by Algis Budrys
“I haven’t got a gun on you, boy,” Mr. Holland said quietly. “There’s better ways of protecting your integrity than shooting people.”
Cot had long ago decided that his neighbor, like all the old people who had been born in the Wild Sixties and grown up through the Dirty Years was, to put it politely, unconventional. But the sheer lack of common sense in going unarmed into a situation where one’s Integrity might be molested was more than any unconventionality.
But that was neither here nor there. In such a case, the greater responsibility in carrying out the proprieties was obviously his to assume.
“Allow me to state the situation clearly, sir,” he said, “In order that there might be no misunderstanding.”
“No misunderstanding, son. Not about the situation, anyway. Hell, when I was your—”
“Nevertheless,” Cot interposed, determined not to let Mr. Holland trap himself into a genuine social blunder, “The fact remains that I have trespassed on your property for a number of years—”
“For the purpose of peeping at Barbara,” Mr. Holland finished for him. “Do me a favor, son?” Mr. Holland’s voice was slightly touched by an amused annoyance.
“Certainly, sir.”
“Can the—” Mr. Holland caught himself. “I mean, show a little less concern for the social amenities; ease up on this business of doing the right thing, come hell or high water, and just listen. Here. Sit down, and let’s talk about a few things.”
Cot’s nerves had edged to the breaking point. He was neither hung nor pardoned. This final gaucherie was too much for him.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, his voice, nerve-driven, harder and harsher than he intended, “but that’s out of the question. I suggest that you either do your duty as the head of your family or else acknowledge your unwillingness to do so.”
“Why?”
The question was not as surprising as it might have been, had it come at the beginning of this fantastic scene. But it served to crystallize one point. It was not meant as a defiant insult, Cot realized. It was a genuine and sincere inquiry. And the fact that Mr. Holland was incapable of appreciating the answer was proof that his mother’s advice had been correct. Holland was not a gentleman.
Quite obviously, there was only one course now open to him, if he did not abandon all hope of Barbara’s hand. Incredible as it might seem, it was to answer the question in all seriousness, in an attempt to force some understanding through the long-set and, bluntly, ossified, habits of Holland’s thinking.
“I should think it would be hardly necessary to remind you that an individual’s Integrity is his most prized moral possession. In this particular case, I have violated your daughter’s Integrity, and, through blood connection, that of your family, as well.” Cot shook his head in the darkness. Explain he might, but his voice was indication enough of his outrage.
“What’s that?” Holland’s own voice was wearing thin.
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Integrity, damn it! Give me a definition.”
“Integrity, sir? Why, everyone—”
Holland cut him off with a frustrated curse. “I should have known better than to ask! You can’t even verbalize it, but you’ll cut each other down for it. All right, you go ahead, but don’t expect me to help you make a damned fool of yourself.” He sighed. “Go on home, son. Maybe, in about twenty years or so, you’ll get up guts enough to come and knock on the door like a man, if you want to see Barbara.”
Through the occlusion of his almost overwhelming rage, Cot realized that he could not, now, say anything further which might offend Holland. “I’m certain that if I were to do so, Miss Barbara would not receive me,” he finally managed to say in an even voice, gratified at his ability to do so.
“No, she probably wouldn’t,” Holland said bitterly. “She’s too goddamned well brought up, thanks to those bloody aunts of hers!”
Before Cot could react to this, Holland spat on the ground, and, turning his back like a coward, strode off down the road.
Cot stood atone in the night, his hands clutching his bandolier, grinding the looped cartridges together. Then he turned on his heel and loped home.
He left his carbine on the family arms-rack in the front parlor, and padded about the surface floor in his moccasins, resetting the alarms, occasionally interrupting himself to tense his arms or clamp his jaw as he thought of what had happened. The incredible complexity of the problem overwhelmed him, presenting no clear face which he could attack and rationalize logically.
Primarily, of course, the fault was his. He had committed a premeditated breach of Integrity. It was in its various ramifications that the question lost its clarity.
He had spied on Barbara Holland and done it repeatedly. Her father had become aware of the fact. Tonight, rather than issue a direct challenge, Holland had lain in wait for him. Then, having informed Cot that he was aware of his actions, Holland had not only not done the gentlemanly thing, but had actually ridiculed his expectation of it. The man had insulted Cot and his family, and had derided his own daughter. He had referred to his sisters-in-law in a manner which, if made public, would have called for a bandolier-flogging at the hands of the male members of the female line.
But the fact nevertheless remained that whether Mr. Holland was a gentleman or Holland was not, Cot had been guilty of a serious offense. And, in Cot’s mind as in that of every other human being, what had been a twinging secret shame was as disastrous and disgusting as a public horror.
And, since Holland had refused to solve the problem for him in the manner in which anyone else would unhesitatingly have done so, Cot was left with this to gnaw at his brain and send him into sudden short-lived bursts of anger intermingled with longer, quieter, and deadlier spells of remorseful shame.
Finally, when he had patrolled the entire surface floor, Cot walked noiselessly down to the living quarters, completely uncertain of the degree of his guilt, and, therefore, of his shame and disgrace, knowing that he would not sleep no matter how long he lay on his bed—and he fought down that part of his mind which recalled the image of Barbara Holland.
Fought—but lost. The remembered picture was as strong as the others beside which he placed it, beginning with the first one from five years ago, when, at the age of twenty- one, he had passed her window on his return from Graduate training. And, though he saw her almost every day at the post office or store, these special images were not obscured by the cold and proper aloofness with which she surrounded herself when she was not—he winced—alone.
Again, there was the entire problem of Barbara’s father. The man had been raised in the wild immorality and casual circumstances of the Dirty Years. Obviously, he could see nothing wrong with what Cot had been doing. He had sense enough not to tell anyone else about it, thank the good Lord—but, in some blundering attempt to “get you two kids together,” or whatever he might call it, what would he tell Barbara?
Dawn came, and Cot welcomed the night’s end.
As head of the family since his father’s death in an affair of Integrity two years before—he had, of course, been the Party at Grievance—it was Cot’s duty to plan each day’s activities insofar as they were to vary from the normal farm routine. Today, with all the spring work done and summer chores still so light as to be insignificant, he was at a loss, but he was grateful for this opportunity to lose himself in a problem with which he had been trained to cope.
But after an hour of attempting to think, he was forced to fall back on what, in retrospect, must have been a device his father had put to similar use. If there was nothing else, there was always Drill.
Out of consideration for his grandmother’s age, he waited until 7:58 before he touched the alarm stud, but not even the heavy slam of shutters being convulsively hurled into their places in the armor plate of the exterior walls, the sudden screech of the generators as the radar antennas came out of their half-sleep into madly whirling life, or the clatter as the household chil
dren fired test bursts from their machineguns were enough to quench the fire in his mind.
The drill ran until 10:00. By then, it was obvious that the household defenses were doing everything they had been designed to, and that the members of the household knew their parts perfectly. Even his grandmother’s legendary skill with her rangefinder had not grown dull—though there was a distinct possibility that she had memorized the range of every likely target in the area. But that, if true, was not an evasion of her duties but, instead, a valuable accomplishment.
“Very good,” he said over the household intercommunications system. “All members of the household are now free to return to their normal duties, with the exception of the children, who will report to me for their schooling.”
His mother, whose battle station was at the radarscope a few feet away from his fire control board, smiled with approval as she returned the switches to AutoSurvey. She put her hand gently on his forearm as he rose from behind the board.
“I’m glad, Cottrell. Very glad,” she said with her smile.
He did not understand what she meant, at first, and looked at her blankly.
“I was afraid you might neglect your duties, as so many of our neighbors are doing,” she explained by continuing. “But I should not have doubted you, even to that degree.” Her low voice was strongly underlaid with her pride in him. “Your fiber is stronger than that. Why, I was even afraid that your disappointment after our little talk yesterday might distract you. But I was wrong, and you’ll never know how thrilled I am to see it.”
He bent to kiss her quickly, so that she would not see his eyes, and hurried up to the parlor, where the children had already assembled and taken their weapons out of the arms-rack.
By mid-afternoon, the younger children had been excused, and only his two oldest brothers were out on the practice terrain with him.
“Stay down!” Cot shouted at Alister. “You’ll never live to Graduate if you won’t learn to flatten out at the crest of a rise!” He flung his carbine up to his cheek and snapped a branch beside his brother’s rump to prove the point.
“Now, you,” he whirled on Geoffrey. “How’d I estimate my windage? Quick!”
“Grass,” Geoffrey said laconically.
“Wrong! You haven’t been over that ground in two weeks. You’ve no accurate idea of how much wind will disturb that grass into its present pattern.”
“Asked me how you did it,” Geoffrey pointed out.
“All right,” Cot snapped. “Score one for you. Now, how would you do it?”
“Feel. Watch me.” Geoffrey’s lighter weapon cracked with a noise uncannily like that of the branch, which now split at a point two inches below where Cot’s heavy slug had broken it off.
“Have an instinct for it, do you?” Cot was perversely glad to find an outlet for his annoyance. “Do it again.”
Geoffrey shrugged. He fired twice. The branch splintered, and there was a shout from Alister. Cot spun and glared at Geoffrey.
“Put it next to his hand,” Geoffrey explained. “Guess he got some dirt in his face, too.”
Cot looked at the point where the grass was undulating wildly as Alister tried to roll away under its cover. He found time to note his brother’s clumsiness before he said, “You couldn’t have seen his hand—or anything except the top of his rump, for that matter.”
Geoffrey’s seventeen-year-old face was secretly amused. “I just figured, if I was Alice, where would I keep my hands? Simple.”
Cot could feel the challenge to his pre-eminence as the family’s fighting man gathering thickly about him.
“Very good,” he said bitingly. “You have an instinct for combat. Now, suppose that had been a defective cartridge—bad enough to tumble the bullet to the right and kill your brother. What then?”
“I hand-loaded those cases myself. Think I’m fool enough to trust that ham-handed would-be gunsmith at the store?” Geoffrey was impregnable. Cot felt his temper beginning to escape the clutch of his strained will.
“If you’re so good, why don’t you go off and join the Militia?”
Geoffrey took the insult without an expression on his face. “Think I’ll stick around,” he said calmly. “You’re going to need help—if old man Holland ever catches you on those moonlight strolls of yours.”
Cot could feel the sudden rush of blood pushing at the backs of his eyes. “What did you say?” The words drove out of his throat with low deadliness.
“You heard me.” Geoffrey turned away, put a bullet to either side of the thrashing Mister, and one above and below. Mister’s training broke completely, and he sprang out of the grass and began to run, shouts choking his throat. “A rabbit,” Geoffrey spat contemptuously. “Just pure rabbit. Me, I’ve got Uncle Jim’s blood, but that Alice, he’s strictly Mother.” He fired again and snapped the heel off Alister’s shoe. As Alister stumbled to the ground, Cot’s open palm smashed against the side of Geoffrey’s face.
Geoffrey took two sideward steps and stopped, his eyes wide with shock. The rifle hung limply from his hands. He had several years to grow before he would raise it instinctively.
“You’ll never mention that relative’s name again!” Cot said thickly. “Not to me, and not to anyone else. What’s more, you’ll consider it a breach of Integrity if anyone speaks of him in your presence. Is that understood? And as for your fantasies about myself and Mr. Holland, if you mention that again, you’ll learn that there is such a thing as a breach of Integrity between brothers!” But he knew that anything he might say now was as much of an admission as a shouted confession. He could feel the night’s sickness seeping through his system again, turning his muscles into limp rags and sending the blood pounding through his ears.
Geoffrey narrowed his eyes, and his lip curled into a half-sneer.
“For a guy that hates armies and soldiers, you sure think you can act like a Senior Sergeant,” he said bitterly. He turned around and began to stride away, then stopped and looked back. “And I’d drop you before you got the lead out of your pants,” he added.
Geoffrey knows, echoed through his mind. Geoffrey knows, and Mr. Holland found me out. How many others? Like a sickening refrain, the thoughts tumbled over and over in his skull as he swung down the road with rapid and clumsy strides. The usual coordination of all the muscles in his lithe body had been destroyed by the added shock of what he had learned on the practice terrain.
He pictured Geoffrey, watching from a window and snickering as he crawled down the ditch. He seemed to hear Mr. Holland’s dry chuckle. Over the last three years, how many others of his neighbors had seen him? As he thought of it, it seemed incredible that pure chance had not ensured that the entire countryside was aware of his disgraceful actions.
But he could not run from it. It was not the way a man faced situations. The thing to do was to go to the club and watch the faces of the men as they looked at him. As they greeted him, there would be a little hidden demon of scorn in their eyes to be looked for.
The carbine’s butt slapped his thigh as he climbed the club steps.
He could not be sure he had found it. As he looked down at the newly refilled mug of rum, he understood this with considerable clarity. He could not deny that a strange sort of perverse desire to see what was not really there might have put an imagined edge on the twinkle in Winter’s eyes, the undercurrent of mirth that always accented Olsen’s voice. If Lundy Hollis sneered a bit more than usual, it probably meant nothing more than that the man had discovered some new quality in himself that made him better than his fellows. But probably, probably, and nothing certain. Neither affirmation nor denial.
Cot’s hand closed around the mug, and he scalded his throat with the drink. The remembered visions of Barbara were attaining a greater precision with every swallow.
“Hello, boy.”
Oh, my God! he thought. He’d forgotten that Holland was a member of the club. But, of course, he was, though Cot couldn’t understand how the old man managed to b
e kept in. He watched Mr. Holland slip into the seat opposite his, and wondered how many chuckles had accompanied the man’s retelling of last night’s events.
“How do you do, sir,” he managed to say, remembering to maintain the necessary civilities.
“Don’t mind if I work on my liquor at the same table with you, do you?”
Cot shook his head. “It’s my pleasure, sir.”
The chuckle came that Cot had been waiting for. “Say, boy, even with a few slugs in you, you don’t forget to tack on those fancy parts of speech, do you?” Mr. Holland chuckled again.
“Guess I got a little mad at you last night,” he went on. “Sorry about that. Everybody’s got a right to live the way they want to.”
Cot stared silently into his mug. The clarity that had begun to emerge from the rum was unaccountably gone, as though the very touch of Holland’s presence was enough to plunge him headlong back into the mental chaos that had strangled his thinking through the night and most of the day. He was no longer sure that Mr. Holland had not kept the story to himself; he was no longer sure that Geoffrey had done more than make a shrewd guess …He was no longer sure.
“Look, boy…”
* * *
And the realization came that, for the first time since he had known him, Mr. Holland was as much unsure of his ground as he. He looked up, and saw the slow light of uncertainty in the man’s glance.
“Yes, sir?”
“Boy—I don’t know. I tried to talk to you last night, but I guess we were both kind of steamed up. Think you’ll feel more like listening tonight? Particularly if I’m careful about picking my words?”
“Certainly, sir.” That, at least, was common courtesy.
“Well, look—I was a friend of your Uncle Jim’s.”
Cot bristled. “Sir, I—” He stopped. In a sense, he was obligated to Mr. Holland. If he didn’t say it now, it would have to be said later. “Sorry, sir. Please go on.”
Mr. Holland nodded. “We campaigned with Berendtsen together, sure. That doesn’t sit too well with some people around here. But it’s true, and there’s lots of people who remember it, so there’s nothing wrong with my saying it.”