The Syndic Part 18

"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 superst.i.tion, 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 b.u.mp--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 thunderG.o.d-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._

Three days ago he'd dozed off while Kennedy broiled the meat over the hearth. When he woke, Kennedy had gobbled it all and was whimpering with apprehension. But he'd done nothing and said nothing; the man wasn't responsible. He'd said nothing, and yet somehow the child knew about it.

His days were numbered; soon enough the jeep would be out of gas and the guns would be out of ammo or an unreplaceable part lost or broken. Then, according to the serene logic that ruled the witch girl, he'd be surplus.

But there was a key to it somehow.

He got up and slapped Kennedy's hand away from the venison. "Naughty,"

he said, and divided it equally with a broad spearblade.

"Naughty," Kennedy said morosely. "The naught-cla.s.s, the null-cla.s.s. I'm the null-cla.s.s. I plus the universe equal one, the universe-cla.s.s. If you could transpose--but you can't transpose." Silently they toasted their venison over the fire.

It was a moonless night with one great planet, Jupiter he supposed, reigning over the star-powdered sky. Kennedy slept muttering feebly in a corner. The hearthfire was out. It had to be out by dark. The spearmen took no chance of their trying to burn down the place. The village had long since gone to sleep, campfires doused, skin flaps pulled to across the door holes. From the corral one of the spavined, tick-ridden cows mooed uneasily and then fell silent.

Charles then began the hardest job of his life. He tried to think, straight and uninterrupted, of Martha, the little girl. Some of the things that interrupted him were:

The remembered smell of fried onions; they didn't have onions here;

Salt;

I wonder how the old 101st Precinct's getting along;

That fellow who wanted to get married on a hundred dollars;

Lee Falcaro, d.a.m.n her!

This, is d.a.m.n foolishness; it can't possibly work;

Poor old Kennedy;

I'll starve before I eat another mouthful of that greasy deer-meat;

The Van Dellen kid, I wonder if I could have saved him;

Reiner's right; we've got to clean up the Government and then try to civilize these people;

There must be something wrong with my head, I can't seem to concentrate;

That terrific third-chukker play in the Finals, my picture all over town;

Would Uncle Frank laugh at this?

It was hopeless. He sat bolt upright, his eyes squeezed tensely together, trying to visualize the child and call her and it couldn't be done. Skittering images of her zipped through his mind, only to be shoved aside. It was d.a.m.n foolishness, anyway....

He unkinked himself, stretched and lay down on the sand floor thinking bitterly: why try? You'll be dead in a few days or a few weeks; kiss the world good-bye. Back in Syndic Territory, fat, sloppy, happy Syndic Territory, did they know how good they had it? He wished he could tell them to cling to their good life. But Uncle Frank said it didn't do any good to cling; it was a matter of tension and relaxation. When you stiffen up a way of life and try to fossilize it so it'll stay that way forever, then you find you've lost it.

Little Martha wouldn't understand it. Magic, ritual, the power of the G.o.ddess, fear of iron, fear of the jeep's vine enclosure--cursed, no doubt--what went on in such a mind? Could she throw things like a poltergeist-girl? They didn't have 'em any more; maybe it had something to do with electric fields or even iron. Or were they all phonies? An upset adolescent girl is a h.e.l.l of a lot likelier to fake phenomena that produce them. Little Martha hadn't been faking her despair, though. The witch-girl--her sister, wasn't she?--didn't fake her icy calm and power.

Martha'd be better off without such stuff--

"_Charles_," a whisper said.

He muttered stupidly: "My G.o.d. She heard me," and crept to the palisade.

Through a c.h.i.n.k between the logs she was just visible in the starlight.

She whispered: "I thought I wasn't going to see anything or hear anything ever again but I sat up and I heard you calling and you said you wanted to help me if I'd help you so I came as fast as I could without waking anybody up--you _did_ call me, didn't you?"

"Yes, I did. Martha, do you want to get out of here? Go far away with me?"

"You bet I do. _She's_ going to take the power of the G.o.ddess out of me and marry me to Dinny, he stinks like a goat and he has a c.o.c.keye, and then she'll kill all our babies. Just tell me what to do and I'll do it." She sounded very grim and decided.