Gordon R. Dickson (21 page)
Authors: Mankind on the Run
"You're wrong," said the Police
Head, in a heavy voice, "there's an Unstab Class Four.
For
active enemies, violators of Peace."
In
spite of himself, Kil felt a queer shrinking inside him. "How much?"
he said. "How much time do you have in that?"
Hagar Kai looked at him.
"Twenty-four
hours," he said. "Every twenty-four hours you move.
Three hundred and sixty-five different locations every year.
You'll sleep in a transient hotel every night. Your food, and drink and
clothing, will be handouts from the Police, one day's supply at a time."
The
words dropped on Kil's ear like stones, one by one, into
a
deep well.
"You
can't do that!" cried Kil. "My wife—I've got to look for my
wife—" he caught himself suddenly.
"Look
where you like," said Hagar Kai, "as long as you never look for more
than a day in any one place. And I wish you luck, Bruner." He sat leaning
forward and watching Kil. Kil stood silent, seeing the man's purpose now and
refusing to be drawn. The silence stretched out in the office.
Five
minutes later, they put him out through one of the gates to Headquarters. Two
Policemen had stripped the old Key from his wrist and escorted him there. Now,
as he stood in the open street, they handed him a new Key and
a
meager roll of possessions, one change of clothing, some toilet articles
and three small food packages.
"Put
the Key on," ordered the younger of the two. He was
a
round-faced boy barely out of his teens, and this sort of thing was
obviously new to him. He spoke with a gruffness and glare that did not succeed
in covering up the embarrassment and a sort of horrified sympathy in him.
Automatically,
Kil took the Key and roll. He stood looking at them for
a
moment in his hands, the couple of pounds of small things that were now
his total estate and his life. For
a
long
moment he looked at them; and then he handed them back to the young Policeman.
"No thanks," he said, gently.
"I don't think I'll
be wanting
these after
all."
And
the world seemed to fall like a cloak from his shoulders, as he turned and
went.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
On
the third day after that, Dekko found him.
Kil had come to a halt finally a little back in the Cascade mountains,
where they run into British Columbia, Canada.
The aircab that had brought him out from
Vancouver glittered a little foolishly on the rocky hillside in the thin, brilliant
sun of early mountain morning, as if it could not quite reconcile itself to
being so far from civilization.
Kil sat apart from it, before
a little fire of dry branches—for the morning was cool—staring unseeingly at
the almost invisible flames.
Suddenly
a speck in the air grew to a recognizable shape of another aircab and this came
on, as an eagle sheered away suspiciously, to land on the slope beside Kil's
vehicle. Kil looked up, but did not stir, as Dekko got out and came toward
him.
The
little hunchback stopped on the far side of the fire and looked down at him.
"Now, what did you do
that for?" he said.
Kil-
smiled a little, opened his mouth as if to explain, then closed it again. He
shrugged. It was too big. Perhaps the time would come finally when he could
answer that question; but not now.
"Where've
you been? I've been chasing you for two days now without being able to come up
with you. What've you been doing?"
Doing?
He had been traveling, in constant motion on rocket and mag ship, from Duluth,
to Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio, Capetown, Timbuktu, Algiers, Madrid,
Amsterdam, Oslo . . . the list ran on indefinitely. He had not been hungry—
except for a little while on the first day. And he could not remember sleeping,
although he must have dozed from time to time in his rocket or mag ship seat.
Now, he was neither tired nor hungry, only withdrawn in a strange way, as if he
had turned in on himself. People, he remembered, had mostly not noticed that he
was Keyless. When they had, they had been shocked, horrified, fascinated. . . .
He shrugged again, in
answer to Dekko's question.
"Listen,
you don't have to give up!" The small man's voice was filled with an
unusual, urgent concern. "We can fix it. I can fix it. You can go back and
they'll have to give you your Key again. What if it is Class Four? Once you've
got it, I can fix things up so you won't know it from Class A. There's nothing
I can't get. You mustn't give up."
That roused him.
"I'm not giving
up," he said.
"I
got food and something to drink in the cab. You got to eat. Clean up and shave.
I got some clothes in there, too. If there's anything else you want, just ask
me. I can get anything for you.
Anything."
"I
don't want anything," said Kil.
"I
just
want to think. Go on back."
Dekko sat down obstinately
opposite the fire.
"I'm not leaving until
you come with me," he said.
"Then
sit quiet," said Kil. He got to his feet and motioned Dekko down as the
smaller man started to scramble up, also. "It's all right. I'm just going
off a few feet. Sit still."
He walked away across the rubbled shelf of
rock and sat down again at a distance of some twenty yards. The fresh breeze
coming up the river gorge blew coolly around him, but he felt it as something
remote and unimportant. He no longer needed the warmth of the fire. His mind,
narrowing down now to the essentials of his search, was dispensing with
ir-relevancies.
He
was remembering a great many things. He had reviewed in his mind the years he
had lived with Ellen and what he looked for was almost, but not quite, there.
He had moved among the world of people as a spectator, and looked at it; and
what he wanted was almost, but not quite, there. He had seen, talked to,
experienced, Stabs and Unstabs, Dekko, McElroy, Ace, the blond boy, Toy, Bolievsky,
Mali,
Melee,
and
an old botanical technician that loved his bug. And the answer was almost, but
not quite, there.
The
answer, he realized quite quietly and suddenly, was in himself.
He
felt a long sigh of accomplishment slip through him. He lifted his eyes to the
mountains, and to the eagle, circling slowly against the blue unclouded sky.
And he let his mind, like the bird, go free.
He
stood apart from himself and imagined himself looking down on his seated body,
sitting on the mountainside, with Dekko and the fire a short distance away. And
then he stepped his point of view away and up, so that he looked down at
himself still, but from the edge of a clifftop several hundred feet above. He
saw himself, with his mind's eye, from the new viewpoint—small and motionless,
with Dekko, small and motionless beside the fire, pale in the daylight.
Again,
he stepped away, so that he hung in air above the level of the tallest peak and
saw the mountainside upon which he sat, and a speck that was he, and Dekko and
the fire together, so small that they could not be made out separately. Again
he moved away; and the whole continent
lay
spread
below him.
The
sky was black above
him,
little patches of cloud were
white and distant below, as they looked seen from an intercontinental rocket
at the peak of its arc above the earth. One more stride upward into the
blackness and the face of the Earth from Pole to Pole hung before him with the
bright line of the dawn creeping westward across the ocean.
He stepped back and saw the stars.
He stood back from the Milky Way.
From the galaxy.
From the island universe.
From the total universe.
From . . .
And then he was through.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
Kil
got up and walked across the rocky ledge to
Dekko and the fire. The sun was westering toward the early mountain twilight,
for a good part of the day had come and gone as Kil sat apart. The decaying
light lay obliquely along the upper walls of the gorge and the lower walls were
already in shadq^v. The fire burned ruddily and fitfully in the light air; and
its bed was ringed with charred, unburnt half-ends of dry limbs, where it had
been replenished many times. Dekko had fallen into a doze; and he sat cross-legged
and hunched over, his hump pronounced and his sharp chin digging into his
chest. Kil looked down on him, feeling a sympathy, almost a tenderness for the
smaller man, not unmixed with a certain amusement.
Kil
leaned over and shook one shoulder gently. Dekko woke at once, his head
springing up.
"Oh—Kil—"
he said. He shook his head as if to shake the last shreds of sleep from his
brain. "What's up?"
"I am," said Kil.
"I'm ready to go."
Dekko scrambled to his
feet.
"Fine,"
he said. He shivered, rubbed his hands and held them to the fire.
"Cold," he said. He took his hands away and energetically began to
kick the burning embers apart, spreading them to die on the bare rock.
"Now—" he said.
"Now,"
said Kil, "I'm ready to take you up on your promise."
"Promise?"
"Didn't
you say you could get me anything I wanted?" "Yes—" Dekko stared
curiously at him in the dimming light. "Just about anything, that is. What
do ybu want?" Kil smiled at him. "Get me a submarine," he said.
Dekko stared at him.
"A
submarine?
A sub?
You mean a submersible."
"No," Kil shook his head. "I
mean a submarine.
Something capable of going down a thousand
feet or more."
Dekko continued to look at
him for a long moment.
"You need some food and a good night's sleep,"
he
said
at last.
'
Kil said nothing.
"A
submarine?"
"That's right."
"What
for?" demanded Dekko.
*
"I
know where Ellen is." "Where?" asked Dekko
sharply.
"I'll show you. Can you get the submarine?" Dekko started to say
something, checked himself, and ended briefly by saying, "I can try."
They took their aircabs back to Vancouver and
Dekko buried himself in a call booth. After some little while he emerged,
looking grimly at Kil.
"This is going to cost
money, you know,"
he
said.
"I suppose," said Kil.
Dekko,
however, did not ask him for any. A deep-going craft had
Ijeen
located,
it seemed, at
One
of the coastal geologic survey stations down the coast near
San Luis-Obispo;
off Pismo Beach, in fact. It could not be
bought, rented or leased; but because of some intricately woven connections between
Dekko and certain people on present duty at the station, it could be
borrowed
for a" day or two.
"We'll have to move it
overland," said Kil.
"That's
all right," replied Dekko. "It's a ducted fan drive. Air or
water—though
its
going to be slow
¿n
the air." He stared at Kil with renewed curiosity. "Where are
we
taking it?"
"Later," said
Kil. "Ask me' that again, later."
He
returned Dekko's gaze, calmly, and the little man, looking confused, dropped
his eyes.
They
took a magship down the coast and an aircab out to the station. It stood,
bright-lit and empty-seeming, in about four fathoms of water far enough out
from the beach so
Üiat
the booming of the surf
came with a curious faintness to their ears. The moon was overcast and hidden,
and as Kil and Dekko stood at last on the walkway running around the inside of
the enclosed dock, the unshielded glare of the lights made a wall of blackness
out of its open door, night-empty to the sea.
"There she sits," said Dekko.
Kil
looked down at the swelling, metal whale-back of the sub, moving imperceptibly
as it floated in the dock, restrained by its magnetic tethering field. The
little slap-slap of small waves against its sides made short, impatient protest
in the stillness.
Kil nodded.
"There's no one around
here now, is there?" he asked.
"Not
them," said Dekko. "Nobody wants to know anything about this.
Why?"
"I
just wondered," Kil looked at him, are you sure you want to go along with
me?"
Dekko blinked at him.
"Me?"
"Yes."
Dekko
said nothing for a long minute, his eyes, bright and unrevealing as polished
obsidian, on Kil.
"Kil,"
he said, at last. "You've been talking strange ever since we left the
mountains. You don't look out of your head, but—why wouldn't I want to go?"
"Because of what it means to you,"
answered Kil, softly, "because of what it means to me.
Because
if we go from here on together, we have to be honest with each other."
"I don't read you,
Chief," said Dekko.
"Kil,"
said Kil.
"Kil, not Chief, Dekko.
And you do understand
me. This is important to you. Is it important enough to be honest with
me?"
"I'm always honest."
"With yourself, yes.
Now,
with me."
"I think you're fishing for
something," he said.
"No." Kil shook his head. "I
know. I just thought it would be easier for you if you came to it'by
yourself."
Dekko favored him with a hard, bleak stare.
Dekko said
nothing,
only continued to match him with that bright, unwavering gaze.
"All
right, then," said Kil, sadly, "take
it off."
"Take what off?"
Kil sighed.
"The mask," he
said.
Slowly
the stiffness seemed to leak out of Dekko. He opened his mouth a little,
then
closed it again. Slowly his fingers came up under his
chin as they had that day when, dressed as Uncle George, he had sat opposite
Kil in the Un-stab hotel room. The fingers hooked and pushed upward. And the
face of Dekko crumpled and moved before them.
He
spread his shoulders and straightened, slowly. Slowly, almost magically, his
torso seemed to stretch and expand. The hump on his back bulged. There was a
slight pop and it deflated all at once as the man stood up to his full height,
short now, but no longer
little,
and no longer
crippled-appearing as mask and hair came off together.
McElroy looked at Kil.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
D
awn
was breaking again over the
wide, ever-cold waters of Lake Superior when they reached it at last in their
slow-flying craft. Indifferently, the white, clear light, too new_for warmth,
illuminated the slaty, rolling waves and the hills above the bouldered shore.
McElroy, at the controls, sent the sub down through the yielding surface of the
lake: down through the gray water, down through the green water, down through
the black water. The great, tumbled blocks of stone scattered down the
shallower slopes as if by some weird and silent, long-forgotten aquatic
landslide, became more scattered and finally disappeared, leaving only a bare
but rugged country of drowned ravines and hills, looking gray and palely
startled in the centuries-forgotten light of the searchBeams from the fleeting
sub. Who goes? Who breaks our ancient slumber, the wakened, silted hills seemed
to cry, as with sound and glare the alien sub shot past and its distorting
shadow flickered on oozy slopes and cliffs.
"Which way?"
asked McElroy.
"To the right,"
said Kil. "
about
one o'clock."
McElroy altered direction
slightly and they sped on.
"Eight
hundred feet," he said reading the depth gauge.
And a
little later, "eleven hundred."
They
had come at last to a level, wide and empty plain. Their searchbeams probed its
featureless expanse for a hundred yards before them.
"Where?" asked
McElroy.
"Keep
going," said Kil.
•
They
continued on over the monotony of the bottom plain. Here there was nothing to
mark distance or direction, only the occasional outcropping of basalt, swelling
up out of the silt like the flank of some gigantic, mudded hog. Only onrfe,
startlingly, across this sterile-seeming plain, there wandered info the
searchbeam's funnel of illumination the unexpected apparition of snouted ten-foot
sturgeon, waving his forked tail in slow astonishment at encountering a
traveler even larger than his own large self.
"How do you know where you're
going?" asked McElroy.
"Partly
feel—partly logic—" said Kil. He smiled a little. "That doesn't
explain it very well, does it? Maybe somebody else can do a better job of it
than I can."
"Do you know what we're looking
for?"
"Yes," said Kil, slowly. "I
don't know just what it'll look like—" he broke off suddenly, gazing out
through the front observation window of the sub. "There, I think."
They
had come at last on a rising mound, all but identical with the basalt heaves,
except for the fact that this was more circular, more regular and
more vast
. Silt covered this, too; but for one short minute
they were treated to the impossible sight of a slim woman-figure, unprotected
under all those vast tons of water except for ordinary kilt and tunic, who
waved when she saw them and turned to the mound. Immediately an opening, large
enough to admit the sub, yawned before them. She slipped through and
disappeared, waving them on.
They
followed her in to a vast lock which was drained of water with a sudden rush,
leaving them foolishly stranded in a shallow basin. Kil went back through the
sub with a rush; and when McElroy followed him in emerging from the hatch a
moment after, he was already holding the girl tight to him, the girl that had
waved them in through the lock. They stood as lost as lovers are, on the metal
flooring of the lock, while the heavy air around them reeked of the flat and
fishy smell of the lake bed—and noticed none of it.
After
a little while, they let each other go a little, though they did not really
step apart, and they both looked at McElroy.
"Your wife, I suppose," said
McElroy, dryly. "Yes," said Kil. "Ellen, this is—I don't know
your first name."
"David," supplied McElroy.
"David McElroy, my.
wife
Ellen."
"I
know about him," said Ellen. Under the brilliance of the overhead sunbeams
and in the damp air, her blonde hair and blue eyes alike seemed touched with
little diamond highlights. "We all know about him. How are you,
David?"
McElroy shrugged, as if the unaccustomed
mantle of his first name sat uneasily upon him.
"No different than usual—Ellen," he
answered. His voice sharpened. "Where's this Project Group of yours?"
"I'll
take you to them, in a moment," said Ellen. "We're all here, waiting
for you—and Kil." She glanced up at her tall husband. "Kil, why did
you bring him?"
"Things
have to come to a head," said Kil. He looked at her, suddenly softening.
"Don't worry for me," he said, gently.
"But I don't know what they'll do."
Her voice was abruptly a little pitiful. "Chase called them all in—from
all over the world. We've never been all together like this before. We're just
people, after all, like anyone else. We can make mistakes, too. Oh, Kill"
"Who's Chase?" McElioy's voice cut
hard across the conversation. Ellen turned to him.
"My great-grandfather, .Bob—Robert Chase.
He's the only one of iis we call by the last
name. He's—well, he's old; and he's Project Head." She looked up at Kil.
"You've met him, darling. It was him, at Acapulco and—"
"In that Unstab hotel in Duluth.
I know," finished Kil, for her.
"Are they waiting for us?"
"Yes. But I wanted to speak to you for a
moment by myself, first. Kil-" her eyes were a little fearful, "you
understand
,
we'll be together from now on. It'll be
all right, whatever they decide."
Kil took his hands from
her; and his face hardened a little.
"No," he said.
"But
you're one of us now, Kil. You're part of the Project. You have to go along
with what the majority decide."
He looked at her with eyes
like agates.
"Which side are you
on?" he demanded.
"Oh, yours, Kil!
I'm with you!" In her agitation she caught his arm and clung to
it, as if to deny any shadow of a barrier between them. "You know
that." She even shook his arm a little, angrily. "It's what it may
mean to you. It's just that they'll expect you not to fight them."