The Loafers of Refuge (9 page)

“We knew that a few hotheads were going to oppose educating the Loafer children with our own, but we were hoping the more sensible people would see it our way,” said Carey.

“They’d better,” said Marge, with a snap to her voice. She stared at him narrow-eyed. “Is it true you took the Controller initiation rites with the young Loafer adults last winter?”

“Yes. I’m not really very good at it, but I can Control.”

“You’re going to need your abilities to control these angry citizens,” said Marge with a wry grin.

Micka had lost interest in the conversation. She wandered over to the row of small seats, each with its glass-topped tri-D screen turned up at a forty-five degree angle in front of it, and sat down. There were no chairs in her home in the waquil fruit, but she had seen the Hairless Ones use them.

Miss Kaymar, armed with a pad and pencil, appeared and asked her name.

The large room, which would seat over fifty children, was slowly filling. Some of the children looked sharply at Micka, and some ignored her. She sat quietly in her seat, except when three more adult Loafers came in leading their children and were duly registered. She motioned one of the boys to take the seat behind her.

Marge let the children talk until she was certain there would be no more latecomers, then rapped for order. She noted with gratification that only five desks were empty, indicating Issakson’s support was not as strong as he thought. When the children were quiet she took the roll Miss Kaymar had made and smoothly and quickly made changes in the seating. When all the little bodies had transferred as directed the four young Loafers were surrounded on all sides by Earthchildren.

Marge started at the left and went down the line, asking each child to stand up and introduce himself. Since the large majority of people lived on scattered farms most of the children knew only a few others in the room. Micka knew only the three other young Loafers. This small school was for children of twelve Eryears or younger, and had only three classes, of which only the beginners’ class had two teachers. Once a child had automatic memory retention perfected he needed only a guiding hand through the rest of his scholastic life, and this was all that was taught them during the first two years.

Miss Kaymar passed out the first looseleafs to each pupil, and Marge inserted the first matching sheet into the projector in her desk and began to talk. School had begun.

Carey, Timmy and a few other adults of both races who had been lingering quietly in the back of the room filed out of the door. Apparently there would be little trouble over school integration at Refuge.

Brian Jacobs paced back and forth on the rough rock floor of his cave and sang an anthem of hate to the unyielding rock,
his great bass voice reverberating in the large room like thunder echoing in the mountain passes. The sound rose to the roof and escaped into a cleft that led upward and opened as a long gash in the top of the mountain the people thereabouts had named Old Baldy. A small fire burned in a natural pit in the stone floor, and the smoke emerged into the open air in a thin, wide stream that would not be visible a hundred yards away. An almost round rock, four feet in diameter, fitted neatly into the mouth of the only tunnel that led into this sheltered spot. He had lived in this cave for the past sixteen years and never been attacked, but each night he exerted his great strength and rolled the rock into the tunnel.

He stood six feet four and weighed two hundred and forty pounds. On a world where the average height was five-and-a-half feet he was a giant. He had not fitted too well into the circumscribed routine of existence on crowded Earth, but nevertheless had not volunteered as a colonist. And when his number came up and he was called, shortly after his second period in Rehabilitation Hall, he had been certain of what he always secretly suspected. The Gall was rigged. Earth Control saw to it that the dissatisfied, the maladjusted, received a Gall. He had been in the second group of colonists to arrive on Refuge. He had not been so large, then, though he did have his full height. None of the tiny women on board the ship had wanted to marry him, and in the end he had remained a bachelor. It had not been long before he was in trouble again. This time, though, there was a place to run, and run he had. They had made one or two half-hearted trips into the mountains after him, but given it up when he proved hard to find.

They called him The-Old-Man-In-The-Mountain now, and used his name to frighten little children into obedience. His sentence of Involuntary Government Service was long dead, the Earth Central Statute of Limitations holding a man liable for the crime of fighting expiring after five years, but he had not chosen to return to civilization. In the wilderness, for the first time in his life, he had found freedom from the heavy, oppressive sense of people-people-people all around him. He did not choose to return to it.

It was time to be going. He stopped his singing, and listened
to the echoes dying around him. He rolled the great door rock to one side with a single tug, then paused to look back into the cave. The room was spotlessly clean, as always; the bed, covered with materials stolen off colonists’ clotheslines, made-up and neat. The dried! fruits and berries which, along with many succulent nuts and tubers, were his only food, hung from the ceiling on long strings. He had not eaten meat in twenty years, and he did not want to now. The animals who laired in the nearby forest knew and did not fear him.

The other furnishings and comforts he had accumulated in fifteen years of petty thievery were all in order. The fire would burn for at least twelve hours, and there was ample dried wood nearby.

He pulled the rock back into place and walked, bent almost double, through the low tunnel to the steep west slope of Old Baldy. He went down the barren face at a fast walk, and once within the heavy forest that began a short way down the mountain he began to trot. By the time he was on comparatively level ground he was running, and he gloried in the strength that would have let him run all day if necessary.

Three hours later he crouched in the heavy brush bordering the path from Loafertown to Refuge, feeling again the presence of the thousands of people in the town and the farms on all sides of him. It was faint, diluted by distance, but very real and apparent. Even in his cave he could, by concentration, detect their presence, but he did not often choose to concentrate. As a small child on crowded Earth he had first become aware that he was different. The feeling of separate-ness had grown stronger as he grew older, as did his awareness of the people around him. At fifteen, when the strains of puberty racked his already large body, his sense of awareness had sharpened, becoming almost painful in its intensity, and he had performed the first of the series of anti-social acts which led to his eventual isolation in a cave in the mountains. He attacked a grown man, and with his awkward young fists he beat him into insensibility.

He had tried to explain to the security men that the urge to fight had exploded inside him like a small bomb, causing an almost complete loss of self-control, but it had done no
good. The man had been a suitor of his divorced mother, and had seemed to personify all that was small and petty and mean in a small mean world. He had made the mistake of mocking young Brian because of his size, and deep frustration found an outlet in uncontrolled violence. His mother had married the man while he was serving his year in Rehabilitation Hall, and he had refused to return home when he emerged. This almost put him back for another term, but they finally placed him with his father, where he managed comparatively well for a year before starting another fight. This time he was closeted with the psychists before starting his term, and treatment had continued for his two years in the Hall, but none of it had changed him. He still suffered from feelings he could neither define nor explain, and sometimes the only outlet for pressures that mounted steadily every day was the release he found with his fists. The psychists, baffled, had at last given him up, not believing his story of his ability to receive impressions of the people around him, or his statement that he could always tell how people actually felt towards him regardless of their spoken words. Few people liked him.

They had tried every possible way to prove him insane, but except for their inability to shake his belief in his illusions he was as sensible as anyone else in a society not in itself too sane. He had tried seriously working with his curse, or gift, after that second time of confinement, but had barely started getting results when his number came up and he found himself on Refuge. The sense of being crowded was not so strong here. He might have calmed down and become a good citizen, but the habit of fighting had become settled, fulfilling a definite need.

The sound of childish voices fell like light rain through the woods and he was abruptly jerked back to the present. He crouched lower in the brush, muscles tensed, and enlarged his peephole with one finger. Two small girls in wirtl-leaf cloaks were walking towards him, discussing in the Loafer tongue the events of their first day in school, their fair young faces animated and lively.

Jacobs studied the two children with growing eagerness.
He got along well with children of any race. They had little guile or deceit about them. He could tolerate their company much better than that of their elders, and played with them often while a member of civilization. This, too, had aroused suspicions, but they were groundless. He would not have harmed or molested a child under any inducement. And he had grown too wise to try to explain to their parents that he could partially read children’s minds.

During his sixteen years of hermitage Jacobs had come in close and frequent contact with the Loafers, and had come to recognize and respect the little-understood power they possessed. He had seen and partially understood, and even tried mental projection himself, but after more years then he cared to remember had made only a few small faltering signs of progress. It was slow, far too slow, and he would be older than his white hair and beard indicated before he mastered their ability unless he obtained help.

He had gone to the Loafers in secret, gone to three separate tribes and begged the boon of knowledge from each, but they had rejected his plea with the sad wise smiles that said there was no hope, and had not believed him when he tried to explain that he had already made some progress alone. And so he had resolved on this dangerous course, and once he had made up his mind there was no turning back.

Micka and Hasel, in typical Loafer fashion, were discussing their experiences and sharing them, though they had been very similar. Both agreed that the Hairless Ones’ school was nothing like the one they attended every day at home, and was far more interesting, if very strange. “In the house of Carey Sheldon, where I have gone with my cousin Timmy, I have seen a box like that into which we looked,” Micka was confiding to Hasel. “It is called a tri-D set, and in its face pictures of people appeared and did those odd things the Hairless Ones do. It was not as much fun as a story by one of our teachers, though, for it had only sight and sound.”

“There was no feeling?” asked Hasel in a tone of mild contempt. “How could you enjoy a story which you only saw and heard, rather than shared?”

Micka opened her mouth to reply, and there was crashing
in the brush, as if some large animal were charging towards them. The girls looked about for a place to hide, but there was none. Micka had just time to scream once, soundlessly, and then Jacobs was on them, his big hands fastening firmly in their long hair. He held both girls, looking down into the small frightened faces for a long moment, then made his decision and released Hasel. She backed away, wide eyes intent on his red face, until she could turn and run, then flew for Loafertown and her father. He would deal with The-Old-Man-In-The-Mountain.

Jacobs slung the unresisting body of the girl over one massive shoulder and trotted down the path after her. After a few yards he reached an intersecting path that led towards the low mountains to the east. He stepped up the pace as he rounded the turn and ran lightly through the woods, hardly feeling the slight weight of the girl. He could cover fifty miles in a day’s time without strain; he would be at home in his cave above the timberline by moonrise.

N
YYUB HAD CALLED
a Council meeting, and there were three Hairless Ones present in addition to the Loafers: Carey and Doreen Sheldon, and Sam Harper, who had come with Brixta. Timmy had insisted that the big Earthman be allowed to attend, though he was a stranger to Nyyub.

The Council members sat on wirtl-mats spread on the floor of the large waquil-house which was reserved for their use. Nyyub opened the meeting in the formal Loafer manner by rising to his feet and giving, in English, a short speech of welcome to the visitors. When he sat down Timmy got to his feet and addressed the group.

“O my Father, friend Brixta of the Sweetwater Valley, of the clan-that-grows-its-own-homes, has words for us. His people have fed the powder called borax, supplied by Carey Sheldon and his friends, to the sacred breshwahr trees. He will give us the results of that feeding.”

The slim, rangy young Loafer sat down and Brixta rose to his feet. He was a powerful man at the height of his strength, a hundred years old by Earth reckoning, and his luxuriantly thick coat of black hair gave him the look of an Earthly bear. Like all Loafers he had a remarkable ability to assimilate strange languages, and had acquired a working proficiency in English in a few short months of association with Sam Harper and the other farmers in the Upper Sweetwater. He swept the seated men with a glance from sharp black eyes before he spoke. “The trees-that-live, within the past summer, have thrived and grown in a manner such as we have not seen for generations beyond count. It is as if all had become young again, young and vigorous, even the ancient ones whose thoughts were so slow and heavy as to be
almost not-there, almost not-living trees. Some of the sprouts have shot up in growth as much in a single summer as formerly they grew in ten. There has come into being a much stronger bond of friendship between Loafers and trees, and the Loafers of Sweetwater are at last reaping the harvest of many years of attention and care. The trees talk to us more often, and give freely of their knowledge as never before. Our food plants grow and thrive, our larders are filled with fruit and grain, and this is accomplished with less time and work than before. We in turn have passed those parts of our accumulated store of knowledge, and the new things we have learned which he can use, to our friend Sam Harper. He has made his fields to grow as no other fields grow on Refuge, and Earthmen come from miles around to admire the size of his corn and quantity of his peanuts. The other farms in the Sweetwater we have not aided, at the request of our wise young friend Carey who feels three farms sitting side by side, one of which has received Loafer aid and two which have not, will be a strong way of showing the effects of applying our knowledge. The Earthmen have seen, and now they know.”