A Treasury of Great Science Fiction 1

by Anthony Boucher (ed)

  It sounded like good advice. I woke Rosalind, and explained. Ten minutes later we were on our way again, with Petra still more than half asleep. With speed now more important than concealment we kept on the first southward track that we found, and urged the horses to a ponderous trot.

  The way wound somewhat with the lie of the land, but its general direction was right. We followed it for fully ten miles without trouble of any kind, but then, as we rounded a corner, we came face to face with a horseman trotting towards us barely fifty yards ahead.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The man cannot have had a moment’s doubt who we were, for even as he saw us he dropped his reins and snatched his bow from his shoulder., Before he had a shaft on the string we had both loosed at him,

  The motion of the greathorse was unfamiliar, and we both shot wide. He did better. His arrow passed between us, skinning our horse’s head. Again I missed, but Rosalind’s second shot took his horse in the chest, It reared, almost unseating him, then turned and started to bolt away ahead of us. I sent another arrow after it, and took it in the buttock. It leapt sideways, catapulting the man into the bushes, and then sped off down the track as hard as it could go.

  We passed the thrown man without checking. He cringed aside as the huge hoofs clumped by within a couple of feet of his head. At the next turn we looked back to see him sitting up, feeling his bruises. The least satisfactory part of the incident was that there was now a wounded riderless horse spreading an alarm ahead of us.

  A couple of miles further on, the stretch of forest came to an abrupt end, and we found ourselves looking across a narrow, cultivated valley. There was about a mile and a half of open country before the trees began again on the far side. Most of the land was pasture, with sheep and cattle behind rail and post fences. One of the few arable fields was immediately to cur left. The young crop there looked as if it might be oats, but it deviated to an extent which would have caused it to be burnt long ago at home.

  The sight of it encouraged us, for it could only mean that we had reached almost to Wild Country where stock could not be kept pure.

  The track led at a gentle slope down to a farm winch was little better than a cluster of huts and sheds. In the open space among them which served for a yard we could see four or five women and a couple of men gathered round a horse. They were examining it, and we had little doubt what horse it was. Evidently it had only just arrived, and they were still arguing about it. We decided to go on, rather than give them time to arm and come in search of us.

  So absorbed were they in their inspection of the horse that we had covered half the distance from the trees before any of them noticed us. Then one glanced up, and the rest, too, turned to stare. They could never have seen a greathorse before, and the sight of two bearing down upon them at a canter with a thunderous rumble of hoofbeats struck them momentarily rigid with astonishment. It was the horse in their midst that broke up the tableau; it reared, whinnied, and made off, scattering them.

  There was no need to shoot. The whole group scuttled for the shelter of various doorways, and we pounded through their yard unmolested.

  The track bore off to the left, but Rosalind held the greathorse on a straight line ahead, toward the next stretch of forest. The rails flew aside like twigs, and we kept on at a lumbering canter across the fields, leaving a trail of broken fences behind us.

  At the edge of the trees, I looked back. The people at the farm emerged from shelter and stood gesticulating and staring after us.

  Three or four miles further on we came out into more open country, but not like any region we had seen before. It was dotted with bushes, and brakes, and thickets. Most of the grass was coarse and large-leafed: in some places it was monstrous, growing into giant tufts where the sharp-edged blades stood eight or ten feet high.

  We wound our way among them, keeping generally southwest, for another couple of hours. Then we pushed into a copse of queer, but fair-sized trees. It offered a good hiding place, and inside were several open spaces where there grew a more ordinary kind of grass which looked as if it might make suitable fodder. We decided to rest awhile there and sleep.

  I hobbled the horses while Rosalind unrolled the blankets, and presently we were eating hungrily. It was pleasantly peaceful there until Petra put out one of her blinding communications so abruptly that I bit my tongue.

  Rosalind screwed up her eyes, and put a hand to her head.

  “For heaven’s sake, child!” she protested.

  “Sorry. I forgot,” said Petra perfunctorily.

  She sat with her head a little on one side for a minute, then she told us:

  “She wants to talk to cue of you. She says will you all try to hear her while she thinks her loudest.”

  “All right,” we agreed, “but you keep quiet, or you’ll blind us.”

  I tried my very hardest, straining sensitivity to its utmost, but there was nothing—or as near nothing as the shimmer of a heat-haze.

  We relaxed again.

  “No good,” I said, “you’ll have to tell her we can’t reach her, Petra. Look out, everyone.”

  We did our best to damp out the exchange that followed, then Petra brought down the force of her thoughts below the dazzle level, and started to relay those she was receiving. They had to be in very simple form so that she could copy them even when she did not understand them; they reached us rather like baby-talk, and with many repeats to make sure that we grasped them. It is scarcely possible to give any idea in words of the way it came across, but it was the over-ail impression that mattered, and that reached us clearly enough.

  The urgent emphasis was on importance—the importance not of us, but of Petra. At all costs she must be protected. Such a power of projection as she had was unheard-of without special training—she was a discovery of the utmost value. Help was already on the way, but until it could reach us we must play for time and safety—Petra’s safety, it seemed, not our own—at all. costs.

  There was quite a lot more that was less clear, muddled up with it, but that main point was quite unmistakable.

  “Did you get it?” I asked of the others, when it had finished.

  They had. Michael responded: “This is very confusing. There is no doubt that Petra’s power of projection is remarkable, compared with ours, anyway, but what she seemed to me to be putting across was that she was particularly surprised to find it among primitive people, did you notice that? It looked almost as if she were meaning us.”

  “She was,” confirmed Rosalind. “Not a shadow of doubt about it.”

  “There must be some misunderstanding,” I put in. “Probably Petra somehow gave her the impression we were Fringes people. As for—” I was suddenly blotted out for a moment by Petra’s indignant denial. I did my best to disregard it, and went on: “As for help, there must be a misunderstanding there, too. She’s somewhere southwest, and everybody knows that there are miles and miles of Badlands that way. Even if they do come to an end and she’s on the other side of them, how can she possibly help?”

  Rosalind refused to argue about that.

  “Let’s wait and find out,” she suggested. “Just now, all I want is sleep.”

  I felt the same way, and since Petra had slept most of the time in the pannier, we told her to keep a sharp lookout and wake us at once if she heard or saw anything suspicious. Both Rosalind and I fell asleep almost before we laid our heads down.

  I awoke with Petra shaking my shoulder, and saw that the sun was not far off setting.

  “Michael,” she explained.

  I cleared my mind for him.

  “They’ve picked up your trail again. A small farm on the edge of Wild Country. You galloped through it. Remember?” I did. He went on:

  “There’s a party converging there now. They’ll start to follow your tracks as soon as it’s light. Better get moving soon. I don’t know how it is in front of you, but there may be some men cutting across from the west to head you off. If there are, my bet is that they
’ll keep-in smallish groups for the night. They can’t risk a cordon of single sentries because there are known to be Fringes people scouting around. So, with luck, you should be able to sneak through.”

  “All right,” I agreed wearily. Then a question I had meant to ask before occurred to me. “What’s happened to Sally and Katherine?”

  “I don’t know. No answer. The range is getting rather long now. Does anyone know?”

  Deborah came in, made faint by the distance.

  “Katherine was unconscious. There’s been nothing understandable since then. Mark and I are afraid.” She faded, in a foggy reluctance to continue.

  “Go on,” Michael told her.

  “Well, Katherine’s been unconscious so long we’re wondering if she’s dead.”

  “And Sally?”

  This time there was even more reluctance.

  “We think—we’re afraid something queer must have happened to her mind. There’ve been just one or two little jumbles from her. Very weak, not sensible at all, so we’re afraid . . .” She faded away, in great unhappiness.

  There was a pause before Michael started with hard, harsh shapes.

  “You understand what that means, David? They are afraid of us. Ready to break us down in the attempt to find out more about us, once they can catch us. You mustn’t let them get hold of Rosalind or Petra—far better to kill them yourself than let that happen to them. You understand?”

  I looked at Rosalind lying asleep beside me, the red of the sunset glistening on her hair, and I thought of the anguish we had felt from Katherine. The possibility of her and Petra suffering that made me shudder.

  “Yes,” I told him, and the others. “Yes. I understand.”

  I felt their sympathy and encouragement for a while, then there was nothing.

  Petra was looking at me, more puzzled than alarmed. She asked earnestly, in words:

  “Why did he say you must kill Rosalind and me?”

  I pulled myself together.

  “That was only if they catch us,” I told her, trying to make it sound as if it were the sensible and usual course in such circumstances. She considered the prospect judicially, then: “Why?” she asked.

  “Well,” I tried, “you see we’re different from them because they can’t make thought-shapes, and when people are different, ordinary people are afraid of them.”

  “Why should they be afraid of us? We aren’t hurting them,” she broke in.

  “I’m not sure that I know why,” I told her. “But they are. It’s a feel-thing not a think-thing. And the more stupid they are, the more like everyone else they think everyone ought to be. And once they get afraid they become cruel and want to hurt people who are different.”

  “Why?” inquired Petra.

  “They just do. And they’d hurt us very much if they could catch us.”

  “I don’t see why,” Petra persisted.

  “It’s the way things work. It’s complicated and rather nasty,” I told her. “You’ll understand better when you’re older. But the thing is, we don’t want you and Rosalind to be hurt. You remember when you spilt the boiling water on your foot? Well, it’d be much worse than that. Being dead’s a lot better—it’s sort of like being so much asleep that they can’t get at you to hurt you at all.”

  I looked down at Rosalind, at the gentle rise and fall of her breasts as she slept. There was a vagrant wisp of hair on her cheek; I brushed it away gently and kissed her without waking her.

  Presently Petra began:

  “David, when you kill me and Rosalind—”

  I put an arm around her. “Hush, darling. It isn’t going to happen, because we aren’t going to let them catch us. Now, let’s wake her up, but we won’t tell her about this. She might be worried, so we’ll just keep it to ourselves for a secret, shall we?”

  “All right,” Petra agreed.

  She tugged gently at Rosalind’s hair.

  We decided to eat again, and then push on when it was a little darker so that there would be stars to steer by. Petra was unwontedly silent over the meal. At first I thought she was brooding upon our recent conversation, but I was wrong, it appeared; after a time she emerged from her contemplations to say, conversationally:

  “Zealand must be a funny place. Everybody there can make think-pictures—well, nearly everybody—-and nobody wants to hurt anybody for doing it.”

  “Oh, you’ve been chatting while we were asleep, have you,” remarked Rosalind. “I must say that makes it a lot more comfortable for us.”

  Petra ignored that. She went on:

  “They aren’t all of them very good at it, though; most of them are more like you and David,” she told us kindly. “But she’s much better at it than most of them, and she’s got two babies and she thinks they will be good at it, only they’re too little yet. But she doesn’t think they’ll be as good at it as me. She says I can make stronger think-pictures than, anybody at all,” she concluded, complacently.

  “That doesn’t surprise me one bit,” Rosalind told her. “What you want to learn next is to make good think-pictures, instead of just noisy ones,” she added, deflatingly.

  Petra remained unabashed. “She says I’ll get better still if I work at it, and then when I grow up I must have babies who can make strong think-pictures, too.”

  “Oh, you must, must you,” said Rosalind. “Why? My impression of think-pictures up to now is that chiefly they bring trouble.”

  “Not in Zealand.” Petra shook her head. “She says that everybody there wants to make them, and people who can’t do it much work hard to get better at it.”

  We pondered that. I recalled Uncle Axel’s tales about places beyond the Black Coasts where the Deviations thought that they were the true image, and anything else was a Mutant.

  “She says,” Petra amplified, “that people who can only talk with words have something missing. She says we ought to be sorry for them because however old they grow they’ll never be able to understand one another much better. They’ll have to be one-at-a-times always, never think-togethers.”

  “I can’t say I feel very sorry for them at present,” I remarked.

  “Well, she says we ought to because they have to live very dull, stupid lives compared with think-picture people,” Petra said, somewhat sententiously.

  We let her prattle on. It was difficult to make sense of a lot of the things she said, and possibly she had not got them right, anyway, but the one thing that did stand out clearly was that these Zealanders, whoever and wherever they were, thought no small beans of themselves. It began to seem more than likely that Rosalind had been right when she had taken “primitive” to refer to ordinary Labrador people.

  In clear starlight we set out again, still winding our way between clumps and thickets in a southwesterly direction. Out of respect for Michael’s warning we were traveling as quietly as we could, with our eyes and ears alert for any signs of interception. For some miles there was nothing to be heard but the steady cushioned clumping of the greathorses’ hoofs, slight creakings from the girths and panniers, and, occasionally, some small animal scuttling out of our way.

  After three hours or more we began to perceive uncertainly a line of deeper darkness ahead, and presently the edge of more forest solidified to loom up like a black wall.

  It was not possible in the shadow to tell how dense it was. The best course seemed to be to hold straight on until we came to it and then, if it turned out to be not easily penetrable, to work along the edge until we could find a suitable place to make an entrance.

  We had come within a hundred yards of it when without any warning a gun went off to the rear, and shot whistled past us.

  Both horses were startled, and plunged. I was all but flung out of my pannier. The rearing horses pulled away and the lead rope parted with a snap. The other horse bolted straight toward the forest, then thought better of it and swerved to the left. Ours pelted after it. There was nothing to be done but wedge oneself in the pannier and hang on as
we tore along in a rain of clods and stones flung up by hoofs of the lead horse.

  Somewhere behind us a gun fired again, and we speeded up still more . . .

  For a mile or more we hurtled on in a ponderous, earth-shaking gallop. Then there was a flash ahead and half-left. At the sound of the shot our horse sprang sideways in midstride, swerved right, and raced for the forest. We crouched still lower in the baskets as we crashed among the trees.

  By luck alone we made the entry at a point where the bigger trunks were well separated, but, for all that, it was a nightmare ride, with branches slapping and dragging at the panniers. The greathorse simply ploughed ahead, avoiding the larger trees, thrusting through the rest, smashing its way by sheer weight while branches and saplings cracked and snapped at the onslaught.

  Inevitably the horse slowed down, but its panic determination to get away from the guns abated very little. I had to brace with arms and legs and whole body to avoid being battered to pieces in the pannier, scarcely daring to raise my head even for a quick look lest a branch should knock it off.

  I could not tell whether there was any pursuit, but it seemed improbable. Not only was it darker under the trees, but a horse of ordinary size would most likely have disembowelled itself in any attempt to follow over the snapped-off stems standing up like stakes behind us.

  The horse began to grow calmer; the pace and violence eased, as it started to pick its way instead of crashing through. Presently the trees on our left grew thinner. Rosalind, leaning out of her pannier, caught up the reins again and urged the creature that way. We came out obliquely upon a narrow open space where we could see the stars overhead again. Whether it was an artificial track, or a natural opening was impossible to tell in the poor light. We paused a moment wondering whether to risk it, then decided that the easier going would offset the disadvantages of easier pursuit, and turned southward along it. A crackling of branches to one side brought both of us facing round, with bows ready, but it was only the other greathorse. It came trotting out of the shadows with a whinny of pleasure, and fell into place behind us as though the rope still held it.