Chapter XII

Kennedy turned out to have been an armorer-artificer of the North American Navy, captured two years ago while deer-hunting too far from the logging-camp road to New Portsmouth. Fed on scraps of gristle, isolated from his kind, beaten when he failed to make his daily task of spear heads and arrow points, he had shyly retreated into beautifully interminable labyrinths of abstraction. Now and then, Charles Orsino got a word or two of sense from him before the rosy clouds closed in. When attempted conversation with the lunatic palled, Charles could watch the aborigines through chinks in the palisade. There were about fifty of them. There would have been more if they hadn’t been given to infanticide--for what reason, Charles could not guess.

He had been there a week when the boulders were rolled away one morning and he was roughly called out. He said to Kennedy before stooping to crawl through the hole: “Take it easy, friend. I’ll be back, I hope.”

Kennedy looked up with a puzzled smile: “That’s such a general statement, Charles. Exactly what are you implying--”

The witch girl was there, flanked by spearmen. She said abruptly: “I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?”

He gawked. The only thing that seemed to fit was: “That’s such a general statement,” but he didn’t say it.

“Answer,” one of the spearmen growled.

“I--I don’t understand. I have no brothers.”

“Your brothers in Portsmouth, on the sea. Whatever you call them, they are your brothers, all children of the mother called Government. Why are you untrue to them?”

He began to understand. “They aren’t my brothers. I’m not a child of the government. I’m a child of another mother far away, called Syndic.”

She looked puzzled--and almost human--for an instant. Then the visor dropped over her face again as she said: “That is true. Now you must teach a certain person the jeep and the guns. Teach her well. See that she gets her hands on the metal and into the grease.” To a spearman she said: “Bring Martha.”

The spearman brought Martha, who was trying not to cry. She was a half-naked child of ten!

The witch girl abruptly left them. Her guards took Martha and bewildered Charles to the edge of the village where the jeep and its mounted guns stood behind a silly little museum exhibit rope of vine. Feathers and bones were knotted into the vine. The spearmen treated it as though it were a high-tension transmission line.

“You break it,” one of them said to Charles. He did, and the spearmen sighed with relief. Martha stopped scowling and stared.

The spearman said to Charles: “Go ahead and teach her. The firing pins are out of the guns, and if you try to start the jeep you get a spear through you. Now teach her.” He and the rest squatted on the turf around the jeep. The little girl shied violently as he took her hand, and tried to run away. One of the spearmen slung her back into the circle. She brushed against the jeep and froze, white-faced.

“Martha,” Charles said patiently, “there’s nothing to be afraid of. The guns won’t go off and the jeep won’t move. I’ll teach you how to work them so you can kill everybody you don’t like with the guns and go faster than a deer in the jeep--”

He was talking into empty air as far as the child was concerned. She was muttering, staring at the arm that had brushed the jeep: “That did it, I guess. There goes the power. May the goddess blast her--no. The power’s out of me now. I felt it go.” She looked up at Charles, quite calmly, and said: “Go on. Show me all about it. Do a good job.”

“Martha, what are you talking about?”

“She was afraid of me, my sister, so she’s robbing me of the power. Don’t you know? I guess not. The goddess hates iron and machines. I had the power of the goddess in me, but it’s gone now; I felt it go. Now nobody’ll be afraid of me any more.” Her face contorted and she said: “Show me how you work the guns.”

He taught her what he could while the circle of spearmen looked on and grinned, cracking raw jokes about the child as anybody anywhere, would about a tyrant deposed. She pretended to ignore them, grimly repeating names after him and imitating his practiced movements in loading drill. She was very bright, Charles realized. When he got a chance he muttered, “I’m sorry about this, Martha. It isn’t my idea.”

She whispered bleakly: “I know. I liked you. I was sorry when the other outsider took your dinner.” She began to sob uncontrollably. “I’ll never see anything again! Nobody’ll ever be afraid of me again!” She buried her face against Charles’ shoulder.

He smoothed her tangled hair mechanically and said to the watching, grinning circle: “Look, hasn’t this gone far enough? Haven’t you got what you wanted?”

The headman stretched and spat. “Guess so,” he said. “Come on, girl.” He yanked Martha from the seat and booted her toward the huts.

Charles scrambled down just ahead of a spear. He let himself be led back to the smithy block house and shoved through the crawl hole.

“I was thinking about what you said the other day,” Kennedy beamed, rasping a file over an arrowhead. “When I said that to change one molecule in the past you’d have to change every molecule in the past, and you said, ‘Maybe so.’ I’ve figured that what you were driving at was--”

“Kennedy,” Charles said, “please shut up just this once. I’ve got to think.”

“In what sense do you mean that, Charles? Do you mean that you’re a rational animal and therefore that your being rather than essense is--”

“Shut up or I’ll pick up a rock and bust your head in with it!“ Charles roared. He more than half meant it. Kennedy hunched down before his hearth looking offended and scared. Charles squatted with his head in his hands.

I have been listening to you.

Repeated drives of the Government to wipe out the aborigines. Drives that never succeeded.

I’ll never see anything again.

The way the witch girl had blasted her rival--but that was suggestion. But--

I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?

He’d said nothing like that to anybody, not to her or poor Kennedy.

He thought vaguely of psi force, a fragment in his memory. An old superstition, like the id-ego-superego triad of the sick-minded psychologists. Like vectors of the mind, exploded nonsense. But--

I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?

Charles smacked one fist against the sand floor in impotent rage. He was going as crazy as Kennedy. Did the witch girl--and Martha--have hereditary psi power? He mocked himself savagely: that’s such a general question!

Neurotic adolescent girls in kerosene-lit farmhouses, he thought vaguely. Things that go bump--and crash and blooie and whoo-oo-oo! in the night. Not in electric lit city apartments. Not around fleshed-up middle-aged men and women. You take a hyperthyroid virgin, isolate her from power machinery and electric fields, put on the pressures that make her feel alone and tense to the bursting point--and naturally enough, something bursts. A chamberpot sails from under the bed and shatters on the skull of stepfather-tyrant. The wide-gilt-framed portrait of thundergod-grandfather falls with a crash. Sure, the nail crystallized and broke--who crystallized it?

Neurotic adolescent girls speaking in tongues, reading face-down cards and closed books, screaming aloud when sister or mother dies in a railroad wreck fifty miles away, of cancer a hundred miles away, in a bombing overseas.

Sometimes they made saints of them. Sometimes they burned them. Burned them and then made saints of them.

A blood-raw hunk of venison came sailing through one of the loopholes and flopped on the sand.

I was sorry when the other outsider took your dinner.