Brain Wave (11 page)

“And you work the land in common?”

“Hardly the correct way to phrase it. Some of the mechanically minded have been devising machines to do most of this for us. It’s amazing what can be done with a tractor engine and some junk yard scrap if you have the brains to put it together in the right way.

“We’ve found our level, for the time being at least. Those who didn’t like it have gone, for the most part, and the rest are busy evolving new social reforms to match our new personalities. It’s a pretty well-balanced setup here.”

“But what do you do?”

“I’m afraid,” said the man gently, “that I couldn’t explain it to you.”

Brock looked away again. “Well,” he said finally, his voice oddly husky, “I’m all alone on the Rossman place and running short on supplies. Also, I’m gonna need help with the harvest and so on. How about it?”

“If you wish to enter our society, I’m sure a place can be found.”

“No—I just want—”

“I would strongly advise you to throw in with us, Archie. You’ll need the backing of a community. It isn’t safe out there any more. There was a circus near here, about the time of the change, and the wild animals escaped and several of them are still running loose.”

Brock felt a coldness within himself. “That must have been—exciting,” he said slowly.

“It was.” The man smiled thinly. “We didn’t know at first, you see; we had too much of our own to worry about, and it didn’t occur to us till too late that the animals were changing too. One of them must have nosed open his own cage and let out the others to cover his escape. There was a tiger hanging around town for weeks, it took a couple of children and we never did hunt it down—it just was gone one day. Where? What about the elephants and—No, you aren’t safe alone, Archie.” He paused. “And then there’s the sheer physical labor. You’d better take a place in our community.”

“Place, hell!” There was a sudden anger in him, bleak and bitter. “All I want is a little help. You can take a share of the crop to pay for it. Wouldn’t be any trouble to you if you have these fancy new machines.”

“You can ask the others,” said the man. “I’m not really in charge. The final decision would rest with the Council and the Societist. But I’m afraid it would be all or nothing for you, Archie. We won’t bother you if you don’t want us to, but you can’t expect us to give you charity either. That’s another outmoded symbol. If you want to fit yourself into the total economy—it’s not tyrannical by any means, it’s freer than any other the world has ever seen—we’ll make a function for you.”

“In short,” said Brock thickly, “I can be a domestic animal and do what chores I’m given, or a wild one and ignored. For
my
sake—huh!” He turned on his heel. “Take it and stick it.”

He was trembling as he walked out and got back into the truck. The worst of it, he thought savagely, the worst of it was that they were right. He couldn’t long endure a
half-in-half-out pariah status. It had been all right once, being feeble-minded; he didn’t know enough then to realize what it meant. Now he did, and the dependent life would break him.

The gears screamed as he started. He’d make out without their help, damn if he wouldn’t. If he couldn’t be a half-tamed beggar, and wouldn’t be a house pet, all right, he’d be a wild animal.

He drove back at a reckless speed. On the way, he noticed a machine out in a hayfield: a big enigmatic thing of flashing arms, doing the whole job with a single bored-looking man to guide it. They’d probably build a robot pilot as soon as they could get the materials. So what? He still had two hands.

Further along, a patch of woods came down to the edge of the road. He thought he glimpsed something in there, a great gray shape which moved quietly back out of sight, but he couldn’t be sure.

His calm temperament reasserted itself as he neared the estate, and he settled down to figuring. From the cows he could get milk and butter, maybe cheese. The few hens he had been able to recapture would furnish eggs. An occasional slaughtered sheer)—no, wait, why not hunt down some of those damned pigs instead?—would give him meat for quite a while; there was a smokehouse on the place. He could harvest enough hay, grain and corn—Tom and Jerry would just have to work!—to keep going through the winter; if he improvised a quern, he could grind a coarse flour and bake his own bread. There were plenty of clothes, shoes, tools. Salt was his major problem—but there ought to be a lick somewhere within a hundred miles or so, he could try to look up where and make a trip to it—and he’d have to save on gasoline and cut a lot of wood for winter, but he thought he could pull through. One way or another, he would.

The magnitude of the task appalled him. One man! One pair of hands! But it had been done before, the whole human race had come up the hard way. If he took a cut in his standard of living and ate an unbalanced diet for a while, it wouldn’t kill him.

And he had a brain which by pre-change measures was something extraordinary. Already, he had put that mind to work: first, devising a schedule of operations for the next year or so, and secondarily inventing gadgets to make survival easier. Sure—he could do it.

He squared his shoulders and pushed down the accelerator, anxious to get home and begin.

The noise as he entered the driveway was shattering. He heard the grunts and squeals and breaking of wood, and the truck lurched with his panicky jerk at the wheel.
The pigs!
he thought.
The pigs had been watching and had seen him go—

And he had forgotten his gun.

He cursed and came roaring up the drive, past the house and into the farmyard. There was havoc. The pigs were like small black and white tanks, chuffing and grunting. The barn door was burst open and they were in the stored feed bags, ripping them open, wallowing in the floury stuff, some of them dragging whole sacks out into the woods. There was a bull too, he must have run wild, he snorted and bellowed as he saw the man, and the cows were bawling around, they had broken down their pasture fence and gone to him. Two dead sheep, trampled and ripped, lay in the yard, the rest must have fled in terror. And Joe—

“Joe,” called Brock. “Where are yuh, boy?”

It was raining a little, a fine misty downpour which blurred the woods and mingled with the blood on the earth. The old boar looked shiny as iron in the wetness. He lifted his head when the truck came and squealed.

Brock drove straight for him. The truck was his only weapon now. The boar scampered aside and Brock pulled up in front of the barn. At once the pigs closed in, battering at the wheels and sides, grunting their hate of him. The bull lowered his head and pawed the ground.

Joe barked wildly from the top of a brooder house. He was bleeding, it had been a cruel fight, but he had somehow managed to scramble up there and save himself.

Brock backed the truck, swinging it around and driving into the flock. They scattered before him, he couldn’t get
up enough speed in this narrow place to hit them and they weren’t yielding. The bull charged.

There wasn’t time to be afraid, but Brock saw death. He swung the truck about, careening across the yard, and the bull met him head on. Brock felt a giant’s hand throw him against the windshield.

Ragged darkness parted before his eyes. The bull was staggering, still on his feet, but the truck was dead. The pigs seemed to realize it and swarmed triumphantly to surround the man.

He fumbled, crouched in the cab and lifting the seat. A long-handled wrench was there, comfortingly heavy. “All right,” he mumbled. “Come an’ get me.”

Something loomed out of the woods and mist. It was gray, enormous, reaching for the sky. The bull lifted his dazed head and snorted. The pigs stopped their battering attack and for a moment there was silence.

A shotgun blast ripped like thunder. The old boar was suddenly galloping in circles, wild with pain. Another explosion sent the bull crazy, turning on his heels and making for the woods.

An elephant
, gibbered Brock’s mind,
an elephant come to help—

The big gray shape moved slowly in on the pigs. They milled uneasily, their eyes full of hate and terror. The boar fell to the ground and lay gasping out his life. The elephant curled up its trunk and broke into an oddly graceful run. And the pigs fled.

Brock was still for minutes, shaking too badly to move. When he finally climbed out, the wrench hanging loosely in one hand, the elephant had gone over to the haystack and was calmly stuffing its gullet. And two small hairy shapes squatted on the ground before the man.

Joe barked feebly and limped over to his master. “Quiet, boy,” mumbled Brock. He stood on strengthless legs and looked into the wizened brown face of the chimpanzee who had the shotgun.

“Okay,” he said at last. The fine cold rain was chilly on his sweating face. “Okay, you’re the boss just now. What do you want?”

The chimpanzee regarded him for a long time. It was a
male, he saw, the other was a female, and he remembered reading that the tropical apes couldn’t stand a northern climate very well. These must be from that circus which the man in the store had spoken of, he thought, they must have stolen the gun and taken—or made a bargain with?— the elephant. Now—

The chimpanzee shuddered. Then, very slowly, always watching the human, he laid down the gun and went over and tugged at Brock’s jacket.

“Do you understand me?” asked the man. He felt too tired to appreciate how fantastic a scene this was. “You know English?”

There was no answer, except that the ape kept pulling at his clothes, not hard, but with a kind of insistence. After a while, one long-fingered hand pointed from the jacket to himself and his mate.

“Well,” said Brock softly, “I think I get it. You’re afraid and you need human help, only you don’t want to go back to sitting in a cage. Is that it?”

No answer. But something in the wild eyes pleaded with him.

“Well,” said Brock, “you came along in time to do me a good turn, and you ain’t killing me now when you could just as easy do it.” He took a deep breath. “And God knows I could use some help on this place, you two and your elephant might make all the difference. And—and—okay. Sure.”

He took off the jacket and gave it to the chimpanzee. The ape chattered softly and slipped it on. It didn’t fit very well, and Brock had to laugh.

Then he straightened his bent shoulders. “All right. Fine. We’ll all be wild animals together. Okay? Come along into the house and get something to eat.”

VLADIMIR IVANOVITCH PANYUSHKIN stood under the trees, letting the rain drip onto his helmet and run off the shoulders of his coat. It was a good coat, he had taken it off a colonel after the last battle, it shed water like a very duck. The fact that his feet squelched in worn-out boots did not matter.

Vision swept down the hill, past the edge of forest and into the valley, and there the rain cut it off. Nothing stirred that he could see, nothing but the steady wash of rain, and he could hear nothing except its hollow sound. But the instrument said there was a Red Army unit in the neighborhood.

He looked at the instrument where it lay cradled in the priest’s hands. Its needle was blurred with the rain that runneled across the glass dial, but he could see it dance. He did not understand the thing—the priest had made it, out of a captured radio—but it had given warning before.

“I would say they are some ten kilometers off, Vladimir Ivanovitch.” The priest’s beard waggled when he spoke. It was matted with rain and hung stiffly across his coarse robe. “They are circling about, not approaching us. Perhaps God is misleading them.”

Panyushkin shrugged. He was a materialist himself. But if the man of God was willing to help him against the Soviet government, he was glad to accept that help. “And perhaps they have other plans,” he answered. “I think we had best consult Fyodor Alexandrovitch.”

“It is not good for him to be used so much, my son,” said the priest. “He is very tired.”

“So are we all, my friend.” Panyushkin’s words were toneless. “But this is a key operation. If we can cut across to Kirovograd, we can isolate the Ukraine from the rest
of the country. Then the Ukrainian nationalists can rise with hope of success.”

He whistled softly, a few notes with a large meaning. Music could be made a language. The whole uprising, throughout the Soviet empire, depended in part on secret languages made up overnight.

The Sensitive came out of the dripping brush which concealed Panyushkin’s troops. He was small for his fourteen years, and there was a blankness behind his eyes. The priest noted the hectic flush in his cheeks and crossed himself, murmuring a prayer for the boy. It was saddening to use him so hard. But if the godless men were to be overthrown at all, it would have to be soon, and the Sensitives were necessary. They were the untappable, unjammable, undetectable link which tied together angry men from Riga to Vladivostok; the best of them were spies such as no army had ever owned before. But there were still many who stood by the masters, for reasons of loyalty or fear or self-interest, and they had most of the weapons. Therefore a whole new concept of war had to be invented by the rebels.

A people may loathe their government, but endure it because they know those who protest will die. But if all the people can be joined together, to act at once—or, most of them, simply to disobey with a deadly kind of peaceful-ness—the government can only shoot a few. Cut off from its own strong roots, the land and the folk, a government is vulnerable and less than a million armed men may be sufficient to destroy it.

“There is a Red Star,” said Panyushkin, pointing out into the rain. “Can you tell what they plan, Fyodor Alexandrovitch?”

The boy sat down on the running, sopping hillside and closed his eyes. Panyushkin watched him somberly. It was hard enough being a link with ten thousand other Sensitives across half a continent. Reaching for unlike minds would strain him close to the limit. But it had to be done.

“There is—they know us.” The boy’s voice seemed to come from very far away. “They—have—instruments. Their metal smells us. They—no, it is death! They send death!” He opened his eyes, sucked in a sharp gasp, and
fainted. The priest knelt to take him up and cast Panyushkin a reproachful look.