“He’s paralyzed: he has no natural sphincter control. He needs most of his strength to keep himself clean.”
“Donatus…” The eyes opened again at the unfamiliar name. She looked up at Helmi and asked timidly, “May I talk to him?”
“You can try,” said Helmi. “A few—maybe five minutes.”
“Donatus!” She clutched his hand with wire-tight fingers so he couldn’t free it without stirring enough to open his mind. “It isn’t your fault the Kingfish is dead!”
“Lea-leave me alone,” he muttered.
“I can’t leave you alone. We need you!”
He tried to pull his hand away. His eyes were still tightly shut.
“Nobody’s blaming you for what happened.”
“I’m afraid that argument’s worn out,” said Helmi.
Doydoy said, half-sobbing, “I to-told you I’m d-angerous. Da-damn you! Lea’ me alone!”
Helmi whispered, “Marczinek! Shandy, they’ve taken Marczinek!”
Shandy pulled frantically at Doydoy’s wrist. It was muscular and beautifully formed. The surprising power of his thick arms had always been hidden by the slope of his shoulders under the hump. “Do you hear that? They’ve got Marczinek! He’s a gentle old man and they’ll kill him!”
Doydoy shuddered and his eyelids squeezed tighter. She said very urgently and very softly, “It’s not shameful to be afraid of them.”
He pulled his spirit further, if possible, into its twisted shell.
“You’ve hated them so terribly for eight years—” His eyes opened wide and closed again.
“Donatus. Are you afraid it wasn’t an accident?”
His shoulders shook. “Go away! Go away!”
She squatted back on her heels and looked at the silent woman by the window. Helmi’s lips moved soundlessly: two minutes.
Nevertheless, she took a precious fifteen seconds to think. And she said slowly, “They must know you pretty well after eight years…they must have peeped you down to the bottom of the id in the five seconds after you came out of the cage yesterday. They know you meant to scatter them. They knew how much you hated them. But they couldn’t have known what would happen with those tractors, because you didn’t. If they’d had one flicker of an idea you meant to hurt or kill any of them, they’d have shot you down in flames before you’d gone three feet.”
She waited tensely for ten seconds. Doydoy’s body began to tremble with dry sobs. “They know-know I’m a goddamn cow-ward!”
“No. You’re no coward. I’m not saying it’s a good idea to kill anybody, either, even a type like the Kingfish. But it was an accident, and… Donatus, it would have been really horrible if it’d been Curtis Quimper… I’m sorry, Helmi.” Out of the corner of her eye she had seen the woman stiffen in her attitude by the window.
“It—it’s all right…you have twenty seconds left before Prothero blows up.”
Shandy turned back to Doydoy. “It’s all yours now kiddo. That’s it.”
Doydoy licked his lips. “They-they’ll put me b-ack in the Du-Du-Dump.”
“No they won’t,” said Shandy. “I swear it. Not anymore.”
* * * *
Jason crossed his arms and leaned against the desk as though he had all the time in the world. “It’s no use. We just can’t pull off this kind of job without Doydoy.”
The veins were standing out on Prothero’s forehead. “What are you talking about? He’s with them.”
“He is and he isn’t. Psychologically, I mean. Physically he’s been with us ever since he came out of the cage. That’s why I left. To get him away from them—not to go in with them.”
“That’s what she—the Johnson girl—said after—”
“And you didn’t believe her. I know.”
“I thought—” Prothero gnawed his lip.
“No. If I’d been with them it wouldn’t have been of my own free will…” He paused and added delicately, “You could have believed her. I can’t read her but I’ve never known her to lie.”
“All of five days.”
“You’ve known me four years.”
“Damn you, don’t read my mind!”
“I can’t help it,” said Jason.
Prothero breathed hard. “What about Doydoy?”
“He’s been curled up in a ball from guilt over killing the Kingfish. He won’t send or receive or even move.” He added bitterly, “He’s completely harmless.”
“What do you mean about his being with them psychologically?”
“You can’t blame him if some of his sympathies are with them. Who else ever needed him?” He paused for a moment. “He might be able to trail them for us if we could give him a good reason to help us.”
“What kind of reason can you dig up after eight years?”
“He’s the only one who can tell what’s going on inside a thing or a person…all those times I went in and got beaten up…all that stuff about broken bones and twisted innards came from him.”
“He told you?”
“He could have shielded…he left his mind open—because he trusted me.” Jason watched Prothero as narrowly as if all his talent and all he knew of the brain-map in the grizzled head were not enough to read him now. “But I couldn’t think of trying to get him to help if he was only going to be shoved in the Dump again.”
Prothero’s face crinkled in suffused fury. “You trying to bargain with me, peeper?”
“Steve!” Urquhart cried. “You’ve forgotten Marczinek!”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Prothero growled. “All these years? You!” he shouted at Jason. “Who do you think you are, eighteen years old and giving me orders?”
Jason’s face flamed and darkened the faint traces of his bruises. He opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind and shut up.
Prothero jammed his cigar butt in the ashtray and sparks went flying. “Things will be handled my way or no way. If you can’t handle ’em, get out! And you!” He jabbed a finger at Prester, who blinked. “You can—you…” His voice broke and his furious color ebbed. “I never thought of it,” he whispered. “You’re a Negro! There never were any at the plant! We wouldn’t take any out of the jail—because the black skin…absorbs radiation…too…my God!”
They stared at Prester. Jason said, “Pres! You never—”
“Quick, boy!” Prothero barked. “Where’re you from?”
“I was born here,” Prester muttered. “My daddy moved in from Detroit the year of the Blowup when he was a kid but he didn’t have psi. My granddaddy—on my mother’s side—came from Nigeria in ’84.”
Prothero rammed hands in pockets and paced the floor. “Is there a reactor in Nigeria? No time to find out now—but if there is—or was, and it skipped a generation! My God!”
Critical mass: thirty-four to begin with, forty-five in the present strength of the Pack without Doydoy… How many Dumps in the world?
Prothero’s shoulders slumped. He said in an achingly weary voice, “Go on. If you can get Doydoy, bring him in.”
Jason closed his eyes. Prothero found his handkerchief and swabbed at the erosive wrinkles of his face and neck. Waxman’s teeth were chattering. He had only been in Sorrel Park for two months.
Seconds passed and passed; faintly, the air began to tremble; it swirled around them, wavered, wrinkled, and broke like silver water.
Doydoy landed crumpled on the carpet, shivering and gasping.
Jason knelt beside him, “You okay?” Doydoy nodded weakly.
“Pajamas, for God’s sake! Tapley, get this man a set of clean fatigues!”
* * * *
Shandy touched the empty bed, still warm from his body and collapsed against it, shaking with reactive chill.
Sunburst: 12
“That business with Prester…” Shandy pulled herself up weari
ly. “Every country with its own Dump and Pack?”
Helmi stared out at the desolate street. “I hope not! I don’t even want to think of it!”
“What’s happening now?” Shandy asked.
“I don’t know…” She pressed a hand to her forehead. “They’re in the Dump, I guess. I can’t even get a scrambler.”
Peter spoke from the doorway, “I think you are not feeling well.”
“I feel all right. It’s just… I’m alone.” At the intensity of the silence behind her, she turned. “I didn’t mean anything by that, Peter. I know…I have a hell of a nerve saying it, don’t I? When I have you, and the baby coming. But you know how I feel. Peter? You know what I am.” Her voice was pleading. “I never misled you.”
Shandy went to the front door and looked out through the tiny window at a square of sky. Even being Impervious was no help. Helmi’s voice trembled behind her: “You always knew what I was. Peter?”
“I knew. And I accepted it.”
“You tried, but—”
“Don’t tell me what I have in the depth of my soul! If I say I accept it must be enough!”
She whispered, “Don’t make it worse for me. I can’t help being what I am.”
“I have always thought you were making me a—a—”
“A buffer against the world? It’s true, but it’s only part of the truth. It’s not a bad thing, Peter.”
“Fools are made that way.”
“Peter… I could reach into your brain and make you marvelously, idiotically happy with me…then you’d be a fool. Or I could make you miserable. But I’ve never touched you with psi. And there’s never anyone else I’ve wanted to live with. The others—they’re only children.”
Peter said bitterly, “And suppose there were another in the world? An older one whom you do not know now?”
“I’d be scared silly to have a baby by another psi.” Her voice shook with tears. “I’m scared now.”
“Please. I love you, Helmi.”
“I know. And I wish, I wish you knew how I love you.”
Shandy wanted to scream. Her emotions were flayed to the bone. Her weariness penetrated to the narrow. Her spirit ached. Helmi came into the hall. “It’s all right, Shandy. Come on, I’ll make some more coffee and we’ll sweat it out together.”
But there was no time. As Helmi was bringing the coffeepot to the table, a noise began to grow downward out of the sky. Peter’s eye flickered with fear and he leaped up. Helmi caught at his arm. “Wait, Peter.”
“What is it?”
“It’s…Shandy?”
Shandy echoed, “What is it?”
Helmi said faintly, “Will you go outside, and—and see?”
“She must not—”
“It’s all right…let her go.”
Mystified, Shandy opened the front door. There was someone standing there whom she knew. It was Davey, an old enemy, fist foolishly raised in the air, about to knock.
“You!” she said.
“Yeah, me.” He glowered at her. Behind him she saw a helicopter in the vacant lot across the street, engine still running.
“What do you want?”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with you! Prothero sent me to pick you up.”
She glanced helplessly at Helmi. Helmi said, “You’ll have to go, Shandy.”
“I—all right…good-bye Helmi, Peter…” The door closed. She gave him a guarded look. “What would he want with me?”
He snapped. “Maybe he wants to give you a medal!” Then he sighed. “Look, I’m not trying to trick you or anything. I figure we’re about even.” He preceded her down the steps and turned. “He said he needed you.” She came down slowly and followed him. One of her life’s aims was about to be accomplished: she was going to become useful. And she was not at all eager to learn how.
* * * *
The helicopter rose in the air, the earth fell away eerily below, and she saw Sorrel Park as the little place it was, narrow, bitter, twisted, not even an appreciable part of the world. She squeezed close to the window with her head turned away so that the others should not see the fear in her face. Not of death or the Dumplings; she had faced them. But of coming out into the world for good, becoming an organic part of the humanity she had shrunk from without knowing why. The prospect that had made her retreat from Urquhart’s probing; a formless fear, but a real one.
From high in the air she saw the green rim of the world surrounding Sorrel Park; the Outside. It was immense and frightening. She had not been afraid for Sorrel Park when the Dumplings were rampaging there—but now she was afraid for the world.
* * * *
The helicopter landed in the courtyard by headquarters. As the crewmen jumped out, Davey said to Shandy, “Not you. You wait here.”
She waited, gripping her knees with sweating palms. The engine was idling, and the sagging rotors trembled. Urquhart ran out a moment later, with a flustered gait, his thin hair ruffling in the wind. He climbed in. “Shandy? How are you, are you frightened?”
Not the way he meant. “Not yet.”
“Good girl.” He sat beside her and took her hands. His palms were as wet as her own. “Kiddo, you’re going to have to listen very carefully, because I’ve a lot to say, and not much time to say it in. We’ve worked out a set of alternative plans here, and their success will depend mostly on you. Believe me, if we had another Imper…do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll take all the care we can. I—anyway, in a couple of minutes a crew of three will come in here, and then Jason with Doydoy and Prester. They’ll give you the creeps because they’re all under hypnosis, they won’t know you, and it’s no use talking to them. I’ve blocked off all their psi except what they need to track the Dumplings, and the non-psis mustn’t know anything they could give away when you come up against them. That kind of thing can’t last very long or we’d have used it on the Dumplings long ago—and they mustn’t be disturbed or distracted till it’s necessary. You understand that.”
She smiled a little. “I won’t pester them.”
“I know you’ll be all right, dear.” He gripped her hands tighter. “But the group of you will be alone. And you’ll be alone as long as they’re in that state. You know what I mean. There’ll be plenty of us coming along behind you, but in this group you’ll be alone. The pilot will be radioing back all the time, but he won’t know what it’s all about.
“Now: if you find them within six hours, and they’re all together in a bunch, or at least a majority, as I think they’ll be, you’ll have to get as close as possible before they know you’re there. That’ll be pretty close, because the psis will be shielding within an hour of picking up the first weak trace. Then you will judge whether there’s enough of them grouped together to warrant going on with the plan.”
“Couldn’t we radio back the information and let you decide?”
“That might draw their attention to us telepathically. We won’t send at all. Of course if they’re out in the open they’ll hear the rotors, but you should be able to get within a mile of them, and there may be enough noise from other traffic to cover you.
“When you’re close, you’ll have to alight and disembark because you won’t need the machine any more. Then you keep close together till you’re within sight of them. With luck, they won’t know what’s going on, and we’ll surprise them. Then if things are okay you’ll speak the code-phrase that will bring your group out of hypnosis—and Jason will know what to do from there.”
“Won’t the Dumplings know as well?”
“Jason can use any one of a number of plans designed to meet any conditions—or the pilot can radio back for changes. None of them knows exactly what they’re going to do right now. It’s the only way we can keep the Dumplings from forestalling us at every move.”
; “What happens if we can’t find them in six hours or they’re hopelessly scattered?” Shandy asked.
“You use the code-phrase as soon as you realize that—and it should be fairly early—and we regroup and go ahead with the next plan. But this is how it stands for the time being. Have you got it all straight?”
“Yes…it’s in my head.”
“Not all of it, Shandy. Too much…I know.” He sighed. “Now: the code—and I repeat it depends on you to judge when to use it—the code-phrase is: new insight carries new delight. Something you wouldn’t be likely to say over the back fence.”
“New insight carries new delight…did you choose that?”
He blinked. “No. Jason did. Why?”
“It’s out of Margaret Mead.” You look like you forgot to ask yourself what would Margaret Mead have done. He had answered, Maybe I’ll ask you that one day. “From a passage I liked very much. He knows I read her books, but I never mentioned that bit to him.”
“Well, he can’t read your mind,” said Urquhart, “but I guess he feels he knows your style.” In spite of the time limit he had stressed, he kept sitting there, clutching her hands. “You’re sure you’ve got it straight,” he said doubtfully.
“I’ve got it straight,” she said. “I give the word when we’re in sight of a reasonable concentration of them, or as soon as I see it’s all a flop. New insight carries new delight.”
“Yes. Well.” He pulled his hands away and fished out a handkerchief to swab his head. And he added in a low voice, “You haven’t asked what was going to happen to you after all this.”
She shrugged ruefully. “I guess I was afraid to.”
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