And Now the News (31 page)

She thought deeply, began several times to say something, dismissed each intended suggestion with a curt headshake. He waited with equally deep intensity.

She nodded at last. “Modulate them separately.” She was no longer asking. “Then modulate them in relation to each other so they won't be in that awful cantilever balancing act.”

“Say it!” he nearly yelled.

“But that isn't enough.”

“No!”

“Audio response.”

“Why?” he rapped out. “And which?”

“Sixty cycles—the AC tone they'll be hearing almost all the time. Assign it to communication between them.”

The doctor slumped into a chair, drained of tension. He nodded
at her, with the tiredest grin she had ever seen.

“All of it,” he whispered. “You got everything I thought of … including the 60 cycles. I knew I was right. Now I
know
it. Or doesn't that make sense?”

“Of course it does.”

“Then let's get started.”

“Now?” she asked, astonished. “You're too tired—”

“Am I?” He jacked himself out of the chair. “Try stopping me and see.”

They used the EEG resultants, made two analogs and another, and used all three as the optimum standard for the final fixing process in the psychostat. It was a longer, more meticulous process than it had ever been and it worked; and what shook the doctor's hand that last day was an unbelievable blend—all of Newell's smoothness and a new strength, the sum of powers he had previously exhausted in the dual struggle that neither had known of; and, with it, Anson's bright fascination with the very act of drawing breath, seeing colors, finding wonderment in everything.

“We're nice guys,” said Richard Anson Newell, still shaking the doctor's hand. “We'll get along great.”

“I don't doubt it a bit,” the doctor said. “Give my best to Osa. Tell her … here's something a little better than a wet handkerchief.”

“Whatever you say,” said Richard Anson Newell.

He waved to Miss Thomas, who watched from the corridor, and behind her, Hildy Jarrell, who wept, and he went down the steps to the street.

“We're making a mistake, doctor,” said Miss Thomas, “letting him—them—go.”

“Why?” he asked, curious.

“All that brain power packed in one skull …”

The doctor wanted to laugh. He didn't. “You'd think so, wouldn't you?” he agreed.

“Meaning it's not so at all,” she said suspiciously. “Why not?”

“Because it isn't
twice
the amount of brains any individual has. It's only as much as any
two
distinct individuals have. Like you and me, for instance. Mostly we supplement each other—but just here
and there, not everywhere, adding up to a giant double brain. Same with Newell and Anson. And any two people can be counted on to jam one another occasionally. So will they—but not like before treatment.”

They watched until Richard Anson Newell was out of sight, then walked back to check the multiple personality cases that Miss Jarrell had dug out of the files.

Four months later, the doctor got a letter:

The doctor galloped through the clinic until he found his head technician in the electrical lab.

“Tommie,” he said jovially, “did you ever go out and get drunk with a doctor?”

The tears were streaming down his face. Miss Thomas went out and got drunk with the doctor.

D
ELIA
F
OX STOOD IN THE CENTER
of the saddle shed, her face pale, her thin lips sucked in and bitten on, invisible. The Circle F's steady rider, Vic Ryan, squatted on his tall heels with his back to the wall and laughed at her. “All right, all right—I'll raid, I'll gun out your nester.” He laughed again. “But under orders.” He aimed the stem of his pipe at her. “The boss's orders.”

“You know he'll never!”

“If I raid, he will,” said Ryan easily. “And he'll give me those orders right up to and includin' the minute I kick in that nester's shack door.”

“You mean you want him to go with you?”

“That's about it.”

“That's the same thing as saying you won't go.”

Ryan shrugged and began to pack his pipe. “I reckon hell
could
freeze over.”

She stamped to the door. “Catch a lot of folks with some heavy hauling to do, the day it does,” she snapped, and went out.

Ryan took the pipe from his mouth and laughed again. He was not a jovial man and his laughter was ugly; but it suited his mood.

Through the open door he could see across the yard—see Delia Fox, stiff-backed, furious, as she stamped into the house. She was thirty-eight years old, with a face five years older and a body twenty years younger, and time was when Vic Ryan used to look at that figure with something besides the familiarity of contempt. He peered back over the years at himself, and her, and he wondered vaguely who those people were—the rawboned young cowboy who'd asked her to marry him, and the girl with ice in her eyes who had told him to own more than an old saddle and an iron skillet before he suggested such a thing to his betters. A long time ago … and never heard
a word he had spoken to her since that wasn't strictly business. Yet he'd stayed, year in and year out, holding the Circle F together against all comers—against the weather, against lazy cowhands they had to put up with at the rates the Circle F paid, against drought, landslide, botflies, and even Delia's brother Roy.

At the thought of Roy he spat. Roy was younger than Delia, and that and his flabbiness were what had led Vic so far astray in the early days: Who could have guessed that it was Roy's ranch—lock, stock, and chopping block? It had been Delia who handled the money, made the decisions, hired and fired. “Better see to the south waterhole today, Vic,” Delia would say, and Roy would chime in, “Yeah, Vic, go clean out the waterhole.” Always her order, her brother's echo. So marry into it; you can't do nothing to the boss's relatives, but a no-good brother-in-law rates a boot in the tail right after the honeymoon. So Vic Ryan had tried it, and she had spat in his eye—Delia Fox, queen of the range, the bitch.

And a year afterward he'd fallen over Roy Fox on the town trail, belly-down and puking drunk, but bragging for all that. Vic had brought him home and slung him into bed, but not before Roy had dragged him into the parlor and showed him the will by which Roy Fox's father, the old fool, had made Roy sole heir to the Circle F.

Something had happened to Vic Ryan that night, something so deep that he couldn't name it if he wanted to. It had to do with a woman who'd refused him because he had so little, when all the time she had nothing; it had to do with a pig-eyed jelly-belly who'd order a better man to do jobs he wouldn't do himself, any time his sister wanted something done. Whatever it was, it made Vic Ryan stay, not planning—because the thing was planned; not building—because it was built … just waiting.

A long wait.

And a longer one yet, he chuckled, before she gets Roy Fox to ride out with me to raid that nester. The nester had squatted in the narrow eastern end of the valley. There was bottomland there, dark and fertile, and good water. Circle F stock had winter-grazed there for years, although legally it wasn't Circle F land. The nester, a heavyset, towheaded stranger with a spavined wife and a rickety kid,
hadn't sent any announcements around or even come calling; one fine day, there he was, with a dirty sod house and a plow and a team of oxen. Delia Fox wanted the nester out of “our” valley, boundary or no, and even if he was a full day's ride away. Vic Ryan wanted him out too, for somewhat less emotional reasons: he knew a successful squatter would bring another, and then fifty more, and goodbye free range. He took the trouble to ride into town and find out quietly if the nester had filed any sort of claim, and came back with the news that the nester had not—too busy, too lazy, or too ignorant; it didn't matter.

But Roy—Roy had shrugged when he heard about the nester, changed the subject when he heard about the claim (or lack of it), and when Delia started getting waspish about it, he started drinking. Vic Ryan understood. He knew it was only a matter of time before Delia would lay her ears back and
make
Roy do something about the nester, and the idea of facing up to a stranger was more than Roy could handle. One day he came into the bunkhouse, mottle-faced, red-eyed, and sat down on Vic's bunk. He started to call Vic a chummy “old boy” and Vic told him to get the hell off his clean blanket-roll and say what he had come to say. Roy said, “Sure, sure, boss,” soothingly, and got up and stood weaving in the doorway, and suggested that Vic ride over to the east pass and see if some Circle F stock hadn't strayed up there, and on the way maybe warn off that nester, huh?

Vic told him to go do his own dirty work, whereupon Roy got up on his drunken dignity and said, “Damn it, Ryan, I can run things around here without you, you know.”

Vic laughed in his face and told him yeah, but his sister couldn't.

But Roy had gone, all the same, and so had Vic Ryan. For at daybreak that next morning an infuriated Delia Fox had saddled up and galloped east, and a shaken and deflated Roy had crept into the bunkhouse to beg Vic Ryan to follow and stop her. For a long moment Vic stared at the quivering rancher and thought it over, and what tipped the scales he never knew, but he snatched up the fire-bucket, doused Roy Fox, and snarled at him to come on. They saddled up and got their guns and rode, and it wasn't until afternoon that they
caught up with Delia. She had nothing to say to them at all, but kept on riding east, and they followed.

When they crested the rise and saw, down by the cliffs, the sod shack, Roy suddenly spurred up beside his sister and said, “You really got nothing to say to that man, Dele. We're off our land.” He was chalky and shaking. Delia said coldly, “You're the one to say it. If you can't find the words in your head, get 'em out of this”—and she handed him a bottle of whiskey from her saddlebag.

Vic Ryan, watching, felt all his scorn and disgust of Roy Fox melt and slump into a puddle of pity: for the sight of the bottle was a bigger thing to the man than any insult, and Roy took it, drank a third of it without stopping, then looked at his sister with his eyes steaming and told her she was a peach.

They rode down the slope. What looked like a scarecrow in the scratchy garden-patch froze and cowered and ran bleating into the shack. That was the wife. What looked like a small white ape scuttled in after her—that was the kid. They rode on, passing the brush margins, and there were the oxen, the plow, and the nester.

Roy took another drink. Vic Ryan got his carbine out of its boot and laid it across his belt-buckle. He'd always liked a carbine. Delia sucked in her lips.

The nester broke and ran, and Roy Fox laughed a rich, deep man's laugh and spurred his horse. The nester turned to look as he ran, his foot caught a clod, and over he went, withers and rump. Roy let out a roar and a Rebel yell and the nester scrambled to his hands and knees and leaped downhill once, twice, three times like a huge hop-toad. Then he was at the shack and inside, and the crazy split-rail and cowhide door banged shut.

The three Circle F riders cantered up and crowded the door. Roy's eyes were bright and his cheeks pink. “Outta your hole, gopher-boy!” he bellowed, and got maybe three syllables of the rich laugh out when the door swung again on its leather hinges and the nester stood there blinking at them. He was a big man, made even larger by the great mat of yellow hair and beard that surrounded his face, and by the tiny doorway that framed him. His thick left arm hung to the lintel above him, his right arm and shoulder were squeezed
out of sight by the doorframe. Deep in Vic Ryan's mind was an indelible picture, and this man brought it blazing to him again: a bear he had once hamstrung with a bad shot, its useless hind legs crowded against a rock, its foreclaws flexing, its little eyes, dark but also incandescent, hurt and hating, reading Vic's face from side to side as it wagged its head; and it panted like this man—too fast, too hard, a harsh series of whispered moans.

“You got to get off this land, gopher-boy,” Roy exulted, still full of downhill speed and whiskey.

Delia said, out of the side of her tight mouth, “Three weeks.”

“Yeah, three weeks,” Roy said.

“Or we'll be back,” spat Delia.

“Yeah, back,” said Roy, “with a keg of gunpowder and a—”

But just then the nester said hoarsely, “No!” and pulled out that right arm and hand; and in it was a single-barreled shotgun which, at that range, looked like a field-piece. “No,” the man gasped, “you go.” He moved the gun. “Go, you go.” His own huge inhalation sucked his lips shut with an audible slap, and they could hear the rest of the breath hiss into his nostrils; he could say no more with words, but only with the mad hurt-animal eyes.