Kennedy turned out to have been an armorer-artificer of the North
American Navy, captured two years ago while deer-hunting too far from
the logging-camp road to New Portsmouth. Fed on scraps of gristle,
isolated from his kind, beaten when he failed to make his daily task of
spear heads and arrow points, he had shyly retreated into beautifully
interminable labyrinths of abstraction. Now and then, Charles Orsino got
a word or two of sense from him before the rosy clouds closed in. When
attempted conversation with the lunatic palled, Charles could watch the
aborigines through chinks in the palisade. There were about fifty of
them. There would have been more if they hadn't been given to
infanticide--for what reason, Charles could not guess.
He had been there a week when the boulders were rolled away one morning
and he was roughly called out. He said to Kennedy before stooping to
crawl through the hole: "Take it easy, friend. I'll be back, I hope."
Kennedy looked up with a puzzled smile: "That's such a _general_
statement, Charles. Exactly what are you implying--"
The witch girl was there, flanked by spearmen. She said abruptly: "I
have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?"
He gawked. The only thing that seemed to fit was: "That's such a
_general_ statement," but he didn't say it.
"Answer," one of the spearmen growled.
"I--I don't understand. I have no brothers."
"Your brothers in Portsmouth, on the sea. Whatever you call them, they
are your brothers, all children of the mother called Government. Why are
you untrue to them?"
He began to understand. "They aren't my brothers. I'm not a child of the
government. I'm a child of another mother far away, called Syndic."
She looked puzzled--and almost human--for an instant. Then the visor
dropped over her face again as she said: "That is true. Now you must
teach a certain person the jeep and the guns. Teach her well. See that
she gets her hands on the metal and into the grease." To a spearman she
said: "Bring Martha."
The spearman brought Martha, who was trying not to cry. She was a
half-naked child of ten!
The witch girl abruptly left them. Her guards took Martha and bewildered
Charles to the edge of the village where the jeep and its mounted guns
stood behind a silly little museum exhibit rope of vine. Feathers and
bones were knotted into the vine. The spearmen treated it as though it
were a high-tension transmission line.
"_You_ break it," one of them said to Charles. He did, and the spearmen
sighed with relief. Martha stopped scowling and stared.
The spearman said to Charles: "Go ahead and teach her. The firing pins
are out of the guns, and if you try to start the jeep you get a spear
through you. Now teach her." He and the rest squatted on the turf around
the jeep. The little girl shied violently as he took her hand, and tried
to run away. One of the spearmen slung her back into the circle. She
brushed against the jeep and froze, white-faced.
"Martha," Charles said patiently, "there's nothing to be afraid of. The
guns won't go off and the jeep won't move. I'll teach you how to work
them so you can kill everybody you don't like with the guns and go
faster than a deer in the jeep--"
He was talking into empty air as far as the child was concerned. She was
muttering, staring at the arm that had brushed the jeep: "That did it, I
guess. There goes the power. May the goddess blast her--no. The power's
out of me now. I felt it go." She looked up at Charles, quite calmly,
and said: "Go on. Show me all about it. Do a good job."
"Martha, what are you talking about?"
"She was afraid of me, my sister, so she's robbing me of the power.
Don't you know? I guess not. The goddess hates iron and machines. I had
the power of the goddess in me, but it's gone now; I felt it go. Now
nobody'll be afraid of me any more." Her face contorted and she said:
"Show me how you work the guns."
* * * * *
He taught her what he could while the circle of spearmen looked on and
grinned, cracking raw jokes about the child as anybody anywhere, would
about a tyrant deposed. She pretended to ignore them, grimly repeating
names after him and imitating his practiced movements in loading drill.
She was very bright, Charles realized. When he got a chance he muttered,
"I'm sorry about this, Martha. It isn't my idea."
She whispered bleakly: "I know. I liked you. I was sorry when the other
outsider took your dinner." She began to sob uncontrollably. "I'll never
see anything again! Nobody'll ever be afraid of me again!" She buried
her face against Charles' shoulder.
He smoothed her tangled hair mechanically and said to the watching,
grinning circle: "Look, hasn't this gone far enough? Haven't you got
what you wanted?"
The headman stretched and spat. "Guess so," he said. "Come on, girl." He
yanked Martha from the seat and booted her toward the huts.
Charles scrambled down just ahead of a spear. He let himself be led back
to the smithy block house and shoved through the crawl hole.
"I was thinking about what you said the other day," Kennedy beamed,
rasping a file over an arrowhead. "When I said that to change one
molecule in the past you'd have to change _every_ molecule in the past,
and you said, 'Maybe so.' I've figured that what you were driving at
was--"
"Kennedy," Charles said, "please shut up just this once. I've got to
think."
"In what sense do you mean that, Charles? Do you mean that you're a
rational animal and therefore that your _being_ rather than _essense_
is--"
"_Shut up or I'll pick up a rock and bust your head in with it!_"
Charles roared. He more than half meant it. Kennedy hunched down before
his hearth looking offended and scared. Charles squatted with his head
in his hands.
_I have been listening to you._
Repeated drives of the Government to wipe out the aborigines. Drives
that never succeeded.
_I'll never see anything again._
The way the witch girl had blasted her rival--but that was suggestion.
But--
_I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?_
He'd said nothing like that to anybody, not to her or poor Kennedy.
He thought vaguely of _psi_ force, a fragment in his memory. An old
superstition, like the id-ego-superego triad of the sick-minded
psychologists. Like vectors of the mind, exploded nonsense. But--
_I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?_
Charles smacked one fist against the sand floor in impotent rage. He was
going as crazy as Kennedy. Did the witch girl--and Martha--have
hereditary _psi_ power? He mocked himself savagely: that's such a
_general_ question!
Neurotic adolescent girls in kerosene-lit farmhouses, he thought
vaguely. Things that go bump--and crash and blooie and _whoo-oo-oo!_ in
the night. Not in electric lit city apartments. Not around fleshed-up
middle-aged men and women. You take a hyperthyroid virgin, isolate her
from power machinery and electric fields, put on the pressures that make
her feel alone and tense to the bursting point--and naturally enough,
something bursts. A chamberpot sails from under the bed and shatters on
the skull of stepfather-tyrant. The wide-gilt-framed portrait of
thundergod-grandfather falls with a crash. Sure, the nail crystallized
and broke--_who crystallized it?_
Neurotic adolescent girls speaking in tongues, reading face-down cards
and closed books, screaming aloud when sister or mother dies in a
railroad wreck fifty miles away, of cancer a hundred miles away, in a
bombing overseas.
Sometimes they made saints of them. Sometimes they burned them. Burned
them and _then_ made saints of them.
A blood-raw hunk of venison came sailing through one of the loopholes
and flopped on the sand.
_I was sorry when the other outsider took your dinner._
Three days ago he'd dozed off while Kennedy broiled the meat over the
hearth. When he woke, Kennedy had gobbled it all and was whimpering with
apprehension. But he'd done nothing and said nothing; the man wasn't
responsible. He'd said nothing, and yet somehow the child knew about it.
His days were numbered; soon enough the jeep would be out of gas and the
guns would be out of ammo or an unreplaceable part lost or broken. Then,
according to the serene logic that ruled the witch girl, he'd be
surplus.
But there was a key to it somehow.
He got up and slapped Kennedy's hand away from the venison. "Naughty,"
he said, and divided it equally with a broad spearblade.
"Naughty," Kennedy said morosely. "The naught-class, the null-class. I'm
the null-class. I plus the universe equal one, the universe-class. If
you could transpose--but you can't transpose." Silently they toasted
their venison over the fire.
* * * * *
It was a moonless night with one great planet, Jupiter he supposed,
reigning over the star-powdered sky. Kennedy slept muttering feebly in a
corner. The hearthfire was out. It had to be out by dark. The spearmen
took no chance of their trying to burn down the place. The village had
long since gone to sleep, campfires doused, skin flaps pulled to across
the door holes. From the corral one of the spavined, tick-ridden cows
mooed uneasily and then fell silent.
* * * * *
Charles then began the hardest job of his life. He tried to think,
straight and uninterrupted, of Martha, the little girl. Some of the
things that interrupted him were:
The remembered smell of fried onions; they didn't have onions here;
Salt;