The Cache (27 page)

Mapfarity paid him no attention. He thumbed through the book, then reached down and lifted Rastignac from his crouching position by the corpse.

“There’s hope yet, Jean-Jacques,” he growled. “This book is printed with the same characters as those I saw in a book owned by a priest I knew. He said it was in Hebrew, and that it was the Holy Book in the original Earth language. This woman must be a citizen of the Republic of Israeli, which I understand was rising to be a great power on Earth at the time you French left.

They walked to the wharf’s end and climbed down a ladder to a platform where a dory was tied up. As they rowed out to their sloop Mapfarity said:

“Look, Rastignac, things aren’t as bad as they seem. If you haven’t the ship nobody else has, either. And you alone have the key to its entrance and operation. For that you can thank the Church, which has preserved the ancient wisdom for emergencies which it couldn’t forsee, such as this. Just as it kept the secret of wine, which will eventually be the greatest means for delivering our people from their bondage to the Skins and, thus enable them to fight the Amphibs back instead of being slaughtered.

“Meanwhile, we’ve a battle to wage. You will have to lead it. Nobody else but the Skinless Devil has the prestige to make the people gather around him. Once we accuse the Minister of Ill-Will of treason and jail him, without an official Breaker to release him, we’ll demand a general election. You’ll be made King of the Ssassaror; I, of the Terrans. That is inevitable, for we are the only skinless men and, therefore, irresistible. After the war is won, we’ll leave for the stars. How do you like that?”

Rastignac smiled. It was weak, but it was a smile. His bracket-shaped eyebrows bent into their old sign of determination.

“You are right,” he replied. “I have given it much thought. A man has no right to leave his native land until he’s settled his problems here. Even if Lusine hadn’t killed the Earthwoman and I had sailed away, my conscience wouldn’t have given me any rest. I would have known I had abandoned the fight in the middle of it. But now that I have stripped myself of my Skin—which was a substitute for a conscience—and now that I am being forced to develop my own inward conscience, I must admit that immediate flight to the stars would have been the wrong thing.”

The pleased Mapfarity said, “And you must also admit, Rastignac, that things so far have had a way of working out for the best. Even Lusine, evil as she was, has helped towards the general good by keeping you on this planet. And the Church, though it has released once again the old evil of alcohol, has done more good by so doing than . . .”

But here Rastignac interrupted to say he did not believe in this particular school of thought, and so, while the howls of savage warriors drifted from the wharfs, while the structure of their world crashed around them, they plunged into the most violent and circular of all whirlpools—the Discussion Philosophical.

THEY TWINKLED LIKE JEWELS

I

Jack Crane lay all morning in the vacant lot. Now and then, he moved a little to quiet the protest of cramped muscles and stagnant blood, but most of the time he was as motionless as the heap of rags he resembled. Not once did he hear or see a Bohas agent, or, for that matter, anyone. The predawn darkness had hidden his panting flight from the transie jungle, his dodging across backyards while whistles shrilled and voices shouted, and his crawling on hands and knees down an alley into the high grass and bushes which fringed a hidden garden.

For a while, his heart had knocked so loudly that he had been sure he would not be able to hear his pursuers if they did get close. It seemed inevitable that they would track him down. A buddy had told him that a new camp had just been built at a place only three hours drive away from the town. This meant that Bohas would be thick as hornets in the neighborhood. But no black uniforms had so far appeared. And then, lying there while the passionate and untiring sun mounted the sky, the bang-bang of his heart was replaced by a noiseless ‘ but painful movement in his stomach.

He munched a candy bar and two dried rolls which a housewife had given him the evening before. The tiger in his belly quit pacing back and forth; it crouched and licked its chops, but its tail was stuck up in his throat. Jack could feel the dry fur swabbing his pharynx and mouth. He suffered, but he was used to that. Night would come as surely as anything did. He’d get a drink then to quench his thirst.

Boredom began to sit on his eyelids. Just as he was about to accept some much needed sleep, he moved a leaf with an accidental jerk of his hand and uncovered a caterpillar. It was dark except for a row of yellow spots along the central line of some of its segments. As soon as it was exposed, it began slowly shimmying away. Before it had gone two feet, it was crossed by a moving shadow. Guiding the shadow was a black wasp with an orange ring around the abdomen. It closed the gap between itself and the worm with a swift, smooth movement and straddled the dark body.

Before the wasp could grasp the thick neck with its mandibles, the intended victim began rapidly rolling and unrolling and flinging itself from side to side. For a minute, the delicate dancer above it could not succeed in clenching the neck. Its sharp jaws slid off the frenziedly jerking skin until the tiring creature paused for the chip of a second.

Seizing opportunity and larva at the same time, the wasp stood high on its legs and pulled the worm’s front end from the ground, exposing the yellowed band of the underpart. The attacker’s abdomen curved beneath its own body; the stinger jabbed between two segments of the prey’s jointed length. Instantly, the writhing stilled. A shudder, and the caterpillar became as inert as if it were dead.

Jack had watched with an eye not completely clinical, feeling the sympathy of the hunted and the hounded for a fellow. His own struggles of the past few months had been as desperate, though not as hopeless, and . . .

He stopped thinking. He heart again took up the rib-thudding. Out of the corner of his left eye he had seen a shadow that fell across the garden. When he slowly turned his head to follow the stain upon the sun-splashed soil, he saw that it clung to a pair of shining black boots.

Jack did not say anything. What was the use? He put his hands against the weeds and pushed his body up. He looked into the silent mouth of a .38 automatic. It told him his running days were over. You didn’t talk back to a mouth like that.

II

Jack was lucky. As one of the last to be herded into the truck, which had been once used for hauling cattle, he had more room to breathe than most of the others. He faced the rear bars. The vehicle was heading into the sun. Its rays were not as hard on him as on some of those who were so jam-packed they could not turn to get the hot yellow splotch out of their eyes.

He looked through lowered lids at the youths on either side of him. For the last three days in the transie jungle, the one standing on his left had given signs of what was coming upon him, what had come upon so many of the transies. The muttering, the indifference to food, not hearing you when you talked to him. And now the shock of being caught in the raid had speeded up what everybody had foreseen. He was hardened, like a concrete statue, into
^v
a half-crouch. His arms were held in front of him like a praying mantis’, and his hands clutched a bar. Not even the pressure of the crowd could break his posture.

The man on Jack’s right murmured something, but the roaring of motor and clashing of gears shifting on a hill squashed his voice. He spoke louder,
“Cerea flexibilitas.
Extreme catatonic state. The fate of all of us.”

“You’re nuts,” said Jack. “Not me. I’m no schizo, and I’m not going to become one.”

As there was no reply, Jack decided he had not moved his lips enough to be heard clearly. Lately, even when it was quiet, people seemed to have trouble making out what he was saying. It made him mildly angry.

He shouted. It did not matter if he were overheard. That any of the prisoners were agents of the Bureau of Health and Sanity didn’t seem likely. Anyway, he didn’t care. They wouldn’t do anything to him they hadn’t planned before this.

“Got any idea where we’re going?”

“Sure. F.M.R.C. 3. Federal Male Rehabilitation Camp No. 3.I spent two weeks in the hills spying on it.”

Jack looked the speaker over. Like all those in the truck, he wore a frayed shirt, a stained and torn coat, and greasy, dirty trousers. The black bristles on his face were long; the back of his neck was covered by thick curls. The brim of his dusty hat was pulled down low. Beneath its shadow, his eyes roamed from side to side with the same fear that Jack knew was in his own eyes.

Hunger and sleepless nights had knobbed his cheekbones and honed his chin to a sharp point. An almost visible air clung to him, a hot aura that seemed to result from veins full of lava and eyeballs spilling out a heat that could not be held within him. He had the face of every transie, the face of a man who was either burning with fever or who had seen a vision.

Jack looked away to stare miserably at the dust boiling up behind the wheels, as if he could see projected against its yellow-brown screen his retreating past.

He spoke out of the side of his mouth. “What’s happened to us? We should be happy and working at good jobs and sure about the future. We shouldn’t be just bums, hobos, walkers of the streets, rod-hoppers, beggars, and thieves.”

His friend shrugged and looked uneasily from the corners of his eyes. He was probably expecting the question they all asked sooner of later:
Why are you on the road?
They asked, but none replied with words that meant anything. They lied, and they didn’t seem to take any pleasure in their lying. When they asked questions themselves, they knew they would not get the truth. But something forced them to keep on trying anyway.

Jack’s buddy evaded also. He said, “I read a magazine article by a Dr. Vespa, the head of the Bureau of Health and Sanity. He’d written the article just after the President created the Bureau. He viewed, quote, with alarm and apprehension, unquote, the fact that six percent of those between the ages of twelve and twenty-five are schizophrenics who need institutionalizing. And he was, quote, appalled and horrified, unquote, that five percent of the nation are homeless unemployed and that three point seven percent of those are between the ages of fourteen and thirty. He said that if this schizophrenia kept on progressing, half the world would be in rehabilitation camps. But if that occurred, the sane half would go to pot. Back to the stone age. And the schizos would die.”

He licked his lips as if he were tasting the figures and found them bitter.

“I was very interested by Vespa’s reply to a mother who had written him,” he went on. “Her daughter ended up in a Bohas camp for schizos, and her son had left his wonderful home and brilliant future to become a bum. She wanted to know why. Vespa took six long paragraphs to give six explanations, all equally valid and all advanced by equally distinguished sociologists. He himself favored the mass hysteria theory. But if you looked at his gobbledegook closely, you could reduce it to one phrase,
We don
’t
know.

“He did say this—though you won’t like it—that the schizos and the transies were just two sides of the same coin. Both were infected with the same disease, whatever it was. And the transies usually ended up as schizos anyway. It just took them longer.”

Gears shifted. The floor slanted. Jack was shoved hard against the rear boards by the weight of the other men. He didn’t answer until the pressure had eased and his ribs were free to work for more than mere survival.

He said, “You’re way off, schizo. My hitting the road has nothing to do with those splitheads. Nothing, you understand? There’s nothing foggy or dreamy about me. I wouldn’t be here with you guys if I hadn’t been so interested in a wasp catching a caterpillar that I never saw the Bohas sneaking up on me”

While Jack described the little tragedy, the other allowed an understanding smile to bend his lips. He seemed engrossed, however, and when Jack had finished, he said:

“That was probably an ammophila wasp.
Sphex
urnaria
Klug. Lovely but vicious little she-demon. Injects the poison from her sting into the caterpillar’s central nerve cord. That not only paralyzes but preserves it. The victim is always stowed away with another one in an underground burrow. The wasp attaches one of her eggs to the body of a worm. When the egg hatches, the grub eats both of the worms. They’re alive, but they’re completely helpless to resist while their guts are gnawed away. Beautiful idea, isn’t it?

“It’s a habit common to many of those little devils:
Sceliphron cementarium, Eumenes, coarcta, Eumenes fraterna, Bembix spinolae, Pelopoeus . . .”

Jack’s interest wandered. His informant was evidently one of those transies who spent long hours in the libraries. They were ready at the slightest chance to offer their encyclopaedic but often useless knowledge. Jack himself had abandoned his childhood bookwormishness. For the last three years his days and evenings had worn themselves out on the streets, passed in a parade of faces, flickered by in plateglass windows of restaurants and department stores and business offices, while he hoped, hoped. . . .

“Did you say you spied on the camp?” Jack interrupted the sonorous, almost chanting flow of Greek and Latin.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. For two weeks. I saw plenty of transies rucked in, but I never saw any taken out. Maybe they left in the rocket.”

“Rocket?”

The youth was looking straight before him. His face was hard as bone, but his voice trembled.

“Yes. A big one. It landed and discharged about a dozen men.”

“You nuts?”

“I saw it, I tell you. And I’m not so nutty I’m seeing things that aren’t there. Not yet, anyway!”

“Maybe the government’s got rockets it’s not telling anybody about.”

“Then what connection could there be between rehabilitation camps and rockets?”