Snow White and the Giants (22 page)

"And he really had no children?"
"We think not. We're almost sure that . . . "
She stopped suddenly.
I followed the direction of her eyes and saw Greg.
He was carrying a spare suit, which he dropped when he saw Miranda. His
expression answered one question. He had meant to kill her, and thought
he had.
Yet he didn't say "How did you get here?" He demanded: " What have
you done? "
She stood up. "What could I do?" There was a slight emphasis on the "I."
"I've lost it," he said hoarsely. "Something's taken it away from me. I
felt it go . . . I couldn't test it with death, that takes too long,
And I wanted to know. I tested it with girls. With Harrie, Wendy, Mary,
Chloe. They couldn't understand it either . . . But they all hate me,
can you understand that?"
Miranda seemed to grow as tall as Greg. A great joy flooded her. "You've
lost it?" she said. "Maybe there is natural justice after all. You're just
a kid now, a great overgrown kid. And helpless."
"Helpless?" he almost shouted, drawing himself up to his enormous height.
Yet he was almost blubbering. Curiously enough, I could understand him.
I'd known Jota for a long time. Jota had a strange Gift, and, I now
believed, very little else. His power, his personality, his success had
all come from something he couldn't help. He had Something; he wasn't
Somebody.
It's not necessarily true, as you're always told when you're a kid, that
a bully must be a coward. Yet there is a weakness, if not necessarily in
courage. A strong, brave, whole man or boy doesn't have to prove himself
at the expense of the weak. He may trample carelessly on the weak, as
strong men do. But he doesn't seek out the weak to torture and humillate
them. He'd rather engage in a real contest with someone his own size.
Jota and Greg had this in common, I now saw, that the thing that set them
apart was important to them, vital to them. They weren't like a banker who
happened to be a talented violinist, enjoying playing the violin for his
own pleasure and that of others, but with no compulsion to tell every new
bank client at once that he was a brilliant violinist. As far as I knew
Jota hadn't used his Gift to kill more than half a dozen people. But he'd
had to go on making amatory conquests -- he'd been forced to go on. Now
that I had the key I could see his Don Juan activities in a different
light, and no longer envied him in the slightest. Every girl who didn't
want him had to be made to want him . . .
Greg, however, was the problem of the moment. As he and Miranda faced
each other, I knew that the way this whole thing would go depended on what
happened now between Greg and Miranda -- and me. Because I mattered, too.
"Yes, helpless," I said. "But you knew that quite a while ago, Greg,
didn't you? You just didn't want to believe it."
He looked at me as if astonished to see me there. Then, remembering,
he looked around. His gaze passed over the sleeping Dina without
stopping. "Where's Jota?" he said.
I had become strong and confident. I felt it, as Greg had felt his
reduction to size, but the opposite way. I didn't even have to stand
up. I was still sitting on the burnt earth.
"I killed him, Greg," I said. "He was trying to add Dina to his list. I
didn't mean to kill him, but I'm not sorry he's dead. I'm beginning to
think his death was necessary."
"You killed him," Greg murmured. " You killed him."
"Why pretend to be surprised? You wanted to kill me, and couldn't. You
had to save me instead. I guess you managed to convince yourself that you
didn't need to kill me in the fire, that it was neater and cleverer and
just as efficient to bring me here to die when the stasis was removed. But
the truth was, you couldn't kill me. The most you could do was place me
in circumstances where I might die."
It was Miranda's turn not to be able to follow what was going on. She had
a glimmering of understanding, but there was still a lot she couldn't fit
into place.
Greg understood. He stared at me with naked hate, and clothed fear.
"Who are you, Val Mathers?" he whispered.
"Nobody in particular," I said. "But once Jota wanted to get rid of me. He
nearly got rid of me, and I came back. And the next time he wanted to get
rid of me, I didn't feel a thing. And an hour or two ago, you tried to
kill me. But you couldn't, could you? You had to bring me here instead,
and just
hope
I'd die. And when Jota and I fought, he died."
Miranda was standing quite still. "You're immune, Val," she whispered.
"You were the first neutral. Only your life had no effect, because you
never had children. But after what I told you . . . "
I understood now. I understood what had changed, and why.
Jota was an irrelevance anyway. In the first run of these few days,
he had died; in the second, he still died. So he was unimportant. He
was a red herring.
I was different. In the first fire, I hadn't died, evidently (or I'd never
have become the scapegoat). In the fire altered by the intervention of
the giants, I was certain I wasn't going to die either. But one thing
differed: but for Miranda, I'd never have had children. Now (I trusted
her -- on the whole I trusted her) I certainly would.
And Greg became impotent.
Yet not, perhaps, entirely impotent, in all senses.
His attention was all on me now. "You," he muttered. "It must be
you. By intervening, we mixed you up in this thing in a way you never
were before. Before we took a hand, you and Sheila and Dina stayed
at home and never knew a thing was happening until it was over. Your
curtains were drawn, nobody phoned you, the lights didn't fail, you
heard no noise. You went to bed and slept, the three of you, and it
wasn't until the next day that you discovered Shuteley had deen burned
to the ground. But we intervened, and . . . "
"And Jota still died," I said. "That was what you, Greg, wanted -- until
a little while ago. When you lost your precious Gift you realized that
somehow what was happening here tonight had snuffed the Gift out. It never
developed. It was beaten here . . . or else, who knows, the elements that
enabled it to be beaten between your time and mine were brought together."
"Yes," Miranda murmured.
"And you changed your mind completely," I said to Greg. "Miranda was
here to save Jota, you to make sure he stayed dead -- because both of
you believed that that would weaken the Gift in your time. A little
while ago, when you found you'd lost it, you decided, and perhaps you
were right, that Jota had to be saved. Save him, and maybe you saved the
Gift after all. So you came back for him. But you're too late, Greg --
I killed Jota."
He leaped at me.
I was on the ground. The advantage wasn't all with Greg; already on
the ground, I could move faster there than he could. He landed heavily
where I had recently been. Knowing I was not involved in a cheerful,
sporting contest, I kicked him in the kidney as I got up. After that,
his movements were slower. I also managed to hit him in the groin before
he got his bearings.
Yet when he was up, hurt badly and slowed down, I was instantly in
trouble. Miranda tried to help, and was canceled out in two seconds. A
single backhand swipe that caught her on the shoulder, with most of
Greg's 250 pounds behind it, finished her interest in the contest at
the moment it began.
Greg had not taken time to take off his suit. The fact, on the whole,
favored me. The plastic afforded him some protection, and he was hard
to grasp properly. But the heat his efforts generated was trapped in
the suit. I also guessed that the air supply from the tank at the back
was constant, not enough to sustain continued desperate activity.
Coming to the same conclusion as me, Greg tried to win grace to remove
his suit. And I kept at him so that he couldn't. Soon he was gasping
like a grassed fish.
He hit me once, and although it was only a glancing blow on my right
breast, the pain and numbness that went through me showed me my only
chance was either to hit Greg without being hit myself, or to fight him
as I had fought Jota.
Using his weight, I brought off a knee-drop which hurt him
badly. Nevertheless, it was perhaps a mistake, for he got up so mad
that I knew I was engaged in not much less than a fight to the death,
perhaps nothing less at all.
He couldn't get his suit off. Every time he tried, I hit him or butted
him or threw him.
My tactics paid off, for when suddenly he caught me a stinging blow on
the side of the head and I reeled, defenseless for a moment, he chose
to use the moment gained to get the suit off rather than to follow up
his advantage. And that was a life for me.
By the time he had stripped to his briefs I was able to go on.
The trend of the struggle changed. While he'd been wearing his suit there
had been no point in trying to throw him through the stasis wall. Now
there was.
I was deliberately trying to do what I had done quite accidentally in
Jota's case -- burn Greg to death. The blaze outside our bubble of
coolness was dying now, and yet the embers were so hot that if Greg
rolled out into them, he'd die as surely as Jota had.
Unlike Jota, however, Greg knew what would happen. And he was trying to
do the same to me.
He threw me once, by brute strength, and then launched himself at me,
intending to wind me with his weight. I rolled partly clear, but he
grabbed me and held me. He was on top, and I could do nothing about his
weight. He started to swing at my head a blow which would have ended my
interest in the fight.
Then he fell on top of me, limp.
I extricated myself. Dina was standing over us. She had picked up a
stone and hit Greg with it.
"Have I killed him?" she asked anxiously.
"I don't care if you have," I gasped.
"I didn't mean to kill him. But if I didn't knock him out, he'd have
taken the stone from me. So I had to hit pretty hard."
"You haven't killed him, Dina," I said, moving from Greg to Miranda,
who was dazedly picking herself up. I offered her a hand, but she shook
her head and sat down again, taking a breather. Greg had been pretty
rough with her that night.
I turned back to Dina, who was a singularly attractive stranger. She
wore a crisp white blouse which in the middle of all this was spotless,
a short black skirt with a wide belt, nylons and stiletto shoes. She
must have been fully protected from the beginning.
I asked her what had happened.
"I was watching television with Barbara and Gil," she said. "We heard
shouting first. Then the television suddenly went off. And there was
a glow at the window. The next thing, there was a glow at the other
window. Gil shouted: 'Get Garry and we'll go to the cellar.' "
So that was how it had happened . . . Before the giants intervened, when
Barbara and Gil were alone in the house with Garry, Gil's first reaction
had been to seek refuge in the cellar. A very reasonable idea, really
. . . the trouble was, he thought the fire that apparently surrounded
them was an ordinary fire, and it wasn't. In an ordinary fire, the cellar
of Gil's house would have been a perfect funkhole. But in the fire that
was to come, any cellar would become an oven, and anyone within would
be baked slowly and very painfully to death.
They had just reached the cellar when two big youths in plastic
suits appeared and practically dragged them back into the hall of the
house. Barbara, frightened, did exactly as she was told; Dina, curious,
was glad to get out of the dingy cellar and have a chance of seeing
what was happening; Gll, dazed, had to be shouted at before anything
registered; and Garry slept peacefully through the whole thing.
There had been a curious wait while people screamed outside, while crowds
ran past the house, while the red glow became bright enough to replace
the lights which had gone out. The youths in plastic suits didn't speak,
didn't answer Barbara's hysterical questions. Yet they had a comforting
air of knowing exactly what they were doing.
Unhurriedly they unwrapped a bundle and made Gil, Barbara, Dina and
Garry put on fire-suits -- the simpler version I had seen. And still
they all waited.
Then, quite suddenly, it was time to move. The giants gave the baby to
Barbara, opened the door, and they moved out.
It was indescribable -- at any rate, Dina entirely failed to describe it.
They walked along a street of fire. No one saw them because nobody not
wearing a suit could be there to see them. They felt no heat, breathed
easily and their eyes did not smart.
They had, after all, only a few hundred yards to go. Before they realized
it, they were in an area of comparative silence, completely calm, and cool,
fresh air.
The suits were at once taken from them. They would be used again and
again that night.
There were others in the stasis, many others -- frightened, bewildered
people. More were brought in every moment, in plastic suits which were
removed as they arrived.
Beyond this point Dina knew little or nothing more, because then Miranda
had appeared and taken her aside.
"She gave me a pill," said Dina. "And I fell asleep."
I looked past her at Miranda. That the giants had powers that were
remarkable to us was undeniable: that these powers were, after all,
limited was equally clear.
I could understand that Miranda's powers had been able to make of Dina
a whole person for the first time in her life. But that this could be
achieved merely by giving her a pill I could not believe.
Unseen by Dina, Miranda made a gesture. Its meaning was plain: she was
telling me not to pursue this.
Maybe she was right. I knew all I had to know.
Looking at Dina, I marveled. She didn't have any words she hadn't had
before; she didn't have any experience she had before.
But . . . Dina was normal. She couldn't have explained things as she had,
understanding in retrospect, unless she'd become something much nearer
an ordinary seventeen-year-old than she'd ever been.
Dina had never before told me a long and fairly complicated story which
I could understand. "She made me," referring to Sheila, was about the
most I could expect.
"I'm grateful," I said to Miranda, and I meant it.
Feeling better, Miranda stood up. There was pain in her face, but only
physical pain, and that was nothing. She glowed with happiness, relief,
satisfaction.