Beyond This Horizon (16 page)

He turned, and was about to leave. His resolution was shaken by another’s presence. He felt nakedly embarrassed.

Then he turned and looked at him. Her gaze was friendly and unsurprised. He recognized her—without surprise, and was surprised that he had not been. He saw that she recognized him.

“Oh, hello,” he said stupidly.

“Come sit down,” she answered.

He accepted silently, and squatted beside her. She said nothing more at the time, but remained resting on one elbow, watching him—not narrowly, but with easy quietness. He liked it. She gave out warmth, as the redwoods did.

Presently she spoke. “I intended to speak to you after the dance. You were unhappy.”

“Yes. Yes, that is true.”

“You are not unhappy now.”

“No,” he found himself saying and realized with a small shock that it was true. “No, I am happy now.”

They were silent again. She seemed to have no need for small speech, nor for restless movement. He felt calmed by her manner himself, but his own calm was not as deep. “What were you doing here?” he asked.

“Nothing. Waiting for you, perhaps.” The answer was not logical, but it pleased him.

Presently the wind became more chill and the fog a deeper grey. They started down. The way seemed shorter this time. He made a show of helping her, and she accepted it, although she was more surefooted than he and they both knew it. Then they were on the floor of the forest and there was no further excuse to touch her hand or arm.

They encountered a group of mule deer, a five-point buck who glanced at them and returned to the serious business of eating, his dignity undisturbed; two does who accepted them with the calm assurance of innocence long protected; and three fawns. The does were passively friendly, but enjoyed being scratched, especially behind their ears.

The fawns were skittishly curious. They crowded around, stepping on their feet and nuzzling their clothes, then would skitter away in sudden alarm at an unexpected movement, their great soft ears flopping foolishly.

The girl offered them leaves plucked from a shrub, and laughed when her fingers were nibbled. Monroe-Alpha tried it and smiled broadly—the nibbling tickled. He would have liked to have wiped his fingers, but noticed that she did not, and refrained.

He felt a compulsion to unburden himself to her, as they walked along, and tried to, stumblingly. He stopped long before he had made himself clear, and looked at her, half expecting to see disgusted disapproval in her eyes. There was none. “I don’t know what it is you have done,” she said, “but you haven’t been bad. Foolish, perhaps, but not bad.” She stopped, looked a little puzzled, and added reflectively, “I’ve never met any bad people.”

He tried to describe some of the ideals of the Survivors Club. He spoke of the plans for dealing with the control naturals as being the easiest and clearest to explain. No inhumanity, a bare minimum of necessary coercion, a free choice between a simple sterilizing operation and a trip to the future—all this in the greater interest of the race. He spoke of these things as something that might be done if the people were wise enough to accept it.

She shook her head. “I don’t think I would care for it,” she said gently, but with clear finality. He dropped the subject.

He was surprised when it became dark. “I suppose we should hurry on to the lodge,” he said.

“The lodge is closed.” That was true, he remembered. The Park was closed; they were not supposed to be there. He started to ask her if she had a skycar there, or had she come up through the tunnel, but checked himself. Either way, she would be leaving him. He did not want that; he himself was not pressed for time—his forty-eight hours would not be up until the morrow. “I saw some cabins as I came this way,” he suggested.

They found them, nestling half hidden in a hollow. They were unfurnished and quite evidently out of service, but strong and weather tight. He rummaged around in the cupboards and found a little glow-heater with more than enough charge showing on its dial for their needs. Water there was, but no food. It did not matter.

There were not even cushion beds available, but the floor was warm and clean. She lay down, seemed to nestle out a bed in the floor as an animal might, said, “Good night,” and closed her eyes. He believed that she went to sleep at once.

He expected to find it hard to get to sleep, but he fell asleep before he had time to worry about it.

When he awoke it was with a sense of well-being such as he had not enjoyed in many days—months. He did not attempt to analyze it at once, but simply savored it, wallowed in it, stretching luxuriously while his soul fitted itself, catlike, back into its leasehold.

Then he caught sight of her face, across the cabin floor, and knew why he felt cheerful. She was still asleep, her head cradled on the curve of her arm. Bright sun flooded in through the window and illuminated her face. It was, he decided, not necessarily a beautiful face, although he could find no fault with it. Its charm lay more in a childlike quality, a look of fresh wonder, as if she greeted each new experience as truly new and wholly delightful—so different, he thought, from the jaundiced melancholy he had suffered from.

Had
suffered from. For he realized that her enthusiasm was infectious, that he had caught it, and that he owed his present warm elation to her presence.

He decided not to wake her. He had much to think of, anyhow, before he was ready to talk with another. He saw now that his troubles of yesterday had been sheer funk. McFee was a careful commander; if McFee saw fit to leave him off the firing line, he should not complain or question. The Whole was greater than the parts. McFee’s decision was probably inspired by Felix, anyhow—from the best of intentions.

Good old Felix! Misguided, but a good sort anyhow. He would have to see if he couldn’t intercede for Hamilton, in the reconstruction. They could not afford to hold grudges—the New Order had no place for small personal emotions. Logic and science.

There would be much to be done and he could still be useful. The next phase started today—rounding up control naturals, giving them their choice of two humane alternatives. Questioning public officials of every sort and determining whether or not they were temperamentally suited to continue to serve under the New Order. Oh, there was much to be done—he wondered why he had felt yesterday that there was no place for him.

Had he been as skilled in psychologies as he was in mathematics he might possibly have recognized his own pattern for what it was—religious enthusiasm, the desire to be a part of a greater whole and to surrender one’s own little worries to the keeping of an over-being. He had been told, no doubt, in his early instruction, that revolutionary political movements and crusading religions were the same type-form process, differing only in verbal tags and creeds, but he had never
experienced
either one before. In consequence, he failed to recognize what had happened to him. Religious frenzy? What nonsense—he believed himself to be an extremely hard-headed agnostic.

She opened her eyes, saw him and smiled, without moving. “Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning,” he agreed. “I neglected to ask your name yesterday.”

“My name is Marion,” she answered. “What is yours?”

“I am Monroe-Alpha Clifford.”

“‘Monroe-Alpha,’” she mused. “That’s a good line, Clifford. I suppose you—” She got no further with her remark; her expression was suddenly surprised; she made two gasping quick intakes of breath, buried her face in her hands, and sneezed convulsively.

Monroe-Alpha sat up abruptly, at once alert and no longer happy. She? Impossible!

But he faced the first test of his new-found resolution firmly. It was going to be damned unpleasant, he realized, but he had to do it. The Whole is greater than the parts.

He even derived unadmitted melancholy satisfaction from the realization that he could do his duty, no matter how painful. “You sneezed,” he said accusingly.

“It was nothing,” she said hastily. “Dust—dust and the sunshine.”

“Your voice is thick. Your nose is stopped up. Tell me the truth. You’re a ‘natural’—
aren’t you?
”

“You don’t understand,” she protested. “I’m a—oh, dear!” She sneezed twice in rapid succession, then left her head bowed.

Monroe-Alpha bit his lip. “I hate this as much as you do,” he said, “but I’m bound to assume that you are a control natural until you prove the contrary.”

“Why?”

“I tried to explain to you yesterday. I’ve got to take you in to the Provisional Committee—what I was talking about is already an established fact.”

She did not answer him. She just looked. It made him still more uncomfortable. “Come now,” he said. “No need to be tragic about it. You won’t have to enter the stasis. A simple, painless operation that leaves you unchanged—no disturbance of your endocrine balance at all. Besides, there may be no need for it. Let me see your tattoo.”

Still she did not answer. He drew his gun and levelled it at her. “Don’t trifle with me. I mean it.” He lowered his sights and pinged the floor just in front of her. She flinched back from the burnt wood and the little puff of smoke. “If you force me, I’ll burn you. I’m not joking. Let me see your tattoo.”

When still she made no move, he got up, went to her, grabbed her roughly by the arm, dragging her to her feet. “Let’s see your tattoo.”

She hesitated, then shrugged her shoulders. “All right…but you’ll be sorry.” She lifted her left arm. As he lowered his head to read the figures tattooed near the arm pit she brought her hand down sharply near the wrist joint of his right hand. At the same instant her right fist made a painful surprise in the pit of his stomach.

He dropped his gun.

He dived after the gun before it had clattered to a stop and was up after her. But she was already gone. The cabin door stood open, framing a picture of sugar pines and redwoods, but no human figure. A bluejay cursed and made a flicker of blue; nothing else moved.

Monroe-Alpha leaped to the door and looked both ways, covering the same arc with his weapon, but the Giant Forest had swallowed her. She was somewhere close at hand, of course; her flight had disturbed the jay. But where? Behind which of fifty trees? Had there been snow on the ground he would have known, but the snow had vanished, except for bedraggled hollows, and the pine needles carpet of an evergreen forest left no tracks perceptible to his untrained eye—nor was it cluttered with undergrowth to impede and disclose her flight.

He cast around uncertainly like a puzzled hound. He caught a movement from the corner of his eye, turned, saw a flash of white, and fired instantly.

He had hit—that was sure. His target had fallen behind a baby pine which blocked his view, thrashed once, and was quiet. He went toward the little tree with reluctant steps, intending to finish her off mercifully, if, by chance, his first bolt had merely mutilated her.

It was not she, but a mule deer fawn. His charge had burnt away half the rump and penetrated far up into the vitals. The movement he had seen and heard could have been no more than dying reflex. Its eyes were wide open, deer soft, and seemed to him to be filled with gentle reproach. He turned away at once, feeling a little sick. It was the first non-human animal he had ever killed.

He spent only a few minutes more searching for her. His sense of duty he quieted by telling himself that she stood no chance of getting away here in a mountain forest anyhow, infected, as he knew her to be, with a respiratory ailment. She would have to give up and turn herself in.

Monroe-Alpha did not return to the cabin. He had left nothing there, and he assumed that the little glow-heater which had kept them warm through the night was equipped with automatic cut-off. If not, no matter—it did not occur to him to weigh his personal convenience against the waste involved. He went at once to the parking lot underground where he found his runabout, climbed in, and started its impeller. There was an immediate automatic response from the Park’s traffic signal system, evidenced by glowing letters on the runabout’s annunciator: NO CRUISING OVER GIANT FOREST—ANGEL THREE THOUSAND AND SCRAMBLE. He obeyed without realizing it; his mind was not on the conning of the little car.

His mind was not on anything in particular. The lethargy, the bitter melancholy, which had enervated him before the beginning of the Readjustment, descended on him with renewed force. For what good? To what purpose was this blind senseless struggle to stay alive, to breed, to fight? He drove the little capsule as fast as its impeller would shove it straight for the face of Mount Whitney, with an unreasoned half-conscious intention of making an ending there and then.

But the runabout was not built to crash. With the increase in speed the co-pilot extended the range of its feelers; the klystrons informed the tracker; solenoids chattered briefly and the car angled over the peak.

“When we die, do we die all over?”

A
S HE turned his back on the lifting runabout into which he had shanghaied Monroe-Alpha, Hamilton dismissed his friend from his mind—much to do and damned little time. Hurry!