Mutant, page 11
“C’mon and eat, skinhead,” Hartwell rumbled. “Where’s your squaw? She’ll get mighty hungry.”
“She’s coming,” Linc said. He didn’t know that Cassie was crouching in the underbrush, a bared throwing-knife in her hand.
His thoughts were focused on the chief, and he could still sense what he had called his hunch, and which was actually undeveloped telepathy. Yes, Hartwell was thinking about another raid.
Linc took a steak from Bethsheba. It didn’t burn his calloused hands. He squatted near Hartwell and bit into the juicy, succulent meat. His eyes never left the bearded man’s face.
“We’re out of Canada now,” he said at last. “It’s warming up some.
We still heading south?”
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Hartwell nodded. “You bet. I don’t figure on losing another toe with frostbite. It’s too cold even here.”
“There’ll be hunting, then. And the wild corn’s due soon. We’ll have a-plenty to eat.”
“Pass the biscuits, Bethsheba. Urp. More we eat, Linc, the fatter we’ll get for next winter.”
Linc pointed to the white cloth. “Them don’t fatten you up none.”
“They’re good anyhow. Try some of these here fish eggs.”
“Yeah— pfui. Where’s the water?”
Hartwell laughed. Linc said, “We going north come summer?”
“We ain’t voted on it yet. I’d say no. Me, I’d rather head south.”
“More towns. It ain’t safe to go on raiding, Jesse.”
“Nobody can’t find us once we get back in the woods.”
“They got gun.”
“You scared?”
“I ain’t scared of nothing,” Linc said. “Only I sort of know you’re thinking about another raid. And I’m telling you to count me out.”
Hartwell’s heavy shoulders hunched. He reached for a sardine, ate it slowly, and then turned his head toward the boy. His lids were half-lowered.
“Yaller?” But he made it a question, so a fight wasn’t obligatory.
“You seen me fight a grizzly with a knife.”
“I know,” Hartwell said, rubbing the white streak in his beard. “A guy can turn yaller, though. I ain’t saying that’s it, understand. Just the same, nobody else is trying to back out.”
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“On that first raid we was starving. The second—well, that might pass too. But I don’t see no percentage in raiding just so you can eat fish eggs and worms.”
“That ain’t all of it, Linc. We got blankets, too. Things like that we needed. Once we lay our hands on a few guns—”
“Getting too lazy to pull a bow?”
“If you’re spoiling for a fight,” Hartwell said slowly, “I can oblige you.
Otherwise shut up.”
Linc said, “O.K. But I’m serving notice to count me out on any more raids.”
In the shadows Cassie’s hand tightened on the dagger’s hilt. But Hartwell suddenly laughed and threw his steakbone at Linc’s head.
The boy ducked and glowered.
“Come the day your belt starts pinching, you’ll change your mind,”
Hartwell said. “Forget about it now. Git that squaw of yours and make her eat; she’s too skinny.” He swung toward the woods.
“Cassie! C’mon and have some of this fish soup.”
Linc had turned away, readjusting his cap. His face was less somber now, though it was still thoughtful. Cassie holstered her knife and came out into the firelight. Hartwell beckoned to her.
“Come and get it,” he said.
The air was peaceful again. No more friction developed, though Linc, Cassie knew, was in a quarrelsome mood. But Hartwell’s good humor was proof against any but direct insults. He passed around the whiskey bottle he had looted—a rare treat, since the tribe could distill smoke only when they settled for a while, which wasn’t often. Linc didn’t drink much. Long after the fire had been smothered and snores came from the lean-tos around him, he lay awake, troubled and tense.
Something—someone—was calling him.
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It was like one of his hunches. It was like what he had felt during the raids. It was like Cassie’s nearness, and yet there was a queer, exciting difference. There was a friendliness to that strange call that he had never felt before.
Dim and indefinable, a dweller hidden deep in his mind woke and responded to that call of a kindred being.
After a while he rose on one elbow and looked down at Cassie. Her face was partly veiled by the deeper blackness of her hair. He touched its soft, living warmth gently. Then he slipped noiselessly out of the shelter and stood up, staring around.
There was a rustling of leaves, and the chuckling of the brooklet.
Nothing else. Moonlight dappled the ground here and there. A woodrat rustled softly through the wild grasses. The air was very cold and crisp, with a freshness that stung Linc’s cheeks and eyes.
And suddenly he was frightened. Old folktales troubled him. He remembered his foster mother’s stories of men who could turn to wolves, of the Wendigo that swept like a vast wind above the lonely forests, of a Black Man who bought souls—the formless, dark fears of childhood rose up in nightmare reality. He had killed a grizzly with his knife, but he had never stood alone at night in the woods, while a Call murmured in his mind—silently—and made his blood leap up in fiery response.
He was afraid, but the bait was too strong. He turned south, and walked out of the camp. Instinctive training made his progress noiseless. He crossed the brook, his sandals inaudible on the stones, and mounted a slope. And there, sitting on a stump waiting for him, was a man.
His back was toward Linc, and nothing could be seen but the hunched torso and the bald, gleaming head. Linc had a momentary horrible fear that when the man turned, he might see his own face.
He touched his knife. The confused stirring in his brain grew chaotic.
“Hello, Linc,” a low voice said.
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Linc had made no sound, and he knew it. But, somehow, that dark figure had sensed his approach. The Black Man—?
“Do I look black?” the voice asked. The man stood up, turning. He was sneering—no, smiling—and his face was dark and seamed. He wore town clothes.
But he wasn’t the Black Man. He didn’t have a cloven hoof. And the warm, sincere friendliness subtly radiating from his presence was reassuring to Linc in spite of his suspicions.
“You called me,” Linc said. “I’m trying to figure it out.” His eyes dwelt on the bald cranium.
“My name’s Barton,” the man said. “Dave Barton.” He lifted something gray—a scalp?—and fitted it carefully on his head. The sneer indicated amusement.
“I feel naked without my wig. But I had to show you I was a . . . a—”
He sought for the word that would fit the telepathic symbol. “That you were one of us,” he finished.
“I ain’t—”
“You’re a Baldy,” Barton said, “but you don’t know it. I can read that from your mind.”
“Read my mind?” Linc took a backward step.
“You know what Baldies are? Telepaths?”
“Sure,” Linc said doubtfully. “I heard stories. We don’t know much about town life. Listen.” he said with fresh suspicion, “how’d you come to be out here? How’d—”
“I came looking for you.”
“Me? Why?”
Barton said patiently, “Because you’re one of Us. I can see I’ve got to explain a lot. From the beginning, maybe. So—”
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He talked. It might have been more difficult had they not been Baldies. Though Linc was telepathically untrained, he could nevertheless receive enough mental confirmation to clarify the questions in his mind. And Barton spoke of the Blowup, of the hard radiations—so much Greek to Linc, until Barton used telepathic symbolism—and, mostly, of the incredible fact that Linc wasn’t merely a hairless freak in his tribe. There were other Baldies, a lot of them.
That was important. For Linc caught the implications. He sensed something of the warm, deep understanding between telepaths, the close unity of the race, the feeling of belonging that he had never had. Just now, alone in the woods with Barton, he was conscious of more genuine intimacy than he had ever felt before.
He was quick to understand. He asked questions. And, after a while, so did Barton.
“Jesse James Hartwell’s behind the raids. Yeah, I was in on ‘em.
You mean you all wear them wigs?”
“Naturally. It’s a big civilization, and we belong to it. We’re part of the whole set-up.”
“And . . . and nobody laughs at you for being bald?”
“Do I look bald?” Barton asked. “There are drawbacks, sure. But there are plenty of advantages.”
“I’ll say!” Linc breathed deeply. “People . . . the same sort . . . your own sort—” He was inarticulate.
“The non-Baldies didn’t always give us an even break. They were afraid of us, a little. We’re trained from childhood never to take advantage of our telepathic powers with humans.”
“Yeah, I can see that. It makes sense.”
“Then you know why I came, don’t you?”
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“I can sort of understand it,” Linc said slowly. “These raids . . .
people might start thinking a Baldy’s involved— I’m a Baldy!”
Barton nodded. “Hedgehounds don’t matter. A few raids—we can take care of them. But to have one of Us involved is bad medicine.”
“I told Jesse James Hartwell tonight I was having no part in any more raiding.” Linc said. “He won’t push me.”
“Yes—That helps. Listen, Linc. Why don’t you come home with me?”
Years of training made Linc pause. “Me? Go into a town? We don’t do that.”
“You?”
“The . . . Hedgehounds. I ain’t a Hedgehound, am I? Gosh, this is—
” He rubbed his jaw. “I’m all mixed up, Barton.”
“Tell you what. Come with me now, and see how you like our sort of life. You never were trained to use your telepathic function, so you’re like a half-blind man. Take a look at the set-up, and then decide what you want to do.”
On the verge of mentioning Cassie, Linc paused. He was half afraid that if he spoke of her, Barton might withdraw his offer. And, after all, it wasn’t as if he intended to leave Cassie permanently. It’d be just for a week or two, and then he could come back to the tribe.
Unless he took Cassie with him now—
No. Somehow he’d feel shamed in admitting that he, a Baldy, had married a Hedgehound. Though he was proud of Cassie herself, all right. He’d never give her up. It was only—
He was lonely. He was horribly, sickeningly lonely, and what he had glimpsed in Barton’s mind and Barton’s words drew him with overpowering force. A world where he belonged, where no one called him skinhead, where he’d never feel inferior to the bearded men of the tribe. A wig of his own.
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Just for a few weeks. He couldn’t miss this chance. He couldn’t!
Cassie would be waiting for him when he came back.
“I’ll go with you,” he said. “I’m ready right now. O.K.?”
But Barton, who had read Linc’s mind, hesitated before he answered.
“O.K.,” he said at last. “Let’s go.”
Three weeks later Barton sat in McNey’s solarium and shaded his eyes wearily with one hand. “Linc’s married, you know,” he said, “to a Hedgehound girl. He doesn’t know we know it.”
“Does it matter?” McNey asked. He was looking very tired and troubled.
“I suppose not. But I thought I’d better mention it, because of Alexa.”
“She knows her own mind. And she must know about Linc being married, too, by this time. She’s been giving him telepathic coaching for weeks.”
“I noticed that when I came in.”
“Yeah,” McNey said, rubbing his forehead. “That’s why we’re being oral. Telepathic conversations distract Linc when there’s more than one; he’s still learning selectivity.”
“How do you like the boy?”
“I like him. He’s not . . . quite what I’d expected, though.”
“He grew up with the Hedgehounds.”
“He’s one of Us,” McNey said with finality.
“No symptoms of paranoid tendencies?”
“Definitely not. Alexa agrees.”
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“Good,” Barton said. “That relieves me. It was the one thing I was afraid of. As for the Hedgehound girl, she’s not one of Us, and we can’t afford to weaken the race by intermarriage with humans.
That’s been an axiom almost since the Blowup. My own feeling is that if Linc marries Alexa or any other one of Us, it’s all to the good, and we can forget about previous entanglements.”
“It’s up to her,” McNey said. “Any more Hedgehound raids?”
“No. But they’re the least; of my troubles. Sergei Callahan’s gone underground. I can’t locate him, and I want to.”
“Just to kill him?”
“No. He must know other key paranoids. I want to drag that information out of him. He can’t blur his mind permanently—and once I get him where I want, he’ll have few secrets left.”
“We’re fighting a losing battle.”
“Are we?”
“I can’t talk yet,” McNey said, with subdued violence. “I can’t even let myself think about the problem. I . . . it works out this way.
There’s crux, a single equation, that must be solved. But not yet.
Because the moment I solve it, my mind can be read. I’ve got to work out all the minor details first. Then—”
“Yes?”
McNey’s smile was bitter. “I don’t know. I’ll find an answer. I haven’t been idle.”
“If we could crack the Power,” Barton said. “If we could only tap the paranoid’s code—”
“Or,” McNey said, “if we had a code of our own—”
“Unbreakable.”
“Which is impossible, by any mechanical means. No scrambler could work, because we’d have to know the key, and our minds
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could be read by paranoids. I don’t want to think about it any more for a while, Dave. The details, yes. But not the problem itself. I . . .
might solve it before I’m ready.”
“The paranoids are plenty busy,” Barton said. “Their propaganda’s spreading. That talk about Galileo’s secret weapon is still going around.”
“Haven’t the Galileans made any denials?”
“It isn’t that tangible. You can’t buck a whispering campaign. That, Darryl, is what’s apt to cause a bust-up. You can fight a person or a thing, but you can’t fight a wind. A wind that whispers.”
“But the atomic bombs! After all—”
“I know. Just the same, some hothead is going to get scared enough to take action one of these days. He’ll say, ‘Galileo’s got a secret weapon. We’re not safe. They’re going to attack us.’ So he’ll jump the gun. After that, there’ll be other incidents.”
“With Us in the middle. We can’t stay neutral. I think there’ll be a pogrom, Dave, sooner or later.”
“We’ll survive it.”
“You think so? With every non-Baldy’s hand ready to strike down telepaths—man, woman or child? There’ll be no quarter given. We need another world, a new world—”
“That’ll have to wait till we get interstellar ships.”
“And meanwhile we live on borrowed time. It might be best if we let the human race reassimilate us.”
“Retrogression?”
“Suppose it is? We’re in the position of a unicorn in a herd of horses. We daren’t use our horn to defend ourselves. We’ve got to pretend to be horses.”
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“The lion and the unicorn,” Barton said, “were fighting for the crown.
Well, Callahan and his paranoids are the lion, all right. But the crown?”
“Inevitably,” McNey said, “it must be rule. Two dominant species can’t exist on the same planet or even in the same system.
Humans and telepaths can’t evenly divide rule. We’re knuckling under now.Eventually, we’ll arrive, by a different path, at Callahan’s goal. But not by degrading or enslaving humans! Natural selection is our weapon. Biology’s on our side. If we can only live in peace with humans, until—”
“—and drummed them out of town,” Barton said.
“So the humans mustn’t suspect the lion and the unicorn are fighting. Or what they’re fighting for. Because if they do, we won’t survive the pogrom. There will be no refuge. Our race is soft, through environment and adaptation.”
“I’m worried about Callahan,” Barton said suddenly. “I don’t know what he’s planning. By the time I find out, it may be too late. If he sets something in operation that can’t be stopped—”
“I’ll keep working,” McNey promised. “I may be able to give you something soon.”
“I hope so. Well, I’m flying to St. Nick tonight. Ostensibly to check the zoo there. Actually, I’ve other motives. Maybe I can pick up Callahan’s trail.”
“I’ll walk you down to the village.” McNey went with Barton into the dropper. They stepped outside into the warm, spring air, glancing through the transparent wall at the televisor where Alexa sat with Linc. Barton said, “They don’t seem worried, anyhow.”
McNey laughed. “She’s sending in her column to the Recorder.
Alexa’s a specialist on heart problems. I hope she never has any of her own to solve!”
