the bandage covering the sore Grace had dressed for him. His cheek was resting on his arm, and the breath sounded very faint and small on his lips.
In the opposite corner of the cage there was a food supply spread on a sheet of wrapping paper: a salami, three tomatoes, and a wax carton half-full of milk.
Jason whispered against the meshes, “Christ, I can’t! I can’t do it!”
She crouched beside him. “I’m sorry, Jason.”
“Sorry! What else could you do? The Pack would have found him—or he’d have rotted before anybody thought to look here.”
“What shall we do?”
“All my big talk…but I can’t let him be shoved back in the Dump—and I can’t let them get him. God, I wish I had power that meant something! Dumper’s peeper!” He spat.
Doydoy had begun to stir; his arms were reaching out, and the muscles of his face were moving in small tics. “He’s going to wake up in a minute.” Shandy glanced about fearfully, as though the shadows were full of Dumplings about to spring. “Do they know anything yet?”
“No, but they’ll catch on.” He stood up.
She whispered, “Jason, if he sees you first thing he might get panicky and blow up. Maybe I could talk to him for a few minutes. Can you shield?”
He looked at her gratefully. She was giving him time, and the consequences of his decision could reach far beyond Sorrel Park. “I told you my limit’s five minutes—maybe I could manage seven or eight.” He backed away into the shadows.
She watched Doydoy, waiting as he twisted about as far on his back as the hump would allow. His hands moved, jerkily at first, as he pushed his fingers under his glasses and rubbed his closed eyes. Then they opened, a very pale blue that caught the light startlingly.
“Donatus…”
He came awake instantly, and his body rose in the air and flung against the cage wall like a wild thing. “Who-who are y-ou?”
His voice was cracked, and he was trembling so hard the wires rattled against the cage.
“My name’s Shandy Johnson. I’m an Imper.”
An understanding flicker struggled through his glare of suspicion. His body was half-fallen against the wall, hands flat on the mesh; his palms were thick and studded with calluses. “I caught a bit-bit ab-out you wh-en I g-g-got ou-out. Wh-at are you?”
In the scheme of things, he meant. “I don’t know yet,” she admitted, “but I want to help you.”
“Why?”
“Because you need it. You can’t get out of here without help.”
“But why?”
She sighed. It was a wonder he could speak with any logic at all after eight years with the Dumplings. But he was no baby, and she couldn’t waste precious time soothing him. “Because Jason Hemmer and I don’t want to see you spending another eight years with that crew.”
“Ja-Jason?”
“I’m his friend. He’s always wanted to help you, and he’s willing to risk everything to keep you out of the Dump. Will you trust us?”
He gaped at her like an idiot, and she could have sworn with vexation. But it was no idiot who had led forty-six people past the Marczinek Field, and there was no-one else who could have done it. She hissed, “For God’s sake! Jason’s over there shielding so the Dumplings won’t know all this, he’s given me seven minutes and I’ve used up three already! Will you believe me?”
Blinking owlishly, he raised a slow hand to straighten his glasses. “Th-there’s nowh-where else to hide.”
He had some sense, after all. “This place isn’t safe either, now we’ve found it, and if we hadn’t found it you’d have starved. Jason will find a way to keep you safe. But I can’t let you out till I know you want to come, because they’ll be here, and then everything’ll be ruined. Will you? Please!”
He closed his eyes, and, astonished, she watched slow tears creep from under his lids to mark white runnels on his smudged skin.
“Doydoy! Donatus!”
He opened his eyes. Their pale color was the only clean thing about him. “Y-ou can c-call m-me Doydoy.”
“No! I won’t! You don’t have to stutter and”—she slammed the cage with the flat of her hand—“you don’t have to be in here!”
“I—I’m—I’m d-angerous.”
Dirty, ragged, beaten down with suffering—dangerous was the last thing he looked. But the psi had given him more power than any one man had ever owned. “I trust you.”
“Y-ou’re an Imper.”
She wanted to scream. Instead she took a deep breath and said earnestly, “Oh Donatus, you
can’t read my mind or pk me down to the bottom of a cistern, but you can throw bricks or cabbages at me and you’ll find I’m as destructible as any non-psi in the world. I do trust you and you’ve got to trust me.”
Before he could answer there was a hoarse cry behind her.
“Shandy! Look out!”
She whirled.
The place was full of Dumplings.
* * * *
They were not flickering; they had found a purpose and coalesced. She had not heard their sounds as they came, but now she was aware that the place had filled with strange echoes rebounding from the great bare walls. Some of them were in shadow, but some were in the beam of light from the doorway and they were looking at her. She glanced at Jason. He was standing still. He had put his hands in his pockets and his face looked as if he were doing his best to make his mind a blank; there was nothing else he could do. He waited there.
The youngest of the lot was fifteen. Curtis Quimper, the eldest, was twenty-six. The girls, shapeless in their gray coveralls, were as sullen and haggard as the boys. Jukeboxes, ice-cream sodas; not for them. It was impossible to imagine them laughing.
Curtis Quimper took a step toward Jason. “You didn’t know where he was.”
“I didn’t then.”
“Zatso?”
“Yeah, zatso.”
She might have found this exchange laughable in another context, but not here. Their glances were flickering warily at her, and it was clear they were according her an enormous potential she didn’t have. She was afraid to look at Doydoy. There was nothing to stop him from telling them she had no psi. If they had believed Jason they wouldn’t have had to worry.
For eight years she had watched for signs of psi in herself without finding any, and without being very disappointed. Now she was beginning to understand Jason’s wish for more powers, in the face of this forty-six-fold power of amorality.
There was a creaking in the cage beside her. Doydoy was pulling himself over to face them. The Kingfish strolled toward the cage; his look was sharp and cruel.
“Hey Doydoy, whatsa matter with ya? Aintcha been happy with us, kid?” The Dumplings laughed. Sound broke and redoubled harshly against the walls.
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