by Kate Wilhelm
That night, after being kicked out of the apartment, he vanished. His partner was afraid to report it, for fear of bringing down the wrath of the official who had given him this assignment. They all knew that Teague was crazy, but he was useful and valued.
Blake turned up in the city the following day, this time as a dark-haired young man whose shoes didn’t match, whose coat looked like it had been found in the dump, and whose pants had come from someone two sizes larger than he was.
Blake didn’t want to divert his attention from the problem he felt was due highest priority, that of gaining enough trust to allow him access to the ship, but neither did he want to lose Derek, who would be picked up and would talk under the care and treatment of the Church.
Probably he would have gone to find Lorna anyway. He remembered her as a brat and alternately as a very lovely young woman in his arms, dependent on him. He knew it would be very easy to fall in love with Lorna, who was so like her mother in appearance, and so like her father in determination and independence.
Anyway, Blake had taken on the job of finding her, and this he would do; in a city of thirty million people.
Chapter Twenty
NEW Year’s Eve in Times Square. Twenty million people within an area of no more then ten city blocks. Snow that comes down black, and falls like bits of metal, straight down, no swirling about, just down. Cold people, miserable people, looking for something from the New Year, something that had been absent in the old one, in the old ones of all the years gone by.
Blake has found Lorna. He has spotted the watchers, all but one of them anyway, and he is being careful, knowing that there may be others. Tonight there will be real trouble in Times Square. Everyone gathered knows this. They have come anyway. For the trouble perhaps. Obie has said that tonight the short hairs will be driven from the city, that the city will greet the new year cleansed of the filth of the non-believers. At least some say that Obie has predicted this. No one knows any longer when he has made a prediction, or when others have made it for him, in his name. False prophets, the long hairs call those others, trying to belittle the accomplishments of the leader. Hedging his bets, the skeptics say with as much certainty. If it pans out, he said it sho-nuff, and if it doesn’t happen, then he never even said it would. No one knows where the truth is any longer. No one really cares: They have come to Times Square in spite of the rumors, or because of the rumors. Lorna has come. Looking for something that she lost. She won’t find it again, and she knows this, too. But she has to look, or give up everything. She has a job of sorts. In a bar where short-hair Irishmen gather and talk about what they will do to the long hairs when the time comes. She serves their drinks—they don’t trust the automated bars, believe they get cheaper booze there, watered down more than in the bars where they can watch the mixing. They may be right. Everyone knows the automatic places of all sorts are programmed to cheat the customer, less food per serving, less alcohol per drink, less time per book, less everything. Lorna is in Times Square, hugging a coat that is too thin to her shoulders, which are also too thin. She is hungry. Most of the time she is hungry, and always cold. She can remember being warm enough, that is more than most of the people she is pushing and pushed by can remember. Few of them have ever been warm in the winter. Lorna’s hair is growing out again, curling about her ears. She doesn’t suspect that she has not had a moment alone since being put out of the hovercraft three months ago. She has felt alone. Loneliness has matured her in a way that age couldn’t, and her eyes are patient now and the look of hurt has been replaced by a look of sadness. She doesn’t like most of the people in the square, but she sympathizes with them. They all, long hairs and short hairs, share the hunger and the cold, and the hopes that the new year will be different. No one really knows how to specify what sort of difference he wants, but everyone knows it has to be different or he doesn’t want to stay around for the next New Year’s Eve. Most of them thought this way last year, and the year before that, and on backward in time to a distant past that is so faded in the memory that perhaps it is only a dream. Lorna never felt this before. She doesn’t know that people can live with this hopelessness for a normal life span. She wouldn’t believe it if she were told repeatedly that it is so.
It is nearing twelve. There is excitement, anticipation, and hands in pockets clutch rocks and bottles, and bricks and clubs, and even guns. Cocktails have been lovingly prepared, for the celebration. There is booze, God only knows from what source, from what ingredients. Probably lethal. There are the pills and the needles and the bits of sugared gum that can be chewed, stored, or shared, and chewed again, each time guaranteed to remove one from reality for a while.
Blake doesn’t let the crowds separate him from Lorna now. Tonight he and Derek plan to pick her up and take her to the mountain cabin. Derek is waiting for his signal. Derek is nearby with the ship that is as much at home under the bay as in the air. Nearby and waiting for the signal. Blake moves closer to the girl. Hell’s door bursts open at midnight, and Blake moves toward Lorna. There is a pitched battle going on all at once. Bricks are thrown, bottles, jagged and mean, are flashing, there are explosions here and there, and tramplings. Why frail people are always in such a crowd is a mystery that should be investigated. Suicides lacking the imagination to work out details? They are there, and they are trampled. Blake swings Lorna around and she recognizes him immediately in spite of the black hair and the clothes that are of the slums. The watchers pay little attention to the dark young man. They have been instructed to leave her strictly alone, not reveal that they were watching regardless of what happens, unless she is threatened with death. So they would have paid no attention at all to him, had not a pipe flashed out and laid open the side of his head. Blake is not immune to a pipe on the side of the head. He falls heavily bleeding, unconscious. Lorna drops to her knees instantly and it is this action that draws the attention of the watchers. She knows him! She is pushed back as they move in, and seconds later they know him also. Lorna and Blake are lifted, she is also unconscious now, her head swelling from a fistful of coins brought down just so, Blake still bleeding, very dead-looking.
Derek, waiting, hears nothing, and continues to wait. An hour later he does hear a voice, not Blake’s voice, and he knows Blake has been taken. The voice says, jubilantly, “My God, finally! Now we finish everything!” The voice belongs to Obie Cox.
Chapter Twenty-one
ANYONE can be conditioned to do anything,” Obie said. “I’ve read a lot about conditioning.”
In the large living room of the mansion perched atop Mount Laurel he held the meeting with his lieutenants. Merton sat moving the objects that they had taken from Blake. There was a curious stone, opal-like, but not an opal. It was shot through with fire, was teardrop shaped, and had a blue background with rose lights. There were keys, five of them. Some coins from Malasia, from New Zealand, from Morocco. An almost flat black disk. A plastic notebook that had curious markings in it; the markings faded out when he opened the pages, and he snapped it shut cursing. That was for the lab boys to handle. He paid no more attention to the disk than to any of the other objects, perhaps less. The opal-like stone and the notebook held his attention longest.
Obie had been going on about Blake and his plans for the kid for an hour and Merton was getting bored. Mueller merely sat and stared at his hands. Finally Merton said, “What do you think, Dr. Mueller? How long will it take?”
Mueller shrugged. “I know nothing about the patient, The preliminary tests and evaluations will take a week, at the least. I have to discover his personality structure, his defense mechanisms, his ego manifestations… ”
“Shit,” Obie said. “March 10, that’s when I want him to be ready to go on stage with me. You hear that. Mueller? March 10.”
Mueller looked pained but said nothing.
Blake woke up in a narrow bed, in a narrow room without windows. He lay unmoving, remembering the events that had led to this. He had been cleaned up and bandaged.
He could feel the absence of the hairs and the radio parts from his ears, so he didn’t even try to feel for them. Probably his every move would be filmed for study. He hoped they hadn’t found Derek, too. And he wondered about Lorna. She hadn’t been a willing plant, he was certain. The shock in her eyes and the pallor that had spread over her face on seeing him had been proof enough of her innocence. He hoped she was still alive. He closed his eyes and returned to sleep.
For the next week Mueller was the only person Blake saw. He cooperated willingly with the tests, faking every answer, but subtly, so that it would take many weeks of computer comparisons before the fakery was discovered. Blake agreed to cooperate with Obie as he had long ago, in exchange for laboratory privileges. Obie was buoyed, Merton was suspicious. Dee Dee was fascinated by the blond boy, and if her interest in him was sexual, she concealed the fact, sublimated it successfully into a maternal solicitude that fooled everyone but Blake and Winifred. Winifred was not permitted to see Blake at all. He never asked about Lorna.
Lorna was confined to a room in the hospital, a carrot on a stick, Obie said when he ordered her held there, ready to be dangled again, if they needed her.
Blake was almost pathetically happy to have his notebook returned. He paid little attention to any of the other pieces that had been taken from his pockets. Merton questioned him about the transmitter and receiver and about the notebook and Blake answered openly. Derek was at the other end of the radio, high in the Andes mountains. Blake repeated that story while conscious, and under drugs, so they had to believe him, although no trace of any cabin was found in the Andes at the coordinates he gave. He said Derek must have moved. Nothing more. Mueller assured Merton that the drugs were infallible. No one had ever been known to sustain a falsification under the influence. It was never learned how Blake managed this, but he told Winifred much later that in his auto-hypnosis training he had developed such absolute control of himself that his instructions overruled anything coming in from the outside. Also he had hypnotized Mueller rather easily, and there was some doubt what Mueller actually got into him in the way of drugs. About the notebook, Blake said, pointing to the various jottings, here were his preliminary thoughts about an anti-gravity device; here a system for transmission of energy; that was for a laser consisting of glass of any sort, old Coke bottles, for example. If Blake’s eyes twinkled as he detailed the many projects he had in mind, it didn’t show. Since most of his notes had been destroyed when Merton opened the notebook there was no way to prove or disprove what he said. Obie’s scientists muttered and drew their heads together over the salvaged portions, then vanished for the next few days, only to reappear in order to announce that everything in it was impossible, it all contradicted known laws, etc., etc. Merton scowled at them and ordered them to return to their consultations. Meanwhile Blake had gone to work in the lab, in a tiny office where he paced, sketched, scowled, made notations for hours at a time, went back to pacing, and finally leaned back with a happy smile on his face. If he was getting results using only his mind, the scientists with the best, most expensive equipment in the world could damn well get results also.
Merton was nor happy during those weeks. He was nervous, and his sleep was interrupted by dreams of monsters chasing him, eating him up, coughing him out again so that he could run some more. It would have been better if he had remained swallowed; to be coughed up again and again was disgusting. He began taking pills to help him sleep. He didn’t believe Blake was cooperating. He thought the kid planned to escape, to make monkeys out of all of them, him especially, and it made him uneasy that he hadn’t the slightest inkling as to how Blake would manage it. The guards were doubled, then tripled. Blake was calm, smiling, busy. He asked no questions, didn’t pry…. Merton couldn’t grasp that. Blake should be full of questions…. Unless he knew the answers already.
Merton shivered. He didn’t want to think about that possibility.
About this time Merton and Dee Dee had a brief violent argument. She found him pacing furiously in her room late one night. She stopped at the door for a moment, then swept past him toward her office. Merton caught her arm and swung her around.
“Where’ve you been?”
“What’s that to you? If you don’t mind, I have work to do.”
“You’ve been with him! The kid! Haven’t you?”
Dee Dee pulled free and stepped back from him. “You pulling the old squatter’s rights routine on me, for chrissakes! Get lost, Merton. Beat it, will you. What if I was?”
“He’s dangerous, Dee Dee. Keep away from him.”
“Dangerous! A kid, for chrissakes! What’s the matter with you? Jealous of a kid? Scared of him is more like it, isn’t it? You’re scared to death of him. You and Obie and Billy. Jesus, you men are all scared right down to your balls over this one kid.” Mockingly she started to pass him again, laughing, “Afraid it’s different, better with an alien, Merton darling?”
“Bitch!” Merton slapped her, and when she tried to hit back he caught her arm and forced it behind her back, twisting her wrist. She moaned. “What have you told him? What’ve you been up to?”
“Nothing,” she gasped. He jerked her hand and she screamed. “I wanted to lay him… he wouldn’t. That’s all. Stop! St—” Merton let go and she fell to the floor.
He sat down hard on a lounge. After a minute or two he asked, “Are you okay?”
Dee Dee had stopped gasping. She pulled herself up without looking at him.
“Did he try to get anything out of you?” Merton asked, almost pleading now.
“I told you,” she said dully. “I told you. Now get out of here and leave me alone.”
“You were gone over an hour,” Merton said. “What were you doing all that time, talking over old times?”
“Yeah,” she said tiredly. “Talking over old times.” She didn’t look at him. She was afraid that he would twist her arm again, and she knew that she still wouldn’t be able to tell him anything more than she had. She didn’t know what they had talked about for more than an hour; she hadn’t known she’d been with him that long.
The next day Merton was surprised when she didn’t seem angry with him. She acted, in fact, as if she had forgotten the whole thing.
A few days later Blake demonstrated to Merton his first miracle for Obie. He produced a clear plastic liner compound that, mixed with water, formed wine, or near enough to fool anyone but a connoisseur. He played with it for a few days, laughed when Merton, who hung about him like a loyal dog, inquired about it and tossed the thing to the detective. A toy, he said. A parlor trick.
He showed Merton how he could fit it into a container, glass, paper cup, plastic glass, anything, add water from the tap, wait a. second or two, and have ruby wine. Merton looked at it suspiciously. Blake laughed again and took it and drank it.
“You have any more of those things?”
“Sure. Over there.” Blake waved toward his desk and paid no more attention when Merton picked up a handful of the plastic disks and left with them. The chemists analyzed the substance and came up with a formula that did produce winelike liquid when mixed with water. It was harmless, although in quantities it could be intoxicating. Obie had his miracle.
Blake had a reprieve from some of the suspicion that had attached to him.
Four nights later he led an escape from the mountain citadel.
It was raining, a cold merciless rain that was steady for hour after hour. Blake went first to Obie’s office, where he ran his hands over the door, finding and disconnecting the alarm before he entered. Blake knew where the safe was, an old-fashioned one that used a combination of voice tones and finger pressure. He said, in Obie’s voice, “Three, ninety-four, eleven, and open now.” The door swung open soundlessly. He picked up his disk, the stone with the rose fire, and his coins. He touched nothing else.
The unrelenting rain was a black curtain through which he moved, heading back toward the hospital area, three miles away. Behind the main building was a cl
uster of small houses, one of which was Winifred’s. He opened the door and whispered her name. Winifred gasped just once, asked no questions, threw a mackintosh around her shoulders, and left with him.
“Lorna’s room,” he said and led the way. Lorna was more reluctant, but she too remained silent and followed. Blake led them past the guards who were huddled inside a building at the edge of the forest. He motioned for them to bend low now and again, and Winifred assumed that there were electronic devices of various sorts spotted throughout the property. When they were deep in the woods they had to hold hands; it was too dark to see each other. Blake let them stop to rest three times between midnight and dawn, but stopping was more miserable than continuing. The cold was penetrating when the motion ceased. Walking, slipping, sliding over the rough mountainside kept them warm.
When the sky paled, Blake stopped them again, this time in the shelter of a low spreading pine tree where the ground was relatively dry, and no rain beat down.
Lorna sank to the ground and her head on her arms folded across her knees. Winifred leaned back against the tree too tired to move or to speak even. Blake vanished and was gone for half an hour, then was back, with a rabbit and a small bag of nuts. He built a tiny fire in the shelter of the tree and roasted the rabbit and they ate it, and the nuts. Nothing had ever tasted so good before to Winifred.
“We won’t make it, Blake, but bless you for trying. I thought… I didn’t know what to think when you acted so compliant.”
He grinned at her. “I had to find out who was there, where we were, where Lorna was, all that.”