Time Travel Omnibus, page 579
He was a lean, leathery old man with a white mustache and I sat next to him in my new place at the “town” table. Those were grim meals. I heard remarks about healthy young men skulking out of uniform and wasting tax money. One night I slammed my fork into my half-emptied plate and stood up.
“The army sent me here and the army keeps me here,” I told the dozen old men and women at the table. “I’d like to go overseas and cut Japanese throats for you kind hearts and gentle people, I really would! Why don’t you all write your Congressman?”
I stamped outside and stood at one end of the veranda, boiling. Old Dave followed me out.
“Hold your horses, son,” he said. “They hate the government, not you. But government’s like the weather, and you’re a man they can get aholt of.”
“With their teeth,” I said bitterly.
“They got reasons,” Dave said. “Lost mines ain’t supposed to be found the way you people are going at it. Besides that, the Crazy Kid mine belongs to us here in Barker.”
He was past seventy and he looked after horses in the local feedyard. He wore a shabby, open vest over faded suspenders and gray flannel shirts and nobody would ever have looked for wisdom in that old man. But it was there.
“This is big, new, lonesome country and it’s hard on people,” he said. “Every town’s got a story about a lost mine or a lost gold cache. Only kids go looking for it. It’s enough for most folks just to know it’s there. It helps ’em to stand the country.”
“I see,” I said. Something stirred in the back of my mind. “Barker never got its lost mine until thirteen years ago,” Dave said. “Folks just naturally can’t stand to see you people find it this way, by main force and so soon after.”
“We know there isn’t any mine,” I said. “We’re just proving it isn’t there.”
“If you could prove that, it’d be worse yet,” he said. “Only you can’t. We all saw and handled that ore. It was quartz, just rotten with gold in wires and flakes. The boy went on foot from his house to get it. The lode’s got to be right close by out there.”
He waved toward our search area. The air above it was luminous with twilight and I felt a curious surge of interest. Colonel Lewis had always discouraged us from speculating on that story. If one of us brought it up, I was usually the one who led the hooting and we all suggested he go over the search area with a dowsing rod. It was an article of faith with us that the vein did not exist. But now I was all alone and my own field boss.
We each put up one foot on the veranda rail and rested our arms on our knees. Dave bit off a chew of tobacco and told me about Owen Price.
“He was always a crazy kid and I guess he read every book in town,” Dave said. “He had a curious heart, that boy.”
I’m no folklorist, but even I could see how myth elements were already creeping into the story. For one thing, Dave insisted the boy’s shirt was tom off and he had lacerations on his back.
“Like a cougar clawed him,” Dave said. “Only they ain’t never been cougars in that desert. We backtracked that boy till his trail crossed itself so many times it was no use, but we never found one cougar track.”
I could discount that stuff, of course, but still the story gripped me. Maybe it was Dave’s slow, sure voice; perhaps the queer twilight; possibly my own wounded pride. I thought of how great lava upwellings sometimes tear loose and carry along huge masses of the country rock. Maybe such an erratic mass lay out there, perhaps only a few hundred feet across and so missed by our drill cores, but rotten with uranium. If I could find it, I would make a fool of Colonel Lewis. I would discredit the whole science of geology. I, Duard Campbell, the despised and rejected one, could do that. The front of my mind shouted that it was nonsense, but something far back in my mind began composing a devastating letter to Colonel Lewis and comfort flowed into me.
“There’s some say the boy’s youngest sister could tell where he found it, if she wanted,” Dave said. “She used to go into that desert with him a lot. She took on pretty wild when it happened and then was struck dumb, but I hear she talks again now.” He shook his head. “Poor little Helen. She promised to be a pretty girl.”
“Where dose she live?” I asked.
“With her mother in Salem,” Dave said. “She went to business school and I hear she works for a lawyer there.”
Mrs. Price was a flinty old woman who seemed to control her daughter absolutely. She agreed Helen would be my secretary as soon as I told her the salary. I got Helen’s security clearance with one phone call; she had already been investigated as part of tracing that uranium crystal. Mrs. Price arranged for Helen to stay with a family she knew in Barker, to protect her reputation. It was in no danger. I meant to make love to her, if I had to, to charm her out of her secret, if she had one, but I would not harm her. I knew perfectly well that I was only playing a game called “The Revenge of Duard Campbell.” I knew I would not find any uranium.
Helen was a plain little girl and was made of frightened ice. She wore low-heeled shoes and cotton stockings and plain dresses with white cuffs and collars. Her one good feature was her flawless fair skin against which her peaked, black Welsh eyebrows and smoky blue eyes gave her an elfin look at times. She liked to sit neatly tucked into herself, feet together, elbows in, eyes cast down, voice hardly audible, as smoothly self-contained as an egg. The desk I gave her faced mine and she sat like that across from me and did the busy work I gave her and I could not get through to her at all.
I tried joking and I tried polite little gifts and attentions, and I tried being sad and needing sympathy. She listened and worked and stayed as far away as the moon. It was only after two weeks and by pure accident that I found the key to her.
I was trying the sympathy gambit. I said it was not so bad, being exiled from friends and family, but what I could not stand was the dreary sameness of that search area. Every spot was like every other spot and there was no single, recognizable place in the whole expanse. It sparked something in her and she roused up at me.
“It’s full of just wonderful places,” she said.
“Come out with me in the jeep and show me one,” I challenged.
She was reluctant, but I hustled her along regardless. I guided the jeep between outcrops, jouncing and lurching. I had our map photographed on my mind and I knew where we were every minute, but only by map coordinates. The desert had our marks on it: well sites, seismic blast holes, wooden stakes, cans, bottles and papers blowing in that everlasting wind, and it was all dismally die same anyway.
“Tell me when we pass a ‘place’ and I’ll stop,” I said.
“It’s all places,” she said. “Right there’s a place.”
I stopped the jeep and looked at her in surprise. Her voice was strong and throaty. She opened her eyes wide and smiled; I had never seen her look like that.
“What’s special, that makes it a place?” I asked.
She did not answer. She got out and walked a few steps. Her whole posture was changed. She almost danced along. I followed and touched her shoulder.
“Tell me what’s special,” I said.
She faced around and stared right past me. She had a new grace and vitality and she was a very pretty girl.
“It’s where all the dogs are,” she said.
“Dogs?”
I looked around at the scrubby sagebrush and thin soil and ugly black rock and back at Helen. Something was wrong.
“Big, stupid dogs that go in herds and eat grass,” she said. She kept turning and gazing. “Big cats chase the dogs and eat them. The dogs scream and scream. Can’t you hear them?”
“That’s crazy!” I said. “What’s the matter with you?”
I might as well have slugged her. She crumpled instantly back into herself and I could hardly hear her answer.
“I’m sorry. My brother and I used to play out fairy tales here. All this was a kind of fairyland to us.” Tears formed in her eyes. “I haven’t been here since . . . I forget myself. I’m sorry.”
I had to swear I needed to dictate “field notes” to force Helen into that desert again. She sat stiffly with pad and pencil in the jeep while I put on my act with the Geiger and rattled off jargon. Her lips were pale and compressed and I could see her fighting against the spell the desert had for her, and I could see her slowly losing.
She finally broke down into that strange mood and I took good care not to break it. It was weird but wonderful, and I got a lot of data. I made her go out for “field notes” every morning and each time it was easier to break her down. Back in the office she always froze again and I marveled at how two such different persons could inhabit the same body. I called her two phases “Office Helen” and “Desert Helen.”
I often talked with old Dave on the veranda after dinner. One night he cautioned me.
“Folks here think Helen ain’t been right in the head since her brother died,” he said. “They’re worrying about you and her.”
“I feel like a big brother to her,” I said. “I’d never hurt her, Dave. If we find the lode, I’ll stake the best claim for her.”
He shook his head. I wished I could explain to him how it was only a harmless game I was playing and no one would ever find gold out there. Yet, as a game, it fascinated me.
Desert Helen charmed me when, helplessly, she had to uncover her secret life. She was a little girl in a woman’s body. Her voice became strong and breathless with excitement and she touched me with the same wonder that turned her own face vivid and elfin. She ran laughing through the black rocks and scrubby sagebrush and momentarily she made them beautiful. She would pull me along by the hand and sometimes we ran as much as a mile away from the jeep. She treated me as if I were a blind or foolish child.
“No, no, Duard, that’s a cliff!” she would say, pulling me back.
She would go first, so I could find the stepping stones across streams. I played up. She pointed out woods and streams and cliffs and castles. There were shaggy horses with claws, golden birds, camels, witches, elephants and many other creatures. I pretended to see them all, and it made her trust me. She talked and acted out the fairy tales she had once played with Owen. Sometimes he was enchanted and sometimes she, and the one had to dare the evil magic of a witch or giant to rescue the other. Sometimes I was Duard and other times I almost thought I was Owen.
Helen and I crept into sleeping castles, and we hid with pounding hearts while the giant grumbled in search of us and we fled, hand in hand, before his wrath.
Well, I had her now. I played Helen’s game, but I never lost sight of my own. Every night I sketched in on my map whatever I had learned that day of the fairyland topography. Its geomorphology was remarkably consistent.
When we played, I often hinted about the giant’s treasure. Helen never denied it existed, but she seemed troubled and evasive about it. She would put her finger to her lips and look at me with solemn, round eyes.
“You only take the things nobody cares about,” she would say. “If you take the gold or jewels, it brings you terrible bad luck.”
“I got a charm against bad luck and I’ll let you have it too,” I said once. “It’s the biggest, strongest charm in the whole world.”
“No. It all turns into trash. It turns into goat beans and dead snakes and things,” she said crossly. “Owen told me. It’s a rule, in fairyland.”
Another time we talked about it as we sat in a gloomy ravine near a waterfall. We had to keep our voices low or we would wake up the giant. The waterfall was really the giant snoring and it was also the wind that blew forever across that desert.
“Doesn’t Owen ever take anything?” I asked.
I had learned by then that I must always speak of Owen in the present tense.
“Sometimes he has to,” she said. “Once right here the witch had me enchanted into an ugly toad. Owen put a flower on my head and that made me be Helen again.”
“A really truly flower? That you could take home with you?”
“A red and yellow flower bigger than my two hands,” she said. “I tried to take it home, but all the petals came off.”
“Does Owen ever take anything home?”
“Rocks, sometimes,” she said. “We keep them in a secret nest in the shed. We think they might be magic eggs.”
I stood up. “Come and show me.”
She shook her head vigorously and drew back. “I don’t want to go home,” she said. “Not ever.”
She squirmed and pouted, but I pulled her to her feet. “Please, Helen, for me,” I said. “Just for one little minute.”
I pulled her back to the jeep and we drove to the old Price place. I had never seen her look at it when we passed it and she did not look now. She was freezing fast back into Office Helen. But she led me around the sagging old house with its broken windows and into a tumbledown shed. She scratched away some straw in one comer, and there were the rocks. I did not realize how excited I was until disappointment hit me like a blow in the stomach.
They were worthless waterworn pebbles of quartz and rosy granite. The only thing special about them was that they could never have originated on that basalt desert.
After a few weeks we dropped the pretense of field notes and simply went into the desert to play. I had Helen’s fairyland almost completely mapped. It seemed to be a recent fault block mountain with a river parallel to its base and a gently sloping plain across the river. The scarp face was wooded and cut by deep ravines and it had castles perched on its truncated spurs. I kept checking Helen on it and never found her inconsistent. Several times when she was in doubt I was able to tell her where she was, and that let me even more deeply into her secret life. One morning I discovered just how deeply.
She was sitting on a log in the forest and plaiting a little basket out of fern fronds. I stood beside her. She looked up at me and smiled.
“What shall we play today, Owen?” she asked.
I had not expected that, and I was proud of how quickly I rose to it. I capered and bounded away and then back to her and crouched at her feet.
“Little sister, little sister, I’m enchanted,” I said. “Only you in all the world can uncharm me.”
“I’ll uncharm you,” she said, in that little girl voice. “What are you, brother?”
“A big, black dog,” I said. “A wicked giant named Lewis Rawbones keeps me chained up behind his castle while he takes all the other dogs out hunting.”
She smoothed her gray skirt over her knees. Her mouth dropped.
“You’re lonesome and you howl all day and you howl all night,” she said. “Poor doggie.”
I threw back my head and howled.
“He’s a terrible, wicked giant and he’s got all kinds of terrible magic,” I said. “You mustn’t be afraid, little sister. As soon as you uncharm me I’ll be a handsome prince and I’ll cut off his head.”
“I’m not afraid.” Her eyes sparkled. “I’m not afraid of fire or snakes or pins or needles or anything.”
“I’ll take you away to my kingdom and we’ll live happily ever afterward. You’ll be the most beautiful queen in the world and everybody will love you.”
I wagged my tail and laid my head on her knees. She stroked my silky head and pulled my long black ears.
“Everybody will love me.” She was very serious now. “Will magic water uncharm you, poor old doggie?”
“You have to touch my forehead with a piece of the giant’s treasure,” I said. ‘That’s the only onliest way to uncharm me.”
I felt her shrink away from me. She stood up, her face suddenly crumpled with grief and anger.
“You’re not Owen, you’re just a man! Owen’s enchanted and I’m enchanted too and nobody will ever uncharm us!”
She ran away from me and she was already Office Helen by the time she reached the jeep.
After that day she refused flatly to go into the desert with me. It looked as if my game was played out. But I gambled that Desert Helen could still hear me, underneath somewhere, and I tried a new strategy. The office was an upstairs room over the old dance hall and, I suppose, in frontier days skirmishing had gone on there between men and women. I doubt anything went on as strange as my new game with Helen.
I always had paced and talked while Helen worked. Now I began mixing common-sense talk with fairyland talk and I kept coming back to the wicked giant, Lewis Rawbones. Office Helen tried not to pay attention, but now and then I caught Desert Helen peeping at me out of her eyes. I spoke of my blighted career as a geologist and how it would be restored to me if I found the lode. I mused on how I would live and work in exotic places and how I would need a wife to keep house for me and help with my paper work. It disturbed Office Helen. She made typing mistakes and dropped things. I kept it up for days, trying for just the right mixture of fact and fantasy, and it was hard on Office Helen.
One night old Dave warned me again.
“Helen’s looking peaked, and there’s talk around. Miz Fowler says Helen don’t sleep and she cries at night and she won’t tell Miz Fowler what’s wrong. You don’t happen to know what’s bothering her, do you?”
“I only talk business stuff to her,” I said. “Maybe she’s homesick. I’ll ask her if she wants a vacation.” I did not like the way Dave looked at me. “I haven’t hurt her. I don’t mean her any harm, Dave,” I said.
“People get killed for what they do, not for what they mean,” he said. “Son, there’s men in this here town would kill you quick as a coyote, if you hurt Helen Price.”
I worked on Helen all the next day and in the afternoon I hit just the right note and I broke her defenses. I was not prepared for the way it worked out. I had just said, “All life is a kind of playing. If you think about it right, everything we do is a game.” She poised her pencil and looked straight at me, as she had never done in that office, and I felt my heart speed up.
“You taught me how to play, Helen. I was so serious that I didn’t know how to play.”
“Owen taught me to play. He had magic. My sisters couldn’t play anything but dolls and rich husbands and I hated them.”
