Mute (32 page)

Knot put the man the rest of the way to sleep. Contrary to popular belief, a strangle properly executed was not uncomfortable for the victim. It interfered with the circulation of blood to the brain, and the brain clicked out painlessly.

He sat the unconscious man on the function pot. Soon Knot had exchanged clothes with him. He knew the man would not recover until the train commenced its return journey. This, too, had been part of his training: how to induce harmless unconsciousness for a reasonable period. That would give Knot time.

He emerged from the function room and sauntered down the aisle to the place Meig had occupied, bypassing his own suitcase. The suitcase was now a decoy for the lobos. The gloves concealed the disparity of fingers; he had two digits jammed into one socket on the right, and an empty socket on the left, but the glove fingers were so stiff it didn’t show. The hat shadowed his face, and the bulky overalls, too large for him on the left side, hid the irregularities of his torso.

When the train reached the end of the line, Knot ambled out with the other farmers onto the station platform and took a flight of steps up.

He emerged into waning daylight in a village. Three lobos were checking the line, referring to a picture. Knot strolled right past them. A truck was waiting; he boarded with two others, prompted by Mit’s advice, and it lurched off.

“Don’t remember you,” one farmer said. It was not a challenge so much as an interested observation. These people were not looking for trouble.

Knot smiled. “No one remembers me! I’m subbing for Meig; he’s indisposed tonight.”
Steer me when I start to go wrong, psi creatures. But don’t get in my way.

Yes, master!
Hermine thought back mirthfully, and projected a picture of a tiny weasel scrambling away from a giant pair of walking boots that threatened to crush her.

Knot had to smile. The farmer picked up on that. “You mean that woman of his is back in town?”

“I didn’t say that,” Knot said, his smile broadening to give him the lie. “I owed him a favor. I’m just here to see he doesn’t get docked.”

“Can you handle a poster?”

“Reckon not. Any other way I can earn Meig’s pay?”

“Sure. On manual corrections. But it isn’t much fun.”

“Just my luck. He’s the one with the fun, tonight.” They shook hands and introduced each other. The man was Batton, a normal, big and strong and duly proud of it: macho all the way. He squeezed Knot’s hand a bit too tightly, but Knot’s big hand was strong enough to return the pressure. It was a good association.

The truck drew into an extensive spread, the Rockhoof Ranch. Heavyset mutant bovines grazed in fenced pastures. No foolishness about fenceless enclosure here. One section was grazed out, and a tractor rig was disking the soil. Many little wheels turned and cut through the turf, turning it over, leaving plowed ground behind: a neat one-stage operation that accomplished what it had once taken men and animals many stages and much time to do, back on ancient Earth. Planet Earth, and soil-earth: surely a connection there. Worked soil was the root of man’s agrarian civilization. This section was being fenced off from the rest, evidently to allow it to re-vegetate in peace.

The three of them were the night shift. The day crew broke off work and departed with gruff salutations. They were smudged with dirt. Well, dirt was good camouflage too. Knot preferred to remain here until the hunt died out. He wanted to rescue Finesse, who was mercifully sleeping now, and he knew he would be best off taking time to be sure he was free. The lobos had proved to be most determined opponents, and any careless move could set them back on his trail.

The disk-rig closed down its operations too. Now the posting crew was the only one active. Outdoor floodlights came on, illuminating the work area, converting the dusk to day in this one region. Knot liked the effect.

The poster turned out to be the post-planting machine. It had an antique internal-combustion motor that spewed fossil fuel fumes into the air—but apparently that did not matter much on a wide-open planet like this. It seemed the Machos used hydrogen as fuel in the city, near the Solar plant that helped process it, and diesel fuel in the country. One of the men started it up, and Knot watched with interest as it jerked along.

In front the machine had a screw-drill that cored the earth neatly to a depth of a meter. In the center it had a rack of treated wooden posts, one of which was dropped endwise into each hole. Then a circular scoop constricted, sliding the dirt back around the post, filling the hole while the post was held vertical. In the rear was a tamping rod that pounded the dirt in tight. The machine moved slowly, but it left a perfect row of posts behind it, each one precisely placed, upright, its top level with the others, and firm.

Then the poster hit a snag. “Root,” the driver called. He touched a switch, aborting the posting mechanism, and proceeded to the next. “Get on it.”

When the machine had cleared the site, the other man showed Knot his job. “Take this hand post-hole digger, drop it in the hole like this, and see if you can cut that root. Then put in this post.” He flipped one off the poster and laid it near. “And level it and tamp it in with this crowbar.” He indicated a man-long iron bar.

“That’s all?” It did not seem complicated.

“That’s enough for now. If you’re lucky, there won’t be many tonight.”

Knot got to work. The root turned out to be tough; the posthole digger rebounded from it jarringly. A meter was a fair depth, it turned out, when it was straight down, and the root was almost at the bottom. He tended to follow the digger handle down until he clipped his chin on it. Soon the muscles of his shoulders began to feel the strain of this unfamiliar exertion.

At last he managed to cut through the root and excavate the hole to full depth. He hefted the post, which was surprisingly solid—and a splinter struck right through his glove into his hand. Ouch! He didn’t want to remove the gloves to get at the splinter for fear the others would see his fingers and realize he was a mutant, so he just had to suffer through. Then the hole turned out to be too deep, and he had to fill in some of his hard-won dirt. Then the post leaned, and he had to adjust it. When he tamped in the dirt, the post was leaning again, because he had tamped unevenly. The job the poster machine had made seem so easy was, in fact, not easy at all.

By the tine he had it finished correctly, the machine was far down the line, and three more misfires awaited him for correction. Full night had fallen beyond the region of floodlights. “I’m not cut out to be a farmer,” Knot muttered ruefully. He peeled back his glove to get at the splinter, but the splinter had already broken off, leaving part of it embedded in his tender flesh. This could be felt but not seen.

The chase resumes,
Hermine thought. She had been taking a nap in the comfortable dirty pocket of the coverall, but Mit’s alarm had put her back on duty.
They will not be fooled this time.

Knot looked out across the fenced fields of the farm. Some of the terrain was fresh-disked dirt, eons of eaten-down grass, and some high-growing uncropped grass. All of it, as far as he could see in the darkness, was level and exposed. He would have virtually no chance on foot.

Mit says that is true.

He would have to get clever again.
What offers?

Get close to Batton, Mit says.

Knot walked up to Batton, who was working on a corner. An idle tractor sat nearby, its blank headlights seeming like eyes, watching the work. Knot wondered why the disking crew worked only by day, while the fencing crew carried through the night; perhaps the fences were an occasional chore, that had to be done at irregular times, and in a hurry, while disking was predictably seasonal.

“It’s not that I’m lazy, but could I change off for a while? My hole-digging muscles are hurting worse than Meig’s.”

Batton considered a moment, working out the pun. Meig supposedly had a hot date. He broke into a smile as he made the connection. “Sure. Takes time to get into fencing, but it’s a good trade when you’re in shape. I’ll show you how to brace a corner.”

He showed Knot. The corner post was outsize, triple the diameter of the line posts, and set in a deeper hole. Even this, the man explained, could be jerked out of line by the pull of the taut fence wire. So they braced it geometrically, with a smaller post two meters down the line, and another set horizontally to connect the two, and wire angled cornerwise and tightened between them.

In the midst of this, the lobo search party arrived. “Stand for inspection,” the leader ordered curtly. “There may be a fugitive among you.”

Batton straightened up slowly. “Lobos, aren’t you?” he inquired.

“That is no concern of yours,” the lobo said. “We have authority. A man sabotaged the solar power station.”

Batton’s big muscles tightened, showing under his coveralls. “No authority on this farm, lob. We run on diesel, not solpower. Move on.”

He doesn’t like lobos,
Hermine thought, unnecessarily.
He will help you.

Good break—except that it wasn’t a break at all. Mit had known, and sent him to join this man. “They may be looking for me,” Knot said. “I roughed up some lobos—”

The lobo leader oriented on him immediately with a disconcerting gaze. “You will come with us.”

“Not likely,” Knot said. “You tried to put me down once. Not again.”

“I must insist.” The words were polite, but the tone was chill. This was a leashed tiger.

“The man doesn’t want to go with you,” Batton said grimly.

The lobo drew a laser pistol.

“You draw on me?” Batton said with righteous ire. “You no-good gap-brained cow-flop! I’ll—”

The pistol swung to cover Batton. Knot reached out and knocked it from the lobo’s hand. Then it was a free-for-all fistfight, two against three, while the third farmhand jumped off the poster and charged to join the fray.

As it happened, two were enough. In moments two lobos were down, and the third retreating. But this one had a radio. “Suspect located; violence,” he called. “Send reinforcements.” Then the radio was dashed from his hand, and he was at the mercy of Batton’s heavy fists.

“Get out of here, Knot,” Batton called. “Take that tractor. I’ll cover for you here.”

Knot thanked him and ran for the indicated machine. With Mit’s help he got the engine started, turning the warm-up button, depressing the clutch, putting it in gear, then using the starter-motor. These simple devices were not quite so simple in practice for a first-time driver.

The engine ignited promptly. He let up the clutch and the machine lurched forward toward the posts they’d just set. He jammed the clutch pedal back and the tractor rolled to a stop. No point in destroying what he had just labored so hard to accomplish. Also, while he himself would be forgotten, the events he participated in would remain in the memory of those involved. If he ripped through the posts, it would be obvious that
someone
had done it, and soon people would figure out who. That would begin to reverse the forgetting effect. So his anonymity was best protected by minimum mischief.

He steered the tractor around between the posts and out across the field. He experimented with the gears, discovered there were eight—in addition to a low range and a high range. By shifting into the highest gear of the high range, he achieved a pretty fair forward velocity.

Lobos come,
Hermine warned.
In the sky.

Now Knot saw the lights. He had hoped to disappear in the night beyond the working-area floodlights, but this made it impossible. They had a flying saucer, or a jetcar, or a copter; no way the big tractor could escape notice.

“So we part company,” he decided. He left the tractor in high gear, then leaped off the side. The machine continued forward, irregularities in the terrain making it wobble a little as though being steered. The aircraft oriented on it as Knot ran away at right angles.

He had eluded discovery and capture again—but he was a long way from the Open Range Hotel and Finesse’s car. How was he going to get back in time to do her any good?

Why do you want to go back to the hotel?
Hermine inquired innocently.

The question stopped him. Why, indeed! Of course the lobos would have the hotel room staked out and the car disconnected. He would be a fool to go back there. He had to proceed directly to Finesse.

Who would also be staked out. That, too, was obvious. Perhaps they suspected that he was in touch with her, and were using her as bait to attract him, in case their active pursuit failed. After ail, they had taken her in only after he slipped their net. They might think he had distance-clairvoyance or intermediate-range telepathy to keep track of her, forgetting the actual nature of his psi. Forgetting about forgetting. They weren’t really questioning her, they were brutalizing her to ensure that he would come to her—and the irony was, even knowing that, he would still do it. He really had no choice.

If these were the people who would bring CC down, he could begin to appreciate how. They might be bereft of their former psi powers, but they were ruthless, clever and effective. Knot was armed with the coordination of three separate psi-talents, while the lobos had none, yet he was barely keeping clear of their clutches. Might not, in fact, have escaped them yet. If the local lobos were this tough, what about the galactic conspiracy of lobos?

Yet there remained missing pieces to this puzzle. He had seen a few of the newly lobotomized people. They were crushed and ineffective as individuals. What made the other lobos so organized and disciplined? Not any great liking for the company of their own kind, he was sure. There should be some overriding force—yet the nature of that force was not apparent. No electronic computer; simple radios were their limit. No psi leader, since by definition these people were without psi, and did not tolerate it among themselves. Who gave the overall directions, then? Who made the policy? Who rewarded the faithful and punished the transgressors? Who coordinated their acts of accomplishment or mischief? It was a mystery.