Polymath (21 page)

They could not refuse the offer of vitamin shots to help clear up the skin infections with which they all were afflicted; the sight of them stripped for the bath had been
revolting, because they were patched with sores and scabs. Moreover, Gomes’s swollen legs had become far worse thanks to his journey through the dense summer undergrowth along the river. But there too suspicion led them to insist that Jerode give himself an injection first.

Going with them from one place to another, Lex did not dare let a hint of his jubilation show on his face. He was worried that people might completely fail to understand his intentions, but it seemed that he had created enough trust in the community for no one to challenge him openly.

Your clothing is past hope: see if this will fit…. It does? Take it!

Your bedrolls are torn and filthy: we’ve made blankets now. Have some!

Your journey back will be tough: we have food to spare. Here you are!

Back at the headquarters hut, Gomes looked with satisfaction on everything they had been given. He still had his gun in his hand; now, glancing up at Lex, he gestured with it.

“Guess I should have brought more men, so’s we could carry more stuff away!” he gibed. “Still, it looks like a gun talks about as loud as ten men on the average, and more with luck.”

He spat in the dust. “So you’re a polymath,” he added. “But you can be just as dead as anybody else. So we’re level.”

Lex was very conscious of the many, many eyes turned on him. Everyone had left work to come and witness the appalling spectacle of Gomes and his men being loaded with as much as they could carry of the community’s goods. To his regret and alarm, their thinking had apparently stopped there—even Jerode, Fritch, Aldric, Cheffy, did not seem to have asked themselves whether this single load of booty was a real prize for Gomes.

But he was not at all surprised to see that Delvia, standing in shade alongside the hut, was smiling to herself when none of Gomes’s men were looking her way.

“Two more things,” Gomes said. “Just a couple more. Lex, you still have a brace of energy guns. The way things are I believe they’d be more use to us than you. Get ‘em!”

“No! No, you mustn’t!”

Fran the front row of the audience Hosper ran out, to
confront Gomes with his face pale, his hands clenched.

“You!” Gomes said. “After what you did, I ought to use this gun on you!” His lip curled. “But why should I waste good charge?”

And he reversed the gun and swung it butt-first against Hosper’s jaw.

A cry, and Jesset was trying to rush after her man, fingers like claws; if she had reached Gomes, she would have torn out his eyes. But someone was there to catch her, hold her, soothe her back to calmness.

Delvia.

If anyone tried to grade the community on a basis of potential for survival, Lex thought, Delvia would come a very good second to himself.

Gomes glared at Hosper, sprawled on the ground before him, then at Jesset panting while Delvia clutched her arm. He said, “Give me those guns, or I’ll burn these two!”

“Go ahead!” Jesset shouted. “It’s a cleaner death than what you’re doing to the people on the plateau!”

“Who has the guns?” Lex said quietly. “Aldric, is it you? Let him have them.”

“Thank you,” Gomes said with immense sarcasm, wiping sweat from his face. “You talked pretty big at first, Mr. Polymath! But these guns talk bigger, don’t they?”

Silently, with one glance at Lex as though he thought the community had been betrayed, Aldric placed the guns on top of one of the packs made up for Gomes’s men.

“Right, that’s almost all,” Gomes said. “Now I want to make one thing clear. Don’t follow us. Don’t try to get up to the plateau. We have all the guns now, and we can spare the time to watch for you creeping up on us. Now I’ve seen how much you have down here, I can see it’s going to be worthwhile coming back. So we will be back, guns and all, and we’ll collect what we want when we want. Next time maybe we’ll ask for more. And when we get our ship into orbit, we may be kind enough to mention that there are some other refugees here on this miserable mudball. Depends how well you behave, understand?”

He chuckled. At that moment Hosper, recovered from his blow on the jaw, made to gather himself and dive for Gomes’s swollen legs. Probian moved quicker. His foot shot out, and Hosper went sprawling again, clutching his face and moaning.

“Thanks, Probian,” Gomes acknowledged with a nod.

“I see I beat a spark of guts into Hosper, at any rate, even if the rest of you are only worried about your comfort and the whole skins you’re so fond of.”

He turned to his companions. “All right, load up. Let’s get away from here before dark.”

They moved obediently to shrug into their packs—all of them except Dockle. He was barely more than a boy, his face tanned to a burned-wood color, his limbs stalk-thin, his body meager. He stood rock-still, his blazing eyes on Gomes.

“That means you, Dockle,” the captain rumbled.

“I’m not going,” the boy said. “I’m not crazy.”

There was a sudden icy hush across the heat of the day. All eyes—Gomes’s, his companions’, the watchers’—turned to Dockle.

“I’m not going!” he repeated more loudly, and his voice was ragged at the edge of barely-suppressed tears. “I don’t want to go back to that hell of yours! You’ll never fix the ship! We’ve slaved over it for months, and all we’ve done is lift it up and show how badly the belly’s smashed. If we work the rest of the summer we’ll never get it ready, and if we don’t prepare for the winter we’ll all die of cold. I’m not going back!”

A wave of anger could be felt passing through the crowd. Lex knew it was directed at him. How could he stop a suicidal attack on Gomes’s party after what Dockle bad said? Even now he was sure no one else had followed his reasoning. Yet what he had in mind felt
right
. It didn’t feel as though it would lead to the horror of eight hundred people without weapons being massacred by eleven with energy guns.

And then, when he had begun to doubt his talent for being right within an hour or two of discovering it, Gomes provided him with the missing answer.

“Pick up that pack, Dockle,” he said in a low, threatening voice. “Because life down here isn’t going to be so pleasant after today. Sure it’s tough to get a ship fixed without proper facilities. But a polymath is claimed to be a substitute for just about everything.”

He whipped around, and his gun was once more leveled at Lex.

“You! Get down here! You’re a valuable property, and we don’t intend to leave you behind!”

The wave that passed through the crowd this time was of indrawn breaths, a collective gasp of dismay. Lex let
it die. He wanted everyone who was watching—except Gomes and his men—to see with clear eyes the precise manner of his obedience.

He said, “Very well. If that’s what you really want. But I won’t answer for the consequences.”

“Then I won’t answer for your survival!” Gomes snapped. “There’ll be two men watching you all the time with guns, so you’ll do as you’re told. There aren’t any more like Hosper on the plateau. We cleaned house.” He cast a glance at Dockle and jerked his head. Reluctantly, but now unable to keep his defiance up, the boy gathered his pack and strapped it on.

Probian had a rope. While the others held back the crowd with their guns he fixed it around Lex’s wrists, lashing them securely behind his back and taking the slack as a kind of leash.

“Move,” Gomes said curtly, and added with raised voice, “Anything you do to try to stop us, your boy Lex is the first to suffer. Keep your distance, all of you!”

Helpless, the crowd followed to the edge of town, hoping for some sign or clue from Lex which they would have obeyed in spite of the threatening guns. But Lex walked steadily among his captors, not looking back.

Clenching his fists in impotent fury as he watched the thieves dwindle along the riverbank, Fritch burst out, “What came over him? We’ll never get him away from them now! He must be out of his mind!”

“He knows what he’s doing!” Delvia flared, rounding on him.

“How can you be so sure?” Fritch snapped.

“He’s a polymath, isn’t he?”

“Polymath or not, he’s only young. And he’s only had part of the training.”

“Right,” Rothers said from a few yards away. “What’s
more, he turned out to be too fond of life to stand up against a gun.”

“I think you’re wrong,” Cheffy countered. Now they were gathering into tight groups as the argument broke into a dozen angry shifting fragments. “He’s seen for himself what conditions are like on the plateau. You’ve heard Hosper, Jesset, the others—you know it would be better to die than fall into Gomes’s hands, and so does he. He must have something figured out!”

From somewhere at the back of the crowd, Nanseltine shouldered his way toward them. Not much had been heard of him since his deflation at the assembly where Lex assumed command, but from his manner now it was clear he’d seen a chance to revert to his old blustering.

“Sure, he may well have figured something out!” he exclaimed. “Nothing that will help us, though! What if Gomes does manage to refit his ship with Lex’s help? Next thing you know, we’ll see it taking off with him and Gomes on board—”

The words exploded into a cry, and Nanseltine drew back, his hand to his reddening cheek. Panting, Delvia stood before him, arm raised for a second blow.

“Just because that’s exactly what you’d like to do, don’t accuse Lex of it, damn you! And the rest of you!” She whirled on the committee members surrounding her. “You’re practically as bad, laying all the responsibility on Lex and then panicking when he does something cleverer than you could have thought of!”

There was a momentary silence. Aldric appealed to Jerode. “Doc, you think she could be right?”

“I don’t know.” Jerode passed his hand over his bald scalp. “I must say I find it very hard to believe Lex would give in meekly without some purpose behind it But it seems like a desperate gamble in any case, and frankly I haven’t the least notion what he has in mind.”

“I can see one good reason for him to act as he did,” Delvia said. “Suppose we’d tried to overpower Gomes’s men. They’d have killed fifty of us easily and some of them would probably have got away. They’d have smashed our equipment, set fire to the buildings—we’d be in a hell of a mess! Lex cares about what happens to us; don’t you know that? And he cares just as much about the others on the plateau! You don’t believe that? Just because he kept turning down harebrained schemes that wouldn’t have freed them?”

She had the whole attention of the crowd now. Eyes blazing, voice ringing, she stormed on.

“Gomes said he’d cleaned house up there, got rid of traitors! But you heard what Dockle said, didn’t you, right to Gomes’s face? If his people hate Gomes that much, what’s going to happen when he gets back with his loot? Is he going to share it around among everybody? Hm? They’re going to hate him worse than ever. And with Lex right there among them—well!”

“But just one man against so many,” Fritch worried.

“Lex isn’t an ordinary man,” Delvia insisted. “Baffin, didn’t he lead you back, eight people and one of you injured, in the dark with Gomes’s men after you?”

“That’s so,” Baffin agreed. “He said he can see in the dark.”

“He told me that too,” Jerode said. “It’s one of his polymath modifications.”

“Well, then!” Delvia appealed to the crowd. “Gomes hasn’t got you or me to cope with. He’s got a ticking bomb! My guess is that Lex will be running things on the plateau his own way inside the week.”

“You make out a good case for your wonder-boy, Delvia,” Fritch grunted. “But like Gomes said, he’s a valuable property. We can’t just leave him to manage by himself.”

“I say we can and should,” Delvia snapped.

Jerode pondered for a moment. Finally he drew himself up. “I’m afraid Fritch is right,” he said. “We’ll have to send a party after him. What they can do without weapons, I don’t know, but—oh, perhaps they could ambush Gomes’s men while they’re asleep. At the very least we must know what’s happening. Baffin, you’ve done the trip more often than the rest. Pick your men.”

Hosper, his face discolored with angry bruises, strode forward at once, and Jesset came with him, clinging to his arm. Fritch stepped up also; then Aykin, Cheffy, Aldric, and others.

“Baffin, whatever you do, don’t interfere!” Delvia pleaded. He shrugged and didn’t answer.

It took some time to organize handlights, hatchets, rations, and other necessities, and it was late in the afternoon before the party was ready to move off. Baffin set a rapid pace. They passed the watchposts, then the site
of Lex’s ingenious trap which had caused Gomes’s men to reveal themselves.

A short distance past that point, Baffin gave a cry and pointed ahead.

“What is it?” Fritch demanded.

“I saw a gun-beam,” Baffin muttered. “Quicker! Come on!”

Mouths dry with apprehension, hearts pounding and lungs straining as they strove to keep up, they followed him through the whipping undergrowth. They had gone another mile and a half when they found the body.

Two thin legs protruded from a bush heavy with mid-summer foliage; the feet were bare. Inseotoids were coming to explore the flesh, crawling out of the bush and up from the ground.

Horrified, they halted. Baffin tugged aside the concealing stems and they recognized the corpse.

“It’s the youngster,” Fritch said, swallowing hard.

A bolt had seared Dockle from throat to waist. He had been stripped of everything he possessed except the charred shirt clinging to his ruined flesh. Out of his scream-open mouth the native carrion-takers were already running.

“Don’t stand around!” Hosper said with violence. “Let’s get after them—it’ll be Lex next!”

But Baffin was staring down at the body, his face set in a meditative frown. “I… wonder,” he said at last. “You blow, somehow I don’t think so. I’m beginning to see what Delvia meant.”

The trouble started sooner than Lex had dared to hope. As soon as they were out of sight of the town, Gomes’s party split into two clearly-defined groups. Gomes, with Probian and most of the others, went at the front, keeping Lex himself in the center with Probian holding his rope-leash. But Dockle and two others, the youngest of the party, kept a short distance behind, talking together in low voices.