"I don't hate you, Dearest,” he replied, mentally. “And I don't blame you. It was a little disconcerting, though, to discover the extent of your capabilities.... How did you manage it?"
"You remember how I made the Sergeant see an angel, the time you were down in the snow?” Colonel Hampton nodded. “Well, I made her see ... things that weren't angels,” Dearest continued. “After I'd driven her almost to distraction, I was able to get into her mind and take control of her.” Colonel Hampton felt a shudder inside of him. “That was horrible; that woman had a mind like a sewer; I still feel dirty from it! But I made her get the pistol-I knew where you kept it-and I knew how to use it, even if she didn't. Remember when we were shooting muskrats, that time, along the river?"
"Uhuh. I wondered how she knew enough to unlock the action and load the chamber.” He turned and faced the others.
Doctor Vehrner was sitting on the floor, with his back to the chair Colonel Hampton had occupied, his injured leg stretched out in front of him. Albert was hovering over him with mother-hen solicitude. T. Barnwell Powell was finishing his whiskey and recovering a fraction of his normal poise.
"Well, I suppose you gentlemen see, now, who was really crazy around here?” Colonel Hampton addressed them bitingly. “That woman has been dangerously close to the borderline of sanity for as long as she's been here. I think my precious nephew trumped up this ridiculous insanity complaint against me as much to discredit any testimony I might ever give about his wife's mental condition as because he wanted to get control of my estate. I also suppose that the tension she was under here, this afternoon, was too much for her, and the scheme boomeranged on its originators. Curious case of poetic justice, but I'm sorry you had to be included in it, Doctor."
"Attaboy, Popsy!” Dearest enthused. “Now you have them on the run; don't give them a chance to re-form. You know what Patton always said-Grab ‘em by the nose and kick ‘em in the pants."
Colonel Hampton re-lighted his cigar. “Patton only said ‘pants’ when he was talking for publication,” he told her, sotto voce. Then he noticed the unsigned commitment paper lying on the desk. He picked it up, crumpled it, and threw it into the fire.
"I don't think you'll be needing that,” he said. “You know, this isn't the first time my loving nephew has expressed doubts as to my sanity.” He sat down in the chair at the desk, motioning to his servant to bring him a drink. “And see to the other gentlemen's glasses, Sergeant,” he directed. “Back in 1929, Stephen thought I was crazy as a bedbug to sell all my securities and take a paper loss, around the first of September. After October 24th, I bought them back at about twenty per cent of what I'd sold them for, after he'd lost his shirt.” That, he knew, would have an effect on T. Barnwell Powell. “And in December, 1944, I was just plain nuts, selling all my munition shares and investing in a company that manufactured baby-food. Stephen thought that Rundstedt's Ardennes counter-offensive would put off the end of the war for another year and a half!"
"Baby-food, eh?” Doctor Vehrner chuckled.
Colonel Hampton sipped his whiskey slowly, then puffed on his cigar. “No, this pair were competent liars,” he replied. “A good workmanlike liar never makes up a story out of the whole cloth; he always takes a fabric of truth and embroiders it to suit the situation.” He smiled grimly; that was an accurate description of his own tactical procedure at the moment. “I hadn't intended this to come out, Doctor, but it happens that I am a convinced believer in spiritualism. I suppose you'll think that's a delusional belief, too?"
"Well.... “Doctor Vehrner pursed his lips. “I reject the idea of survival after death, myself, but I think that people who believe in such a theory are merely misevaluating evidence. It is definitely not, in itself, a symptom of a psychotic condition."
"Thank you, Doctor.” The Colonel gestured with his cigar. “Now, I'll admit their statements about my appearing to be in conversation with some invisible or imaginary being. That's all quite true. I'm convinced that I'm in direct-voice communication with the spirit of a young girl who was killed by Indians in this section about a hundred and seventy-five years ago. At first, she communicated by automatic writing; later we established direct-voice communication. Well, naturally, a man in my position would dislike the label of spirit-medium; there are too many invidious associations connected with the term. But there it is. I trust both of you gentlemen will remember the ethics of your respective professions and keep this confidential."
"Oh, brother!” Dearest was fairly hugging him with delight. “When bigger and better lies are told, we tell them, don't we, Popsy?"
"Yes, and try and prove otherwise,” Colonel Hampton replied, around his cigar. Then he blew a jet of smoke and spoke to the men in front of him.
"I intend paying for my nephew's hospitalization, and for his wife's funeral,” he said. “And then, I'm going to pack up all his personal belongings, and all of hers; when he's discharged from the hospital, I'll ship them wherever he wants them. But he won't be allowed to come back here. After this business, I'm through with him."
T. Barnwell Powell nodded primly. “I don't blame you, in the least, Colonel,” he said. “I think you have been abominably treated, and your attitude is most generous.” He was about to say something else, when the doorbell tinkled and Sergeant Williamson went out into the hall. “Oh, dear; I suppose that's the police, now,” the lawyer said. He grimaced like a small boy in a dentist's chair.
Colonel Hampton felt Dearest leave him for a moment. Then she was back.
"The ambulance.” Then he caught a sparkle of mischief in her mood. “Let's have some fun, Popsy! The doctor is a young man, with brown hair and a mustache, horn-rimmed glasses, a blue tie and a tan-leather bag. One of the ambulance men has red hair, and the other has a mercurochrome-stain on his left sleeve. Tell them your spirit-guide told you."
The old soldier's tobacco-yellowed mustache twitched with amusement.
"No, gentlemen, it is the ambulance,” he corrected. “My spirit-control says.... “He relayed Dearest's descriptions to them.
T. Barnwell Powell blinked. A speculative look came into the psychiatrist's eyes; he was probably wishing the commitment paper hadn't been destroyed.
Then the doctor came bustling in, brown-mustached, blue-tied, spectacled, carrying a tan bag, and behind him followed the two ambulance men, one with a thatch of flaming red hair and the other with a stain of mercurochrome on his jacket-sleeve.
For an instant, the lawyer and the psychiatrist gaped at them. Then T. Barnwell Powell put one hand to his mouth and made a small gibbering sound, and Doctor Vehrner gave a faint squawk, and then both men grabbed, simultaneously, for the whiskey bottle.
The laughter of Dearest tinkled inaudibly through the rumbling mirth of Colonel Hampton.
THE RETURN
(with John J. McGuire)
CHAPTER I
Altamont cast a quick, routine glance at the instrument panels and then looked down through the transparent nose of the helicopter at the yellow-brown river five hundred feet below. Next he scraped the last morsel from his plate and ate it.
"What did you make this out of, Jim?” he asked. “I hope you kept notes while you were concocting it. It's good."
"The two smoked pork chops left over from yesterday evening,” Loudons said, “and that bowl of rice that's been taking up space in the refrigerator the last couple of days, together with a little egg powder and some milk. I ground the chops up and mixed them with the rice and other stuff. Then added some bacon, to make grease to fry it in."
Altamont chuckled. That was Loudons, all right: he could take a few left-overs, mess them together, pop them in the skillet, and have a meal that would turn the chef back at the Fort green with envy. He filled his cup and offered the pot.
"Caffchoc?” he asked.
Loudons held his cup out to be filled, blew on it, sipped, and then hunted on the ledge under the desk for the butt of the cigar he had half-smoked the evening before.
"Did yo
u ever drink coffee, Monty?” the socio-psychologist asked, getting the cigar drawing to his taste.
"Coffee? No. I've read about it, of course. We'll have to organize an expedition to Brazil, sometime, to get seeds and try raising some."
Loudons blew a smoke ring toward the rear of the cabin.
"A much overrated beverage,” he replied. “We found some, once, when I was on that expedition into Idaho, in what must have been the stockroom of a hotel. Vacuum-packed in moisture-proof containers, and free from radioactivity. It wasn't nearly as good as caffchoc.
"But then, I suppose, a pre-bustup coffee drinker couldn't stomach this stuff we're drinking."
Loudons looked forward, up the river they were following. “Get anything on the radio?” he asked. “I noticed you took us up to about ten thousand, while I was shaving."
Altamont got out his pipe and tobacco pouch, filling the former slowly and carefully.
"Not a whisper. I tried Colony Three, in the Ozarks, and I tried to call in that tribe of workers in Louisiana. I couldn't get either."
"Maybe if we tried to get a little more power on the set...."
That was Loudons, too, Altamont thought. There wasn't a better man at the Fort, when it came to dealing with people. But confront him with a problem about things and he was lost.
That was one of the reasons why he and the stocky, phlegmatic social scientist made such a good team, he thought. As far as he, himself, was concerned, people were just a mysterious, exasperatingly unpredictable order of things which were subject to no known natural laws.
And Loudons thought the same thing about machines: he couldn't psychoanalyze them.
Altamont gestured with his pipe toward the nuclear-electric conversion unit, between the control-cabin and the living quarters in the rear of the boxcar-sized helicopter.
"We have enough power back there to keep this windmill in the air twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, for the next fifteen years,” he said. “We just don't have enough radio. If I'd step up the power on this set any more, it'd burn out before I could say, ‘Altamont calling Fort Ridgeway.’”
"How far are we from Pittsburgh now?” Loudons wanted to know.
Altamont looked across the cabin at the big map of the United States as they had been, the red and green and blue and yellow patchwork of vanished political divisions. The colors gleamed through the transparent overlay on which this voyage of re-discovery was plotted.
The red line of their journey started at Fort Ridgeway, in what had been Arizona. It angled east by a little north, to Colony Three, in northern Arkansas ... sharply northeast to St. Louis and its lifeless ruins ... then to Chicago and Gary, where little bands of Stone Age reversions stalked and fought and ate each other ... Detroit, where things that had completely forgotten they were human emerged from their burrows only at night ... Cleveland, where a couple of cobalt bombs must have landed in the lake and drenched everything with radioactivity that still lingered after two centuries ... Akron, where vegetation was only beginning to break through the glassy slag ... Cincinnati, where they had last stopped....
"How's the leg this morning, Jim?” he asked.
"Little stiff. Doesn't hurt much, though."
"Why, we're about fifty miles, as we follow that river, and that's relatively straight.” He looked down through the transparent nose of the copter at a town, now choked with trees that grew among the tumbled walls. “I think that's Aliquippa."
Loudons looked and shrugged, then looked again and pointed.
"There's a bear. Just ducked into that church or movie theater or whatever. I wonder what he thinks we are."
Altamont puffed slowly at his pipe. “I wonder if we're going to find anything at all in Pittsburgh."
"You mean people, as distinct from those biped beasts we've found so far? I doubt it,” Loudons replied, finishing his caffchoc and wiping his mustache with the back of his hand. “I think the whole eastern half of the country is nothing but forest like this, and the highest type of life is just about three cuts below Homo Neanderthalensis, almost impossible to contact, and even more impossible to educate."
"I wasn't thinking about that. I've just about given up hope of finding anybody or even a reasonably high level of barbarism,” Altamont said. “I was thinking about that cache of microfilmed books that was buried at the Carnegie Library."
"If it was buried,” Loudons qualified. “All we have is that article in that two-century-old copy of Time about how the people at the library had constructed the crypt and were beginning the microfilming. We don't know if they ever had a chance to get it finished, before the rockets started landing."
They passed over a dam of flotsam that had banked up at a wrecked bridge and accumulated enough mass to resist the periodic floods that had kept the river usually clear. Three human figures fled across a sand-flat at one end of it and disappeared into the woods. Two of them carried spears tipped with something that sparkled in the sunlight, probably shards of glass.
"You know, Monty, I get nightmares, sometimes, thinking about what things must be like in Europe,” Loudons said.
Five or six wild cows went crashing through the brush below. Altamont nodded when he saw them.
"Maybe tomorrow, we'll let down and shoot a cow,” he said. “I was looking in the freeze-locker and the fresh meat's getting a little low. Or a wild pig, if we find a good stand of oak trees. I could enjoy what you'd do with some acorn-fed pork."
He looked across the table. “Finished?” he asked Loudons. “Take over, then. I'll go back and wash the dishes."
They rose, and Loudons, favoring his left leg, moved over to the seat at the controls.
Altamont gathered up the two cups, the stainless-steel dishes, and the knives and the forks and spoons, going up the steps over the shielded converter and ducking his head to avoid the seat in the forward top machine-gun turret. He washed and dried the dishes, noting with satisfaction that the gauge of the water tank was still reasonably high, and glanced out one of the windows. Loudons was taking the big helicopter upstairs, for a better view.
Now and then, among the trees, there would be a glint of glassy slag, usually in a fairly small circle. That was to be expected: beside the three or four H-bombs that had fallen on the Pittsburgh area, mentioned in the transcripts of the last news to reach the Fort from the outside, the whole district had been pelted, more or less at random, with fission bombs.
West of the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela, it would probably be worse than this.
"Can you see Pittsburgh yet, Jim?” he called out.
"Yes, it's a mess! Worse than Gary, worse than Akron even."
"Monty! Come here! I think I have something!"
Picking up the pipe he had laid down, Altamont hurried forward, dodging his six-foot length under the gun turret and swinging down from the walkway over the converter.
"What is it?” he asked.
"Smoke. A lot of smoke, twenty or thirty fires at the very least."
Loudons had shifted from Forward to Hover and was peering through a pair of binoculars. “See that island, the long one? Across the river from it, on the north side, toward this end. Yes, by Einstein! And I can see cleared ground, and what I think are houses, inside a stockade...."
CHAPTER II
Murray Hughes walked around the corner of the cabin into the morning sunlight, lacing his trousers, with his hunting shirt thrown over his bare shoulders. He found, without much surprise, that his father had also slept late. Verner Hughes was just beginning to shave.
Inside the kitchen, his mother and the girls were clattering pots and skillets.
Outside the kitchen door, his younger brother, Hector, was noisily chopping wood.
Going through the door, he filled another of the light-metal basins with hot water, found his razor, and went outside again, setting the basin on the bench.
Most of the ware in the Hughes cabin was of light-metal. Murray and his father had
mined it in the dead city up the river, from a place where it had floated to the top of a puddle of slag, back when the city had been blasted, at the end of the hard times.
It had been hard work, but the stuff had been easy to carry down to where they had hidden their boat. And, for once, they'd had no trouble with the Scowrers.
Too bad they couldn't say as much for yesterday's hunting trip!
As he rubbed lather into the stubble on his face, he cursed with irritation. That had been a bad-luck hunt, all around.
They had gone out before dawn, hunting into the hills to the north. They'd spent the day at it, and shot one small wild pig. Lucky it was small, at that. They'd have had to abandon a full-grown one, after the Scowrers had began hunting them. Six of them, as big a band as he'd ever seen together at one time, had managed to cut them off from the stockade. He and his father had been forced to circle miles out of their way.
His father had shot one, and he'd had to leave his hatchet sticking in the skull of another, when his rifle had misfired.
That meant a trip to the gunsmith's, for a new hatchet and to have the mainspring of the rifle replaced. Nobody could afford to have a rifle that couldn't be trusted, least of all a hunter and prospector.
On top of everything else, he had had a few words with Alex Barrett, the gunsmith, the other day.
Well, at least that could be smoothed over. Barrett would be glad to do business with him, once the gunsmith saw that hard tool-steel he had dug out of that place down the river. Hardest steel either he or his father had ever found, and it hadn't been atom-spoiled, either.
He cleaned, wiped and stropped his razor and put it back in the case. He threw out the wash-water on the compost pile and went into the cabin, putting on his shirt and his belt. Then he passed through to the front porch, where his father was already eating at the table.
The Second H. Beam Piper Omnibus Page 26