Sunburst Page 9

  “Here I am, Grace.” The sky had been paling gradually, and now the sun broke between two lead bars of cloud with a harsh yellow light.

  “Gee, I used to read a lot of junk about rosy-fingered dawn,” said Shandy. “This one looks like brass knuckles. I’ll get some breakfast for you, Grace.”

  * * * *

  The sun was coming into her room, but there was a jagged line of shadow on the blind, from a broken pane. She was lying on the bed. She had thought of getting some sleep, but a massive foreboding had settled on her suddenly. Since the situation had come to a head so quickly, there was no more time for her, and no more use for her.

  She sat up and stared at the worn pale spots on the knees of her jeans. This room was not the young girl’s dream, but she had never been able to afford many young-girl dreams, and for spaciousness, privacy, and cleanliness it was more than she had ever expected to enjoy. She could give up these but she longed to keep on drawing courage and affection from Urquhart, Marczinek and Grace; and she wanted Jason’s astringent personality around. But she had no claims on anyone.

  This was a strange place to have found missing parts of her character, and the qualities of home. But she was still far away from ultimate discovery in the first case, and permanence in the second.

  “Shandy.”

  Jason was at the door, and he had a glum look about him. She got up and followed him silently down the hall.

  When they reached the stairs she said, “He’s kicking me out, isn’t he?” He didn’t answer. “It’s no use, Jason. There’s nothing for me to do here now, and he can’t just hang around waiting and hoping to find some terrific talent I’ve got… Jason, don’t tell me you’re going to miss me.”

  “Me?” He glanced back at her. “Miss all that yackety—ah, forget it. I got used to you, I guess.”

  She didn’t want to ask what plans Prothero might have for her; she didn’t think she was going to approve of them.

  Prothero was sitting at his desk, staring at his folded hands. He looked up. “Jason, I want you to go and tell Marczinek I’ll see him in fifteen minutes.”

  “Sir—”

  “Jason, keep your mouth out of this. I’ve told you what I want.”

  Jason disappeared with an angry pop. Prothero went on staring at his hands. He sighed. “Miss Johnson, we brought you here to find out if you could be of some help to us in the future. But with everything that’s happened I need all the help I can get right this minute. I just can’t spare you the time anymore.” He looked up.

  She breathed deeply, hoping her voice wouldn’t quaver. “Where do you expect me to go?”

  “I’ll have you taken back to your people. I don’t think you’ll come to harm.”

  “But my stepmother’s in jail, the still’s bust, and the rest of them…” Her voice trailed off. The rest of the Slippecs were hardly aware of her existence; they had nothing to spare for her. “I have no place to stay.”

  He said coldly, “You might find a friend to stay with. I’m sure you have plenty of friends. Or”—his mouth was grim—“my friend Chief Casker of the Civil Police will be happy to put you up.”

  “I’ll find a friend,” she muttered.

  “Good.” He began to shuffle papers on the desk and his face was so weary she pitied him.

  “Look,” she said desperately, “I can run messages for you. I could be useful that way. The Dumplings don’t know I’m around when nobody else sees me, and I know how to keep from being seen.”

  “I can believe that. But…you are insolent and furtive. I can’t have that here. I don’t trust you.”

  “I can’t say anything to that,” she whispered, and turned to go.

  * * * *

  She was throwing things into the duffel, lingering to draw out the last few moments, when Urquhart came in. She looked at him without speaking.

  “Shandy, don’t”—he was groping for a word—“don’t go to pieces—oh, I don’t mean that, because I know you won’t. But if you’re anything valuable or special—”

  “I could be a special kind of jerk.” She gave the duffel cord a yank and knotted it down fiercely.

  He said, “There’s a woman in the Public Library—a Miss Wilma French—”

  “I know. She chased me out at closing time once or twice.”

  “She’s really quite decent.” He flushed. “She’d take you in if you told her I sent you. I’ll write you a note.”

  She looked away. With the blood in his face he had given her a gift—his vulnerability. He had crossed the t on himself. But she could only shake her head wordlessly and swing the duffel over her shoulder.

  And the noise began. A roaring that came from outside and the quality of it made her drop the duffel and run out the door without stopping to look out the window. Urquhart was already down the hall. Noise washed and crackled around her, the walla-walla of a crowd scene in an ancient movie, the snick-snap-spatter of old sound track on cracked film breaking off and on in split seconds. She might have been a teleport for all she was aware of getting down the stairs or shoving aside anyone who was in her way. She ran straight into it, as she had run at the civvies. The experience had not taught her caution.

  There was a milling of soldiers in the yard. Prothero somewhere yelling, “Get out that cannon, dammit get—”

  She pushed her way towards a circular cleared space near the flowerbed. Jason was in the center of it and around him, flickering there and away, yelling like forty, were four or five Dumplings in their prisoners’ gray, never the same one in the space of two seconds, flick-flick, there and gone God knew where.

  She fought to keep balance in the push, and the ashes of the flowerbed crunched under her feet. She had seen the old pictures in the files last night, and she tried to pick out faces from them: here, Curtis Quimper with an aged and haggard face; there, LaVonne, a squat Velasquez dwarf bulky and grotesque in the coverall; Colin Prothero, Scooter, who had styled himself the Kingfish, Jocko; wild, unkempt, hair overgrown, filthy, stubbled faces scored with black lines as though they had burned their beards off hair by hair. Jason was crouched in the center with his eyes squeezed tight seeing everything and his hands over his ears shutting out nothing.

  As she watched, he straightened, flung out his arms, opened his eyes and yelled, “Stop it! Stop it! Prothero! Stop it and shut up! SHUT UP!”

  The Dumplings stopped, seven or eight in a circle, and flung their glances around the crowd like dust, almost tangible matter that left its influences where it was touched, and beyond.

  Gradually, the rest of the noise stopped. The men became still where they were standing; two or three fell like statues and lay on the ground in stiff attitudes, with their eyes open. Prothero stood a few feet away from the circle, frozen in a flourish of arm movement, eyes and mouth open to the limit and face a slowly draining scarlet.

  Then the Dumplings turned to face Jason.

  He said, panting, “For God’s sake, give me a chance!”

  The Dumplings flicked out one by one like the lights in a sleeping city, until only the Kingfish and LaVonne remained before him. Like the rest, the Kingfish had changed from the urgent half-terrified boy who had run out in the moonlight with the Pack. His face had thinned and wizened. Shandy thought of the smooth-skinned children of the photographs; Marczinek’s heart had turned at the sight of them.

  The Kingfish was watching Jason speculatively, and Shandy realized she was the only other person in the courtyard who was conscious and able to move. But she stayed as still as the rest.

  Jason lowered his arms and took a shuddering breath. “I told you I don’t know.”

  The Kingfish snarled, “You’re shielding!”

  “I can’t shield that good and you know it!”

  Silence. If furies of argument raged and crackled inwardly among the three of them, there was no sign.

&nbs
p; Shandy glanced at LaVonne. Her hair hung in long greasy strings and her hugely bulging forehead and cheekbones left only slits for the small glitter of her eyes. Her lips curled superbly up to her pug nose and her jaw was deeply underhung. Her uniform was as evenly tattered as if she had ripped it purposely herself, and she probably had. A picture of self-hatred.

  Just the look of me makes you want to puke.

  LaVonne was another oddment of the Pack: a reversed spiritual image of Doydoy. Shandy recalled an old cartoon in which an ugly crooked man found a funhouse mirror that neutralized his ugliness with its own distortions and returned him a straight and handsome image. Left to herself LaVonne might once have found such a mirror—but not here, submerged in the raw honesty of telepathy and psychopathic contempt for deformity. Shandy wondered if the Dumplings ever got sick of their own transparencies and mutually perfectly-checked powers.

  Finally the Kingfish scratched his cheek and said, in a voice that was meant to be persuasive, but came out a whine, “Doydoy always said you were a good guy…” Jason put his hands in his pockets, waited, and said nothing. But his face was glittering with sweat under the morning sun and the dark stain was running down in lines from the armpits of his khaki t-shirt.

  LaVonne snapped, “Come on, come on! We need Doydoy!”

  “Ah, shut up, LaVonne! Listen, Hemmer—”

  Jason interposed lazily, “Scared you won’t be able to break enough windows without him?”

  Whatever the Kingfish did was not apparent, but it made Jason pull his hands from his pockets and hold his head screaming silently in a rictus of pain. Shandy trembled and was paralyzed.

  The Kingfish said, “It’s past the time for jokes.”

  Jason opened his eyes and grunted agreement. “I never figured you were joking. But I don’t know where he is.”

  “He’s gotta be somewhere.”

  “He’s shielding.” Jason felt the back of his neck, to make sure it was still there. “Maybe he’s tired of you.”

  “He can’t shield five solid hours.”

  “He might; you couldn’t be sure.”

  He licked his lips. He had made a mistake, and the Kingfish seized on it. “If he can do that, so can you! Let’s go!”

  “Look, I’m not like that—you know me inside out! I—” But both of them leaped on him and had him down on the ground, face in the cinders.

  “We’ll turn you inside out!” The Kingfish, kneeling on Jason’s back, spat and wiped his mouth on a shoulder. “Okay, LaVonne! Let’s go!”

  Shandy found voice, arms, legs, and finally sense. She grabbed a fallen rifle, knocked men over like dominoes, and leaped out swinging and screeching at the top of her lungs.

  The Kingfish jerked his head up. “Hey!” The rifle swung. She had a blink of their gaping faces. The Kingfish raised his arm in an instinctive gesture that went back much farther than psi, sunlight flicked blue on the oiled barrel, and the rifle, coming down badly aimed, lost momentum in suddenly empty space and thwacked Jason across the backs of his thighs. The Dumplings were gone.

  “Jason, are you all right? Did I hurt you? Jason!” She knelt beside him. He was lying with his face still half in cinders and his shoulders quivering. “Jason! What are you laughing for, you kook!”

  Jason rolled over and sat up, still laughing weakly, gasping for breath, hugging himself and shivering. “I wish you could have seen your face!”

  “If you could see your own you wouldn’t talk!”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Jason picked himself up and began to brush off the ashes. “I read a story once about some pioneer women larruping wild Injuns with broomsticks!” He doubled up and started in all over again.

  She looked around. The yard was coming alive; men were getting up and moving about; they discovered that their eyeballs were dry, red, and painful from standing for minutes with their eyes open. Like figures in a sleeping-beauty pageant they tried to continue the actions they had left off, and discovered the cause was gone. The cannon gaped at emptiness.

  Prothero’s yell died down into a cough, and he began to make his way over to the flowerbed, blinking and rubbing his eyes.

  Jason had stopped laughing. “Keep your trap shut,” he told Shandy.

  Prothero was shaking his head like a wet dog. He was still not quite aware of what had happened, and particularly that it had happened to him, Stephen Decatur Prothero. His hand came down with a hundred-pound slap on Jason’s shoulder. “What did they want?” he barked. “Where did they go?”

  “Doydoy got away from them, and they think we’re hiding him. They didn’t believe me, they were going to take me back with them…but Shandy stopped them.”

  Prothero gulped, and blinked painfully. “How did she manage all of that?” His hand on the shoulder tightened and corded, but Jason’s face was expressionless.

  “They put all of you to sleep—except her. It doesn’t work on her. She was the only one who could do anything. With all the excitement, and being mad over Doydoy they didn’t even notice she was there.” He gave a brief and uncolored description of the wild lunge with the rifle, and added, “They don’t realize she’s just an Imper. Right now they think she’s got some kind of psi they haven’t come across.”

  Prothero swallowed in his dry throat again and turned to Shandy. His expression was as unreadable as Jason’s. “Get back to your room.”

  As she went she heard Prothero asking Jason, “Where are they now?”

  “Camping out by Pringle’s Post.”

  “Hmph…right between us and Sorrel Park.”

  * * * *

  She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the tightly knotted duffel. In thickly stenciled white letters it said, JOSEPH SLIPPEC USN. The very name Slippec looked strange to her, as though in the last three days her ten years of life with them had been blotted out. She felt numb. She had been granted a stay of execution, but what she was coming back to was not what she had only just learned to value. Her small security had vanished with the Dumplings.

  Doydoy was gone. After eight years of hideous suffering he had still managed an act of defiance. Was he still the decent person Jason had once tried to help? And where could he hide?

  She curled up on the bed. In an instinctive gesture she reached up and moved her fingers back and forth across the top of her skull. Her anterior fontanel had not closed until she was seven years old, and as a very small child falling asleep she would lie touching the faint depression where her pulses moved openly between brain and membrane. She had had the fancy that these were the thoughts moving about in her head. The Slippecs had not bothered much with doctors and no-one noticed the opening. It had not occurred to her how much more vulnerable than other children she had been, since a comparatively light blow on the head would have killed her—and blows fell like rain where she lived. Still, she had escaped.

  Where was Doydoy? He had long passed the limit of his shielding ability. Suppose he had gone back into the Dump to hide. Unlikely. She didn’t think Doydoy would want to see the inside of the Dump again even if his life depended on it—even if he had been able to get back in. Jason’s esp range was two or three miles in radius, the Dumplings’ perhaps ten…suppose he were a hundred miles away by now? Yet it seemed to her that a sensitive cripple who had been cruelly imprisoned for eight of his growing years would be terrified of the open world.

  No, the Marczinek Field was the only barrier that would protect Doydoy. And the Dump was the only—no. She sat up suddenly. There was one other place, equally grim, and not really an escape at all. If Doydoy had used it, he would have been desperate to a degree that verged on foolishness. A place where he would be shielded—and perhaps starved as well. The Dump was impossible; this place merely crazy.

  There was a knock on the door and Jason yelled, “Come on and have lunch!”

  But she felt queasy. She had jammed hersel
f down into a cleft stick.

  I hope I’m wrong, because then it won’t matter one way or the other, but in the meantime I don’t know I’m wrong, and if I know my own brains at all, I’m probably right. In that case I’ve either got to tell somebody or shut up. If I tell, the Dumplings’ll know about it right away and come down on us like a ton of bricks. If I shut up the Dumplings will probably figure it out for themselves in a couple of days—and even if they don’t Doydoy will have to come out—if he can—or else, yell for help sooner or later, or starve. Now what am I to do?

  Gee, sometimes I wish I wasn’t so bright.

  * * * *

  She opened the door and Jason said, “Just because you’re a triple threat doesn’t mean you need three times as long to wash your face.”

  “Some threat. They should know all about me anyway, just from reading you.”

  “They never believe me. I’m an outsider.”

  “They’d never want me as a sub for Doydoy.”

  “Not as long as they can’t read you. He’s their information-and-logic bank. Not willingly. They pump him when they want to know what to do and how to do it.”

  “Do you think he’d had plans to leave them?”

  “I don’t know… I think he might have been able to shield a plan to leave them—but I don’t see how he could have hidden any plan to get out of the Dump—it was on their minds all the time. So when they were out he took his chances.”

  “I can’t understand how they could have let me scare them off.”

  “You’re an unknown factor to them. That’s all.

  An unknown, an x. She considered the two: X and x. The powerful but transparent Dumpling; the helpless but impenetrable Shandy.

  “Wait, Jason.” They were on the landing and she backed into the corner and leaned there. “I know Prothero’s keeping me on because the Dumplings think I’m a threat. I’m no real use to him.”

  Jason raised a hand. “Don’t count the teeth on a gift horse.”

  “Oh, I want to stay. I don’t care how. Are the Dumplings reading you now?”