Troublemakers. Part 9

Alf Gunnderson let the light of Omalo wash his sunken face with red haze. His eyes seemed to deepen in intensity. His hands on the console ledge stiffened and the knuckles turned white. He had seen the possibilities, and he had decided. They would never understand that he had chosen the harder way. He turned slowly.

"Where is the lifescoot located?"

They stared at him, and he repeated his question. They refused to answer, and he shouldered past them, stepped into the droptube to take him below decks. The Mindee spun on him, his face raging.

"You're a coward and a traitor, fireboy! You're a lousy no-psi freak and we'll get you! You can take the lifeboat, but someday we'll find you! No matter where you go out there, we're going to find you!"

He spat then, and the Blaster strained and strained and strained, but the power of his mind had no effect on Gunnderson.The pyrotic let the dropshaft lower him, and he found the lifescoot some time later. He took nothing with him but the battered harmonica, and the red flush of Omalo on his face.

When they felt thepop! of the lifescoot being snapped into s.p.a.ce, and they saw the dark gray dot of it moving rapidly away, flicking quickly off into invers.p.a.ce, the Blaster and the Mindee slumped into relaxers, stared at each other.

"We'll have to finish the war without him."

The Blaster nodded. "He could have won it for us in one minute. He's gone."

"Do you think he could have done it?"

The Blaster shrugged his heavy shoulders. "I just don't know. Perhaps."

"He's gone," the Mindee repeated bitterly. "He's gone? Coward! Traitor! Some day . . . some day . . ."

"Where can he go?"

"He's a wanderer at heart. s.p.a.ce is deep, he can go anywhere."

"Did you mean that, about finding him some day?"

The Mindee nodded rapidly. "When they find out, back on Earth, what he did today, they'll start hunting him through all of s.p.a.ce. He'll never have another moment's peace. Theyhave to find him . . . he's the perfect weapon. But he can't run forever. They'll find him."

"A strange man."

"A man with a power he can't hide, John. A man who will sooner or later give himself away. Hecan't hide himself cleverly enough to stay hidden forever."

"Odd that he would turn himself into a fugitive. He could have had peace of mind for the rest of his life.

Instead, he's got this . . ."

The Mindee stared at the closed portal s.h.i.+elds. His tones were bitter and frustrated. "We'll find him some day."

The s.h.i.+p shuddered, reversed drives, and slipped back into invers.p.a.ce.

Much sky winked back at him.

He sat on the bluff, wind tousling his gray hair, flapping softly at the dirty s.h.i.+rt-tail hanging from his pants top.

The Minstrel sat on the bluff watching the land fall slopingly away under him, down to the s.h.i.+ning hide of the sprawling dragon, lying in the cup of the hills. The dragon slept - awake - across once lush gra.s.s and productive ground.

City.

On this far world, far from a red sun that shone high and steady, the Minstrel sat and pondered the many kinds of peace. And the kind that is not peace, cannever be peace.

His eyes turned once more to the sage and eternal advice of the blackness above. No one saw him winkback at the silent stars. Deeper than the darkness.

With a sigh he slung the battered theremin over his frayed shoulders. It was a portable machine, with both rods bent, and its power-pack patched and soldered. His body almost at once a.s.sumed the half-slouch, round-shouldered walk of the wanderer. He ambled down the hill toward the rocket field.

They called it the rocket field, out here on the Edge, but they didn't use rockets any longer. Now they rode to s.p.a.ce on a whistling tube that glimmered and sparkled behind itself like a small animal chuckling over a private joke. The joke was that the little animal knew the riders were never coming back.

It whistled and sparkled till it flicked off into some crazy-quilt not-s.p.a.ce, and was gone forever.

Tarmac clicked under the heels of his boots. Bright, s.h.i.+ning boots, kept meticulously clean by polis.h.i.+ng over polis.h.i.+ng till they reflected back the corona of the field kliegs and, ever more faintly, the gleam of the night. The Minstrel kept them cleaned and polished, a clas.h.i.+ng note matched against his generally unkempt appearance.

He was tall, towering over almost everyone he had ever met in his homeless wanderings. His body was a lean and supple thing, like a high-tension wire; the merest suggestion of contained power and quickness.

The man moved with an easy gait, accentuating his long legs and gangling arms, making his well-proportioned head seem a bubble precariously balanced on a neck too long and thin to support it.

He kept time to the click of the polished boots with a soft half-hum, half-whistle. The song was a dead song, long forgotten.

He, too, was a half-dead, half-forgotten thing.

He came from beyond the mountains. No one knew where. No one cared where.He had almost forgotten.

But they listened when he came. They listened almost reverently, having heard the stories about him, with a desperation born of men who know they are severed from their home worlds, who know they will go out and out and seldom come back. He sang of s.p.a.ce, and he sang of land, and he sang of the nothing that is left for Man - all Men, no matter how many arms they have, or what their skin is colored - when he has expended the last little bit of Eternity to which he is ent.i.tled.

His voice had the sadness of death in it. The sadness of death before life has finished its work. But it had the joy of metal under quick fingers, the strength of turned nickel-steel, and the whip of heart and soul working through loneliness. They listened when his song came with the night wind; probing, crying, lonely through the darkness of a thousand worlds and in a thousand winds.

The pitmen stopped their work as he came, silent but for the hum of his song and the beat of his boots on the blacktop. They watched as he came across the field.

There was no doubt who it was. He had been wandering the star-paths for many years now. He had appeared, and that was all; he was. They knew him as certainly as they knew themselves. They turned and he was like a pillar, set dark against the light and shadow of the field. He paced slowly, and they stopped the hoses feeding the radioactive food to the little animals, and stopped the torches they boiled on the metal skins; and they listened.

The Minstrel knew they were listening, and he unslung his instrument, settling the narrow box with its tone-rods around his neck by its thong. As his fingers cajoled and pleaded and extracted the song of a soul, cast into the pit of the void, left to die, crying in torment not so much at death, but at the terror ofbeing alone when the last calling came.

And the workmen cried.

They felt no shame as the tears coursed through the dirt on their faces and over the sweat-s.h.i.+ne left from toil. They stood, silent and all-feeling, as he came toward them.

Then with many small crescendos, and before they even knew it was ended, and for seconds after the wail had fled back across the field into the mountains, they listened to the last notes of his lament.

Hands wiped clumsily across faces, leaving more dirt than before, and backs turned slowly as men resumed work. It seemed they could not face him, the nearer he came; as though he was too deep-seeing, too perceptive for them to be at ease close by. It was a mixture of respect and awe.

The Minstrel stood, waiting.

"Hey! You!"

The Minstrel stood waiting. The pad of soft-soled feet behind him. A s.p.a.ceman; tanned, supple, almost as tall as the ballad-singer - reminding the ballad-singer of another s.p.a.ceman, a blond-haired boy he had known long ago - came up beside the silent figure. The Minstrel had not moved.

"Whut c'n ah do for ya, Minstrel?" asked the s.p.a.ceman, tones of the South of a long faraway Continent rich in his voice.

"What do they call this world?" the Minstrel asked. The voice was quiet, like a needle being drawn through velvet. He spoke in a hushed monotone, yet his voice was clear and bore traces of an uncountable number of accents.

"The natives call it Audi, and the charts call it Rexa Majoris XXIX, Minstrel. Why?"

"It's time to move on."

The Southerner grinned hugely, lines of amus.e.m.e.nt crinkling out around his watery brown eyes. "Need a lift?"

The Minstrel nodded, smiling back enigmatically.

The s.p.a.ceman's face softened, the lines of squinting into the reaches of an eternal night broke and he extended his hand: "Mah name's Quantry; top dog on theSpirit of Lucy Marlowe . If y'doan mind workin' yer keep owff bah singin' fer the payssengers, we'd be pleased to hayve ya awn boward."

The tall man smiled, a quick radiance across the darkness the shadows made of his face. "That isn't work."

"Then done!" exclaimed the s.p.a.ceman. "C'mon, ah'll fix ya a bunk in steerage."

They walked between the wiper gangs and the pitmen. They threaded their way between the glare of fluorotorches and the sputtering blast of robot welding instruments. The man named Quantry indicated the opening in the smooth side of the s.h.i.+p and the Minstrel clambered inside.

Quantry fixed the berth just behind the reactor feeder-bins, sealing off the compartment with an electrical blanket draped over a loading track bar. The Minstrel lay on his bunk - a repair bench - with a pillow under his head. He lay thinking.The moments fled silently and his mind, deep in thought, hardly realized the ports were being dogged home, the radioactive additives were being sluiced through their tubes to the reactors, the blast tubes were being extruded. His mind did not leave its thoughts as the atomic motors warmed, turning the pit to green gla.s.s beneath the s.h.i.+p's bulk. Motors that would carry the s.h.i.+p to a height where the Driver would be wakened from his sleep - orher sleep, as was more often the case with that particular breed of psioid - to snap the s.h.i.+p through into invers.p.a.ce.

As the s.h.i.+p came unstuck from solid ground, hurled itself outward on an unquenchable tail of fire, the Minstrel lay back, letting the rea.s.suring hand of acceleration press him into deeper reverie. Thoughts spun, of the past, of the further past, and of all the pasts he had known.

Then the reactors cut off, the s.h.i.+p shuddered, and he knew they were in invers.p.a.ce. The Minstrel sat up, his eyes far away. His thoughts deep inside the cloud-cover of a world billions of light years away, hundreds of years lost to him. A world he would never see again.

There was a time for running, and a time for resting, and even in the running, there could be resting. He smiled to himself so faintly it was not a smile.

Down in the reactor rooms, they heard his song. They heard the build to it, matching, sustaining, whining in tune with the invers.p.a.ce drive. They grinned at each other with a sweet sadness their faces were never expected to wear.

"It's gonna be a good trip," said one to another.

In the officer's country, Quantry looked up at the tight-slammed s.h.i.+elds blocking off the patchwork insanity of not-s.p.a.ce, andhe smiled. Itwas going to be a good trip.

In the saloons, the pa.s.sengers listened to the odd strains of lonely music coming up from below, and even they were forced to admit, though they had no way of explaining how they knew, that this was indeed going to be a good trip.

And in steerage, his fingers wandering across the keyboard of the battered theremin, no one noticed that the man they called "The Minstrel" had lit his cigarette without a match.

NEVER SEND TO KNOW FOR WHOM.

THE LETTUCE WILTS.

So I'm watching the report on CNN about how little kids who've become enamoured of smackdown wrestling (which isso fulla c.r.a.p bogus I can never figure howany body can be dumb enough even to watch it, much less think of it as anything but staged stupidity, Three Stooges in ugly tights . . . but then I can also never understand why people who watch those weepy televangelists don't spot them as the con men they truly are), and the kids are so impressionable . . . not to mention dumb as a paving stone . . .

that they're setting up these makes.h.i.+ft WWF play areas in their backyards. And they're jumping on each other, and they're hitting each other with chairs, and they're throwing smaller kids against walls, and they're dropping both knees into some other urchin's solar plexus, and in general going way beyond the kind of silly horseplay you and I engaged in when we were their age. (Andhere's a question: isn't there an adult in that time zone who cansee what's going down, and maybe suggest that poking a garden hoe into another kid's eye might impair his career as an air traffic controller in later life?) But the chilling capper to this report is the moment when one of these doofus children, who has been - are you ready for this - videotaping the ma.s.sacre, isn't satisfied with the "reality" of the scenario, and he takes a flippin'cheese grater to the face of his "opponent," slicing and dicing the kid for life, and he looks intothe camera and grins and says, "See, now ya kinsee the blood! Ain't it kewl!" The troublemaker lesson to be learned from this story is: curiosity about things that you shouldn't be curious about can get you scarred for life. Oh, and the other lesson: stay away from people dumber than you. If such creatures exist.

Tuesday.

Henry Leclair did a double-take. His eyes racked and reracked between the Chinese fortune cookie in his right hand and the Chinese fortune cookiefortune in his left. He read it again:Tuesday .

Then again, querulously, "Tuesday?"

That was all. Nothing more; no aphorism about meeting one's true love on Tuesday; no saccharine cliche denoting Tuesday as the advent of good fortune; no Tuesday-themed accompanying notation warning of investing in hi-tech stocks on Tuesday. Nothing. Just the narrow, slightly-gray slip of rectangular paper with the printed wordTuesday and a period immediately after it.

Henry muttered to himself. "Why Tuesday? What Tuesday?" He absently let the fortune cookie slip from his fingers.

"d.a.m.n!" he murmured, watching the cookie sink quickly to the bottom of his water gla.s.s.

He returned his attention to the fortune.Tuesday. That was today. Biting his lower lip, Harry reached for the second of the three cookies. He pulled at the edge of the fortune paper protruding from the convoluted pastry. Placing the cookie back on its plate carefully, he turned the slip over and read it: You're the one.

Henry Leclair had been a premature baby. His mother, Martha Annette Leclair, had not carried him full term. Seven months, two days. Boom. Enter baby Henry. There was no explanation save the vagaries of female physiology. However, therewas another explanation: Henry - even pre-natal - had been curious. Pathologically, even pre-natally, curious. He had wanted free from the womb, had wanted to discoverwhat was out there .

When he was two years old, Henry had been discovered, in trapdoor-bottom pajamas, in mid-winter, crouching in the snow outside his home, waiting to see whether the white stuff fell from above or came up through the ground.

At the age of seven they had to cut Henry down. He had been swinging from a clothesline strung in the bas.e.m.e.nt, drying the family wash. Henry had been curious: what does it feel like to strangle?

By the time he was thirteen, Henry had read every volume of the ENCYLOPAEDIA BRITTANICA, copious texts on every phase of the sciences, all matter disseminated by the government for the past twenty-eight years, and biographies by the score. Also, somewhere between seven thousand, eight hundred, and seven thousand, nine hundred books on history, religion, and sociology. He avoided books of cartoons - and novels.

By the time he was twenty, Henry wore noticeably thick-lensed gla.s.ses; and he had migraine headaches.

But his all-consuming curiosity had not been satiated.

On his thirty-first birthday, Henry was unmarried and digging for bits of a stone tablet in the remains of a lost city somewhere near the Dead Sea. Curiosity.Henry Leclair was curious about almost everything. He wondered why a woman wore egret feathers in her hat, rather than those of the peac.o.c.k. He wondered why lobsters turned red when they were cooked. He wondered why office buildings did not have thirteenth floors. He wondered why men left home. He wondered what the soot-acc.u.mulation rate in his city was. He wondered why he had a strawberry mark on his right knee. He wondered all sorts of things.

Curiosity. He was helpless, driven, doomed in its itching, overwhelming, adhesive grip.

You're the one.

"I'm the one?" Henry blurted incredulously. "Me? I'm thewhat? What am I? What the blazes are you talking about?" He spoke to the insensate, unresponsive fortune paper.

This was, suddenly, overpoweringly, a conundrum for Henry. He knew, deep in his soul-matter, that curiosity demanded he must solve this intrusive enigma. Two such fortunes - two such incomprehensible mind-troublers - were more than mere coyness on someone's part. There was something not quite right here.Something , as Henry put it to himself, with stunning originality,more than meets the eye!

Henry called for the waiter. The short, almost bald, and overly-contemptuous Oriental pa.s.sed twice more - once in either direction - finally coming to a halt beside Henry's booth. Henry extended the two fortunes and said, "Who writes these?"

" ,"answered the waiter, with a touch of insouciant, yet distingue, impudence.

"I beg your pardon," Henry said, removing his noticeably thick-lensed gla.s.ses, dangling them in his other hand, "but would you mind speaking English?"

The waiter wrinkled his nose in distaste, stroked the cloth napkin draped over his forearm, and pointed to the manager, lounging half-asleep behind the cash register.

"Thanks," said Henry absently, his attention to the chase now directed elsewhere. He started to rise as the waiter turned. "Oh - check, please." The waiter stopped dead in his tracks, drew his shoulders up as though he had been struck an especially foul blow, and returned to the table. He hurriedly scribbled the check, all in Chinese glyphs except the total, and plunked it on the table. Muttering Eastern epithets, he stalked away.

Henry absently dropped the remaining fortune cookie in his jacket pocket as he picked up the check - so anxious was he now to speak to the manager. Quickly slapping his hat on his head, he gathered his topcoat off the chair, dropped a dollar and some change, and headed for the manager. The old man was slumped across the gla.s.s case, one arm securely pressed against the cash register's drawer. He awakened at almost the instant Henry stopped in front of him. His hand extended automatically for check and cash.

While the fellow was placing his check on a spindle, Henry leaned across and asked, quietly, "Can you tell me where you get these little fortunes?" He showed one. Henry expected more misdirection and confusion, as he had experienced with the waiter, but the Chinese manager did not take his eyes off the change he was delivering as he said, "We buy in lots. From trading company that sell us cookies. You want buy dozen, take home with you?"

Henry fended him off, and asked the name and address of the company. After a few seconds of deliberation, the manager reached out of sight under the counter, dragged forth a large notebook. He opened it, ran a finger down a column of addresses, said, "Saigon-San Francisco Trading Company, 431 Bessemer Street."Henry thanked him and strode out onto the sidewalk. "Taxi!" he called into the river of pa.s.sing cars, and a few minutes later was riding toward 431 Bessemer Street.The crimson clutching claw of cold curiosity . Oh, my.

The Saigon-San Francisco Trading Company was located in a condemned warehouse on the desolate lower end of Bessemer Street. In the manufacturing and warehouse section of the city, Bessemer Street was regarded as the drop-off dead end of the known universe. On Bessemer Street, the lower end was regarded much the same. Henry had an idea this building was the last rung on the ladder of aversion.

Beyond lay the dark, restless river.