The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth

by C. M. Kornbluth

  * * * *

  Charles then began the hardest job of his life. He tried to think, straight and uninterrupted, of Martha, the little girl. Some of the things that interrupted him were:

  The remembered smell of fried onions; they didn’t have onions here;

  Salt;

  I wonder how the old 101st Precinct’s getting along;

  That fellow who wanted to get married on a hundred dollars;

  Lee Falcaro, damn her!

  This, is damn foolishness; it can’t possibly work;

  Poor old Kennedy;

  I’ll starve before I eat another mouthful of that greasy deer-meat;

  The Van Dellen kid, I wonder if I could have saved him;

  Reiner’s right; we’ve got to clean up the Government and then try to civilize these people;

  There must be something wrong with my head, I can’t seem to concentrate;

  That terrific third-chukker play in the Finals, my picture all over town;

  Would Uncle Frank laugh at this?

  It was hopeless. He sat bolt upright, his eyes squeezed tensely together, trying to visualize the child and call her and it couldn’t be done. Skittering images of her zipped through his mind, only to be shoved aside. It was damn foolishness, anyway.…

  He unkinked himself, stretched and lay down on the sand floor thinking bitterly: why try? You’ll be dead in a few days or a few weeks; kiss the world good-bye. Back in Syndic Territory, fat, sloppy, happy Syndic Territory, did they know how good they had it? He wished he could tell them to cling to their good life. But Uncle Frank said it didn’t do any good to cling; it was a matter of tension and relaxation. When you stiffen up a way of life and try to fossilize it so it’ll stay that way forever, then you find you’ve lost it.

  Little Martha wouldn’t understand it. Magic, ritual, the power of the goddess, fear of iron, fear of the jeep’s vine enclosure—cursed, no doubt—what went on in such a mind? Could she throw things like a poltergeist-girl? They didn’t have ’em any more; maybe it had something to do with electric fields or even iron. Or were they all phonies? An upset adolescent girl is a hell of a lot likelier to fake phenomena that produce them. Little Martha hadn’t been faking her despair, though. The witch-girl—her sister, wasn’t she?—didn’t fake her icy calm and power. Martha’d be better off without such stuff—

  “Charles,” a whisper said.

  He muttered stupidly: “My God. She heard me,” and crept to the palisade. Through a chink between the logs she was just visible in the starlight.

  She whispered: “I thought I wasn’t going to see anything or hear anything ever again but I sat up and I heard you calling and you said you wanted to help me if I’d help you so I came as fast as I could without waking anybody up—you did call me, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did. Martha, do you want to get out of here? Go far away with me?”

  “You bet I do. She’s going to take the power of the goddess out of me and marry me to Dinny, he stinks like a goat and he has a cockeye, and then she’ll kill all our babies. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” She sounded very grim and decided.

  “Can you roll the boulders away from the hole there?” He was thinking vaguely of teleportation; each boulder was a two-man job.

  She said no.

  He snarled: “Then why did you bother to come here?”

  “Don’t talk like that to me,” the child said sharply—and he remembered what she thought she was.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “What I came about,” she said calmly, “was the ex-plosion. Can you make an ex-plosion like you said? Back there at the jeep?”

  What in God’s name was she talking about?

  “Back there,” she said with exaggerated patience, “you was thinking about putting all the cartridges together and blowing up the whole damn shebang. Remember?”

  He did, vaguely. One of a hundred schemes that had drifted through his head.

  “I’d sure like to see that ex-plosion,” she said. “The way she got things figured, I’d almost just as soon get exploded myself as not.”

  “I might blow up the logs here and get out,” he said slowly. “I think you’d be a mighty handy person to have along, too. Can you get me about a hundred of the machine gun cartridges?”

  “They’ll miss ’em.”

  “Sneak me a few at a time. I’ll empty them, put them together again and you sneak them back.”

  She said, slow and troubled: “She set the power of the goddess to guard them.”

  “Listen to me, Martha,” he said. “I mean listen. You’ll be doing it for me and they told me the power of the goddess doesn’t work on outsiders. Isn’t that right?”

  There was a long pause, and she said at last with a sigh: “I sure wish I could see your eyes, Charles. I’ll try it, but I’m damned if I would if Dinny didn’t stink so bad.” She slipped away and Charles tried to follow her with his mind through the darkness, to the silly little rope of vine with the feathers and bones knotted in it—but he couldn’t. Too tense again.

  Kennedy stirred and muttered complainingly as an icy small breeze cut through the chinks of the palisade, whispering.

  His eyes, tuned to the starlight, picked up Martha bent almost double, creeping toward the smithy-prison. She wore a belt of fifty-caliber cartridges around her neck like a stole. Looked like about a dozen of them. He hastily scooped out a bowl of clean sand and whispered: “Any trouble?”

  He couldn’t see the grin on her face, but knew it was there. “It was easy,” she bragged. “One bad minute and then I checked with you and it was okay.”

  “Good kid. Pull the cartridges out of the links the way I showed you and pass them through.”

  She did. It was a tight squeeze.

  He fingered one of the cartridges. The bullet fitted nicely into the socket of an arrowhead. He jammed the bullet in and wrenched at the arrowhead with thumb and forefinger—all he could get onto it. The brass neck began to spread. He dumped the powder into his little basin in the sand and reseated the bullet.

  Charles shifted hands on the second cartridge. On the third he realized that he could put the point of the bullet on a hearth-stone and press on the neck with both thumbs. It went faster then; in perhaps an hour he was passing the re-assembled cartridges back through the palisade.

  “Time for another load?” he asked.

  “Nope,” the girl said. “Tomorrow night.”

  “Good kid.”

  She giggled. “It’s going to be a hell of a big bang, ain’t it, Charles?”

  CHAPTER XIV

  “Leave the fire alone,” Charles said sharply to Kennedy. The little man was going to douse it for the night.

  There was a flash of terrified sense: “They beat you. If the fire’s on after dark they beat you. Fire and dark are equal and opposite.” He began to smile. “Fire is the negative of dark. You just change the sign, in effect rotate it through 180 degrees. But to rotate it through 180 degrees you have to first rotate it through one degree. And to rotate it through one degree you first have to rotate it through half a degree.” He was beaming now, having forgotten all about the fire. Charles banked it with utmost care, heaping a couple of flat stones for a chimney that would preserve the life of one glowing coal invisibly.

  He stretched out on the sand, one hand on the little heap beneath which five pounds of smokeless powder was buried. Kennedy continued to drone out his power-series happily.

  Through the chinks in the palisade a man’s profile showed against the twilight. “Shut up,” he said.

  Kennedy shivering, rolled over and muttered to himself. The spearman laughed and went on.

  Charles hardly saw him. His whole mind was concentrated on the spark beneath the improvised chimney. He had left such a spark seven nights running. Only twice had it lived more than an hour.
Tonight—tonight, it had to last. Tonight was the last night of the witch-girl’s monthly courses, and during them she lost—or thought she lost, which was the same thing—the power of the goddess.

  Primitive aborigines, he jeered silently at himself. A life time wasn’t long enough to learn the intricacies of their culture—as occasional executions among them for violating magical law proved to the hilt. His first crude notion—blowing the palisade apart and running like hell—was replaced by a complex escape plan hammered out in detail between him and Martha.

  Martha assured him that the witch girl could track him through the dark by the power of the goddess except for four days a month—and he believed it. Martha herself laid a matter-of-fact claim to keener second sight than her sister because of her virginity. With Martha to guide him through the night and the witch-girl’s power disabled, they’d get a day’s head start. His hand strayed to a pebble under which jerked venison was hidden and ready.

  “But Martha. Are you sure you’re not—not kidding yourself? Are you sure?”

  He felt her grin on the other side of the palisade. “You’re sure wishing Uncle Frank was here so you could ask him about it, don’t you, Charles?”

  He sure was. He wiped his brow, suddenly clammy.

  Kennedy couldn’t come along. One, he wasn’t responsible. Two, he might have to be Charles’ cover-story. They weren’t too dissimilar in build, age, or coloring. Charles had a beard by now that sufficiently obscured his features, and two years absence should have softened recollections of Kennedy. Interrogated, Charles could take refuge in an imitation of Kennedy’s lunacy.

  “Charles, the one thing I don’t get is this Lee dame. She got a spell on her? You don’t want to mess with that.”

  “Listen, Martha, we’ve got to mess with her. It isn’t a spell—exactly. Anyway I know how to take it off and then she’ll be on our side.”

  “Can I set off the explosion? If you let me set off the explosion, I’ll quit my bitching.”

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  She chuckled very faintly in the dark. “Okay,” she told him. “If I can’t, I can’t.”

  He thought of being married to a woman who could spot your smallest lie or reservation, and shuddered.

  Kennedy was snoring by now and twilight was deepening into blackness. There was a quarter-moon, obscured by over-cast. He hitched along the sand and peered through a chink at a tiny noise. It was the small scuffling feet of a woods-rat racing through the grass from one morsel of food to the next. It never reached it. There was a soft rush of wings as a great dark owl plummeted to earth and struck talons into the brown fur. The rat squealed its life away while the owl lofted silently to a tree branch where it stood on one leg, swaying drunkenly and staring with huge yellow eyes.

  As sudden as that, it’ll be, Charles thought abruptly weighted with despair. A half-crazy kid and yours truly trying to outsmart and out-Tarzan these wild men. If only the little dope would let me take the jeep! But the jeep was out. She rationalized her retention of the power even after handling iron by persuading herself that she was only acting for Charles; there was some obscure precedent in a long, memorized poem which served her as a text-book of magic. But riding in the jeep was out.

  By now she should be stringing magic vines across some of the huts and trails. “They’ll see ’em when they get torches and it’ll scare ’em. Of course I don’t know how to do it right, but they don’t know that. It’ll slow ’em down. If she comes out of her house—and maybe she won’t—she’ll know they don’t matter and send the men after us. But we’ll be on our way. Charles, you sure I can’t set off the explosion? Yeah, I guess you are. Maybe I can set off one when we get to New Portsmouth?”

  “If I can possibly arrange it.”

  She sighed: “I guess that’ll have to do.”

  It was too silent; he couldn’t bear it. With feverish haste he uncovered the caches of powder and meat. Under the sand was a fat clayey soil. He dug up hands-full of it, wet it with the only liquid available and worked it into paste. He felt his way to the logs decided on for blasting, dug out a hole at their bases in the clay. After five careful trips from the powder cache to the hole, the mine was filled. He covered it with clay and laid on a roof of flat stones from the hearth. The spark of fire still glowed, and he nursed it with twigs.

  She was there, whispering: “Charles?”

  “Right here. Everything set?”

  “All set. Let’s have that explosion.”

  He took the remaining powder and with minute care, laid a train across the stockade to the mine. He crouched into a ball and flipped a burning twig onto the black line that crossed the white sand floor.

  The blast seemed to wake up the world. Kennedy charged out of sleep, screaming, and a million birds woke with a squawk. Charles was conscious more of the choking reek than the noise as he scooped up the jerked venison and rushed through the ragged gap in the wall. A hand caught his—a small hand.

  “You’re groggy,” Martha’s voice said, sounding far away. “Come on—fast. Man, that was a great ex-plosion!”

  She towed him through the woods and underbrush—fast. As long as he hung on to her he didn’t stumble or run into a tree once. Irrationally embarrassed by his dependence on a child, he tried letting go for a short time—very short—and was quickly battered into changing his mind. He thought dizzily of the spearmen trying to follow through the dark and could almost laugh again.

  * * * *

  Their trek to the coast was marked by desperate speed. For twenty-four hours, they stopped only to gnaw at their rations or snatch a drink at a stream. Charles kept moving because it was unendurable to let a ten-year-old girl exceed him in stamina. Both of them paid terribly for the murderous pace they kept. The child’s face became skull-like and her eyes red; her lips dried and cracked. He gasped at her as they pulled their way up a bramble-covered 45-degree slope: “How do you do it? Isn’t this ever going to end?”

  “Ends soon,” she croaked at him. “You know we dodged ’em three times?”

  He could only shake his head.

  She stared at him with burning red eyes. “This ain’t hard,” she croaked. “You do this with a gut-full of poison, that’s hard.”

  “Did you?”

  She grinned crookedly and chanted something he did not understand:

  “Nine moons times thirteen is the daughter’s age

  When she drinks the death-cup.

  Three leagues times three she must race and rage

  Down hills and up—”

  She added matter-of-factly: “Last year. Prove I have the power of the goddess. Run, climb, with your guts falling out. This year, starve for a week and run down a deer of seven points.”

  He had lost track of days and nights when they stood on the brow of a hill at dawn and looked over the sea. The girl gasped: “’Sall right now. She wouldn’t let them go on. She’s a bitch, but she’s no fool.” The child fell in her tracks. Charles, too tired for panic, slept too.

  * * * *

  Charles woke with a wonderful smell in his nostrils. He followed it hungrily down the reverse slope of the hill to a grotto.

  Martha was crouched over a fire on which rocks were heating. Beside it was a bark pot smeared with clay. As he watched, she lifted a red-hot rock with two green sticks and rolled it into the pot. It boiled up and continued to boil for an astonishing number of minutes. That was the source of the smell.

  “Breakfast?” he asked unbelievingly.

  “Rabbit stew,” she said. “Plenty of runways, plenty of bark, plenty of green branches. I made snares. Two tough old bucks cooking in there for an hour.”

  They chewed the meat from the bones in silence. She said at last: “We can’t settle down here. Too near to the coast. And if we move further inland, there’s her. And others. I been thinking.” She spat a string of tough meat
out. “There’s England. Work our way around the coast. Make a raft or steal a canoe and cross the water. Then we could settle down. You can’t have me for three times thirteen moons yet or I’d lose the power. But I guess we can wait. I heard about England and the English. They have no hearts left. We can take as many slaves as we want. They cry a lot but they don’t fight. And none of their women has the power.” She looked up anxiously. “You wouldn’t want one of their women, would you? Not if you could have somebody with the power just by waiting for her?”

  He looked down the hill and said slowly: “You know that’s not what I had in mind, Martha. I have my own place with people far away. I want to get back there. I thought—I thought you’d like it too.” Her face twisted. He couldn’t bear to go on, not in words. “Look into my mind, Martha,” he said. “Maybe you’ll see what it means to me.”

  She stared long and deep. At last she rose, her face inscrutable, and spat into the fire. “Think I saved you for that?” she asked. “And for her? Not me. Save yourself from now on, mister. I’m going to beat my way south around the coast. England for me, and I don’t want any part of you.”

  She strode off down the hill, gaunt and ragged, but with arrogance in her swinging, space-eating gait. Charles sat looking after her, stupefied, until she had melted into the underbrush. “Think I saved you for that? And for her?” She’d made some kind of mistake. He got up stiffly and ran after her, but he could not pick up an inch of her woods-wise trail. Charles slowly climbed to the grotto again and sat in its shelter.

  He spent the morning trying to concoct simple springs out of bark strips and whippy branches. He got nowhere. The branches broke or wouldn’t bend far enough. The bark shredded, or wouldn’t hold a knot. Without metal, he couldn’t shape the trigger to fit the bow so that it would be both sensitive and reliable.

  At noon he drank enormously from a spring and looked morosely for plants that might be edible. He decided on something with a bulbous, onion-like root. For a couple of hours after that he propped rocks on sticks here and there. When he stepped back and surveyed them, he decided that any rabbit he caught with them would be, even for a rabbit, feeble-minded. He could think of nothing else to do.