Star Science Fiction 4 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Frederik Pohl

  “When they grow up they will be company policemen,” Marna said.

  “I thought the wolfpacks were made up of escaped citizens,” Harry said.

  Marna looked at him scornfully. “Is that what they tell you?”

  “A citizen,” Pearce whispered, “is lucky to stay alive when he’s alone. A group of them wouldn’t last a week.”

  They got back up on the turnpike and started walking again. Christopher was nervous as he led Pearce. He kept turning to look behind them and glancing from side to side. Soon Harry was edgy too.

  “Down!” Christopher shouted.

  Something whistled. A moment later Harry was struck a solid blow in the middle of the back. It knocked him hard to the ground. Marna screamed.

  Harry rolled over, feeling as if his back were broken. Christopher and Pearce were on the pavement beside him, but Marna was gone.

  A rocket blasted a little ahead and above. Then another. Pearce looked up. A powered glider zoomed toward the sky. Marna was dangling from it, her body twisting and struggling to get free. From a second glider swung empty talons—padded hooks like those which had closed around Marna and had almost swooped up Harry.

  Harry got to his knees, clutching his wrist. It was beginning to send stabs of pain up his arm like a prelude to a symphony of anguish. The only thing that kept him from falling to the pavement in writhing torment was the black anger that surged through his veins. He shook his fist at the turning gliders, climbing on smoking jets.

  “Dr. Elliott!” Christopher said urgently.

  With blurred eyes Harry looked for the voice. The boy was in the ditch again. So was the old man.

  “They’ll be back! Get down!” the boy said.

  “But they’ve got Marna!” Harry said.

  “It won’t help if you get killed.”

  One glider swooped like a hawk toward a mouse. The other, carrying Marna, continued to circle as it climbed. Harry rolled toward the ditch. A line of chattering bullets chipped at the pavement where he had been.

  “I thought,” he gasped, “they were trying to take us alive.”

  “They hunt heads, too,” Christopher said.

  “Anything for a thrill,” Pearce whispered.

  “I never did anything like that,” Harry moaned. “I never knew anyone who did.”

  “You were busy,” Pearce said.

  It was true. Since four years old he had been in school constantly, most of that time in medical school. He had been home only for a brief day now and then; he scarcely knew his parents any more. What would he know of the pastimes of young squires? But this—this wolf pack business!

  The first glider was a small cross in the sky; Marna, a speck hanging from it. It straightened and glided toward Lawrence. The second followed.

  Suddenly Harry began beating the ground with his aching arm. “Why did I dodge? I should have let myself be captured with her. She’ll die.”

  “She’s strong,” Pearce whispered, “stronger than you or Christopher, stronger than almost anyone. But sometimes strength is the cruelest thing. Follow her. Get her away.”

  Harry looked at the bracelet from which pain lanced up his arm and through his body. Yes, he could follow her. As long as he could move he could find her. But feet were so slow against glider wings.

  “The motorcycles will be coming back,” Christopher said. “The gliders will have radioed them.”

  “But how do we capture a motorcycle?” Harry asked. The pain wouldn’t let him think clearly.

  Christopher had already pulled up his T-shirt. Around his thin waist was wrapped turn after turn of nylon cord. “Sometimes we fish,” he said. He stretched the cord across the two-lane pavement in the concealment of grass grown tall in a crack. He motioned Harry to lie flat on the other side. “Let them pass, all but the last one,” he said. “Hope that he’s a straggler, far enough behind so that the others won’t notice when we stand up. Wrap the cord around your waist. Get it up where it will catch him around the chest.”

  Harry lay beside the pavement while his left arm felt as though it were a swelling balloon, and the balloon was filled with pain. He looked at it once, curiously, but it was still the same size.

  After an eternity came the sound of motors, many of them. As the first passed, Harry cautiously lifted his head. There was a straggler. He was about a hundred feet behind the others; he was speeding now to catch up.

  The others passed. As the straggler got within twenty feet Harry jumped up, bracing himself against the impact. Christopher sprang up at the same instant. The young squire had no time to move; he had time only to look surprised before he hit the cord. The cord pulled Harry out into the middle of the pavement, his heels skidding. Christopher had tied his end to the trunk of a young tree.

  The squire smashed into the pavement—but the motorcycle slowed and heeled over into the bank of weeds. Beyond, far down the road, the others didn’t look back.

  Harry untangled himself from the cord and ran to the squire. He was as old as Harry and as big. He had a harelip and a withered leg. His skull was crushed. He was dead.

  Harry closed his eyes. He had seen men die before, but he had never been the cause of it. It was like breaking his Hippocratic Oath.

  “Some must die,” Pearce whispered. “It is better for the evil to die young.”

  Harry stripped quickly and got into the squire’s clothes and goggles. He strapped the pistol down on his hip and turned to Christopher and Pearce. “What about you?”

  “We won’t try to escape,” Pearce said.

  “I don’t mean that. Will you be all right?”

  Pearce put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Christopher will take care of me. And he will find you after you have rescued Marna.”

  The confidence in Pearce’s voice strengthened Harry. He did not pause to question that confidence. He mounted the motorcycle, settled himself into the saddle seat, and turned the throttle. The motorcycle took off violently.

  It was tricky, riding on one wheel, but he had had experience on similar vehicles in the Subterranean Medical Center thoroughfares.

  His arm hurt, but it was not like it had been before when he was helpless. Now it was a guidance system. As he rode, he could feel the pain lessen. That meant he was getting closer to Marna.

  * * * *

  It was night before he found her. The other motorcycles had completely outdistanced him, and he had swept past the side road several miles before the worsening pain warned him. He cruised back and forth before he finally located the curving ramp that led across the cloverleaf ten miles east of Lawrence.

  From this a ruined asphalt road turned east, and the pain in Harry’s arm had dropped to an ache. The road ended in an impenetrable thicket. Harry stopped just before he crashed into it. He sat immobile on the seat, thinking.

  He hadn’t considered what he was going to do when he found Marna; he had merely taken off in hot pursuit, driven half by the painful bracelet upon his wrist, half by his emotional involvement with the young girl.

  Somehow—he could scarcely trace back the involutions of chance to its source—he had been trapped into leading this pitiful expedition from the Medical Center to the governor’s mansion. Moment by moment it had threatened his life—and not, unless all his hopes were false, just a few years but eternity. Was he going to throw it away here on a quixotic attempt to rescue a girl from the midst of a pack of cruel young wolves?

  But what would he do with the thing on his wrist? What of the governor? And what of Marna?

  “Ralph?” someone asked out of the darkness, and the decision was taken out of his hands.

  “Yes,” he muttered. “Where is everybody?”

  “Usual place—under the bank.”

  Harry moved toward the voice, limping. “Can’t see a thing.”

  “Here’s a light.”

  The trees lighted up, and a black form loomed in front of Harry. Harry blinked once, squinted, and hit the squire with the edge of his palm on the fourth
cervical vertebra. As the man dropped, Harry picked the everlight out of the air, and caught the body. He eased the limp form into the grass and felt the neck. It was broken all right, but the squire was still breathing. He straightened the head, so that there would be no pressure on nerve tissue, and looked up.

  Light glimmered and flickered somewhere ahead. There was no movement, no sound; apparently no one had heard him. He flickered the light on, saw the path, and started through the young forest.

  The campfire was built under a clay overhang so that it could not be seen from above. Roasting over it was a whole young deer being slowly turned on a spit by one of the squires. Harry found time to recognize the empty ache in his midriff for what it was: hunger.

  The rest of the squires sat in a semicircle around the fire. On the far side was Marna, seated, her hands bound behind her. Her head was raised; her eyes searched the darkness around the fire. What was she looking for? Of course. For him. She knew by the bracelet on her wrist that he was near.

  He wished that he could signal her in some way, but there was no way. He studied the squires: one was an albino, a second a macrocephalic, a third a spastic. The others might have had physical impairments that Harry could not see. All except one, who seemed older than the rest and leaned against the edge of the clay bank. He was blind, but inserted surgically into his eye sockets were electrically operated binoculars. He carried a power pack on his back with leads to the binoculars and to an antenna in his coat.

  Harry edged cautiously around the forest edge beyond the firelight toward where Marna was sitting.

  “First the feast,” the albino gloated, “then the fun.”

  The one who was turning the spit said, “I think we should have the fun first—then we’ll be good and hungry.”

  They argued back and forth, good-naturedly for a moment and then as others chimed in, with more heat. Finally the albino turned to the one with the binoculars. “What do you say, Eyes?”

  In a deep voice, Eyes said, “Sell the girl. Young parts are worth top prices.”

  “Ah,” said the albino slyly, “but you can’t see what a pretty little thing she is, Eyes. To you she’s only a pattern of white dots against a gray cathode-ray tube. To us she’s white and pink and black and-”

  “One of these days,” Eyes said in a calm voice, “you’ll go too far.”

  “Not with her, I won’t.”

  A stick broke under Harry’s foot. Everyone stopped talking and listened. Harry eased his pistol out of its holster.

  “Is that you, Ralph?” the albino said.

  “Yes,” Harry said, limping out into the edge of the firelight, keeping his head in the darkness, his pistol concealed in a fold of pants at his side.

  “Can you imagine,” the albino said, “the girl says she’s the governor’s daughter?”

  “I am,” Marna said clearly. “He will have you cut to pieces slowly for what you are going to do.”

  “But I’m the governor dearie,” said the albino in a falsetto, “and I don’t give a-”

  Eyes said sharply, “That’s not Ralph. His leg’s all right.”

  Harry cursed his luck. The binoculars were equipped to pick up X-ray reflections as well as radar. “Run!” he shouted in the silence that followed.

  His first shot was for Eyes. The man was turning, and it struck his power pack. He began screaming and clawing at the binoculars that served him for eyes. But Harry wasn’t watching. He was releasing the entire magazine into the clay bank above the fire. Already loosened by the heat from the fire, the bank collapsed, smothering the fire and burying several of the squires sitting close to it.

  Harry dived to the side. Several bullets went through the space he had just vacated.

  He scrambled for the forest and started running. He kept slamming into trees, but he picked himself up and ran again. Somewhere he lost his everlight. Behind, the pursuit thinned and died away.

  He ran into something soft and warm that yielded before him. It fell to the ground. He tripped over it and toppled, his fist drawn back.

  “Harry!” Marna said.

  His fist turned into a hand that went around her, pulled her tight. “Marna!” he gasped. “I didn’t know. I didn’t think I could do it. I thought you were-”

  Their bracelets clinked together. Marna, who had been soft beneath him, suddenly stiffened and pushed him away. “Let’s not get slobbery about it,” she said angrily. “I know why you did it. Besides, they’ll hear us.”

  Harry drew a quick, outraged breath and then let it sigh out. What was the use? She’d never believe him. Why should she? He wasn’t sure himself why he had done it. Now that it was over and he had time to realize the risks he had taken, he began to shiver. He sat there in the dark forest, his eyes closed, and tried to control his shaking.

  Marna put her hand out hesitantly, touched his arm, started to say something, stopped, and the moment was past.

  “B-b-brat-t-t!” he chattered. “N-n-nasty, un—ungrateful, b-b-brat!” And then the shakes were gone.

  She started to move. “Sit still!” he whispered. “We’ve got to wait until they give up the search.”

  At least he had eliminated the greatest danger: Eyes with his radar, X-ray vision that was just as good by night as by day.

  They sat in the darkness and waited, listening to the forest noises. An hour passed. Harry was going to say that perhaps it was safe to move when he heard something rustling nearby. Animal or enemy? Marna, who had not touched him again or spoken, clutched his upper arm with a panic-strengthened hand. Harry doubled his fist and drew back his arm.

  “Dr. Elliott?” Christopher whispered. “Marna?”

  Relief surged over Harry like a warm, enervating current “You wonderful little imp! How’d you find us?”

  “Grampa helped me. He has a sense for that. I have a little, but he’s better. Come.” Harry felt a small hand fit itself into his. Christopher began to lead them through the darkness. At first Harry was distrustful and then, as the boy kept them out of bushes and trees, he moved more confidently. The hand became something he could depend on. He knew how Pearce felt and how bereft he must be now.

  Christopher led them a long way before they reached another clearing. A bed of coals glowed dimly beneath a sheltering bower of green leaves. Pearce sat near the fire slowly turning a spit fashioned from a green branch. It rested on two forked sticks. On the spit two skinned rabbits were golden brown and sizzling.

  Pearce’s sightless face turned up as they entered the clearing. “Welcome back,” he said.

  Harry felt a warmth inside him that was like coming home.

  Marna fell to her knees in front of the fire, raising her hands to it to warm them. Rope dangled from them, frayed in the center where she had methodically picked it apart while she had waited by another fire. She must have been cold, Harry thought, and I let her shiver through the forest while I was warm in my jacket.

  But there was nothing to say.

  When Christopher removed the rabbits from the spit, they almost fell apart. He wrapped four legs in damp green leaves and tucked them away in a cool hollow between two tree roots. “That’s for breakfast,” he said.

  The four of them fell to work on the remainder. Even without salt, it was the most delicious meal Harry had ever eaten. When it was finished, he licked his fingers, sighed, and leaned back on a pile of old leaves. He felt more contented than he could remember. He was a little thirsty because he had refused to drink from the brook that ran through the woods close to their improvised camp, but he could stand that A man couldn’t surrender all his principles. It would be ironic to die of typhoid so close to his chance at immortality.

  That the governor would confer immortality upon him— or at least put him into a position where he could earn it—he did not doubt. After all, he had saved the governor’s daughter.

  Marna was a pretty little thing. It was too bad she was still a child. An alliance with the governor’s family would not hurt his chances.
Perhaps in a few years—He put the notion away from him. Marna hated him.

  Christopher shoveled dirt over the fire with a large piece of bark. Harry sighed again and stretched luxuriously. Sleeping would be good tonight.

  Marna had washed at the brook. Her face was clean and shining. “Will you sleep here beside me?” Harry asked her, touching the dry leaves. He held up his bracelet apologetically. “This thing keeps me awake when you’re very far away.”

  She nodded coldly and sat down beside him—but far enough away so that they did not touch.

  Harry said, “I can’t understand why we’ve run across so many teratisms. I can’t remember ever seeing one in my practice at the Medical Center.”