The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories (26 page)

His father said quietly, “What you must look for, Fred, is the game which offers the really valuable prizes.”

“I know,” he said, and began to scan the booths. We don’t have a need for hula-hula dolls, he said to himself. Or boxes of salt water taffy.

Somewhere in the carnival lay the real spoils. It might be in the money-pitching board or the spinning wheel or the bingo table; anyhow it was there. He scented it, sniffed it. And hurried.

In a weak, strained voice his father said, “Um, maybe I’ll leave you, Freddy.” Tony had seen one of the girl platforms and had turned toward it, unable to take his eyes from the scene. One of the girls was already—but then the rumble of a truck made Fred Costner turn, and he forgot about the high-breasted, unclad girl on the platform. The truck was bringing the produce of the settlement, to be bartered in exchange for tickets.

The boy started toward the truck, wondering how much Hoagland Rae had decided to put up this time after the awful licking they had taken before. It looked like a great deal and Fred felt pride; the settlement obviously had full confidence in his abilities.

He caught then the unmistakable stench of Psi.

It emanated from a booth to his right and he turned at once in that direction. This was what the carny people were protecting, this one game which they did not feel they could afford to lose. It was, he saw, a booth in which one of the freaks acted as the target; the freak was a no-head, the first Fred had ever seen, and he stopped, transfixed.

The no-head had no head at all and his sense organs, his eyes and nose and ears, had migrated to other parts of his body beginning in the period before birth. For instance, his mouth gaped from the center of his chest, and from each shoulder an eye gleamed; the no-head was deformed but not deprived, and Fred felt respect for him. The no-head could see, smell and hear as good as anyone. But what exactly did he do in the game?

In the booth the no-head sat within a basket suspended above a tub of water. Behind the no-head Fred Costner saw a target and then he saw the heap of baseballs near at hand and he realized how the games worked; if the target were hit by a ball the no-head would plunge into the tub of water. And it was to prevent this that the carny had directed its Psi powers; the stench here was overpowering. He could not, however, tell from whom the stench came, the no-head or the operator of the booth or from a third person as yet unseen. The operator, a thin young woman wearing slacks and a sweater and tennis shoes, held a baseball toward Fred. “Ready to play, captain?” she demanded and smiled at him insinuatingly, as if it was utterly in the realm of the impossible that he might play and win.

“I’m thinking,” Fred said. He was scrutinizing the prizes. The no-head giggled and the mouth located in the chest said, “He’s thinking—I doubt that!” It giggled again and Fred flushed.

His father came up beside him. “Is this what you want to play?” he said. Now Hoagland Rae appeared; the two men flanked the boy, all three of them studying the prizes. What were they? Dolls, Fred thought. At least that was their appearance; the vaguely male, small shapes lay in rows on the shelves to the left of the booth’s operator. He could not for the life of him fathom the carny’s reasons for protecting these; surely they were worthless. He moved closer, straining to see…

Leading him off to one side Hoagland Rae said worriedly, “But even if we win, Fred, what do we get? Nothing we can use, just those plastic figurines. We can’t barter those with other settlements, even.” He looked disappointed; the corners of his mouth turned down dismally.

“I don’t think they’re what they seem,” Fred said. “But I don’t actually know what they are. Anyhow let me try, Mr. Rae; I know this is the one.” And the carny people certainly believed so.

“I’ll leave it up to you,” Hoagland Rae said, with pessimism; he exchanged glances with Fred’s father, than slapped the boy encouragingly on the back. “Let’s go,” he announced. “Do your best, kid.” The group of them—joined now by Bob Turk—made their way back to the booth in which the no-head sat with shoulder eyes gleaming.

“Made up your mind, people?” the thin stony-faced girl who operated the booth asked, tossing a baseball and recatching it.

“Here.” Hoagland handed Fred an envelope; it was the proceeds from the settlement’s produce, in the form of carny tickets—this was what they had obtained in exchange. This was all there was, now.

“I’ll try,” Fred said to the thin girl, and handed her a ticket.

The thin girl smiled, showing sharp, small teeth.

“Put me in the drink!” the no-head babbled. “Dunk me and win a valuable prize!” It giggled again, in delight.

That night, in the workshop behind his store, Hoagland Rae sat with a jeweler’s loupe in his right eye, examining one of the figurines which Tony Costner’s boy had won at the Falling Star Entertainment Enterprises carnival earlier in the day.

Fifteen of the figurines lay in a row against the far wall of Hoagland’s workshop.

With a tiny pair of pliers Hoagland pried open the back of the doll-like structure and saw, within, intricate wiring. “The boy was right,” he said to Bob Turk, who stood behind him smoking a synthetic tobacco cigarette in jerky agitation. “It’s not a doll; it’s fully rigged. Might be UN property they stole; might even be a microrob. You know, one of those special automatic mechanisms the government uses for a million tasks from spying to reconstruct surgery for war vets.” Now, gingerly, he opened the front of the figurine.

More wiring, and the miniature parts which even under the loupe were exceedingly difficult to make out. He gave up; after all, his ability was limited to repairing power harvesting equipment and the like. This was just too much. Again he wondered exactly how the settlement could make use of these microrobs. Sell them back to the UN? And meanwhile, the carnival had packed up and gone. No way to find out from them what these were. “Maybe it walks and talks,” Turk suggested.

Hoagland searched for a switch on the figurine, found none. Verbal order? he wondered. “Walk,” he ordered it. The figurine remained inert. “I think we’ve got something here,” he said to Turk. “But—” He gestured. “It’ll take time; we’ve got to be patient.” Maybe if they took one of the figurines to M City, where the truly professional engineers, electronics experts and repairmen of all kinds could be found… but he wanted to do this himself; he distrusted the inhabitants of the one great urban area on the colony planet.

“Those carny people sure were upset when we won again and again,” Bob Turk chuckled. “Fred, he said that they were exerting their own Psi all the time and it completely surprised them that—”

“Be quiet,” Hoagland said. He had found the figurine’s power supply; now he needed only to trace the circuit until he came to a break. By closing the break he could start the mechanism into activity; it was—or rather it seemed—as simple as that.

Shortly, he found the interruption in the circuit. A microscopic switch, disguised as the belt buckle, of the figurine… exulting, Hoagland closed the switch with his needle-nose pliers, set the figurine down on his workbench and waited.

The figurine stirred. It reached into a pouch-like construct hanging at it side, a sort of purse; from the pouch it brought a tiny tube, which it pointed at Hoagland.

“Wait,” Hoagland said feebly. Behind him Turk bleated and scuttled for cover. Something boomed in his face, a light that thrust him back; he shut his eyes and cried out in fright.
We’re being attacked!
he shouted, but his voice did not sound; he heard nothing. He was crying uselessly in a darkness which had no end. Groping, he reached out imploringly…

The settlement’s registered nurse was bending over him, holding a bottle of ammonia at his nostrils. Grunting, he managed to lift his head, open his eyes. He lay in his workshop; around him stood a ring of settlement adults, Bob Turk foremost, all with expressions of gray alarm.

“These dolls or whatever,” Hoagland managed to whisper. “Attacked us; be careful.” He twisted, trying to see the line of dolls which he had so carefully placed against the far wall. “I set one off prematurely,” he mumbled. “By completing the circuit; I tripped it so now we know.” And then he blinked.

The dolls were gone.

“I went for Miss Beason,” Bob Turk explained, “and when I got back they had disappeared. Sorry.” He looked apologetic, as if it were his personal fault. “But you were hurt; I was worried you were maybe dead.”

“Okay,” Hoagland said, pulling himself up; his head ached and he felt nauseated. “You did right. Better get that Costner kid in here, get his opinion.” He added, “Well, we’ve been taken. For the second year in a row. Only this time is worse.” This time, he thought, we won. We were better off last year when we merely lost.

He had an intimation of true foreboding.

Four days later, as Tony Costner hoed weeds in his squash garden, a stirring of the ground made him pause; he reached silently for the pitchfork, thinking, It’s an m-gopher, down under, eating the roots. I’ll get it. He lifted the pitchfork, and, as the ground stirred once more, brought the tines of the fork savagely down to penetrate the loose, sandy soil.

Something beneath the surface squeaked in pain and fright. Tony Costner grabbed a shovel, dug the dirt away. A tunnel lay exposed and in it, dying in a heap of quivering, pulsating fur, lay—as he had from long experience anticipated—a Martian gopher, its eyes glazed in agony, elongated fangs exposed.

He killed it, mercifully. And then bent down to examine it. Because something had caught his eye: a flash of metal.

The m-gopher wore a harness.

It was artificial, of course; the harness fitted snugly around the animal’s thick neck. Almost invisible, hair-like wires passed from the harness and disappeared into the scalp of the gopher near the front of the skull.

“Lord,” Tony Costner said, picking the gopher and its harness up and standing in futile anxiety, wondering what to do. Right away he connected this with the carnival dolls; they had gone off and done this, made this—the settlement, as Hoagland had said, was under attack.

He wondered what the gopher would have done had he not killed it.

The gopher had been up to something. Tunneling toward—his house!

Later, he sat beside Hoagland Rae in the workshop; Rae, with care, had opened the harness, inspected its interior.

“A transmitter,” Hoagland said, and breathed out noisily, as if his childhood asthma had returned. “Short range, maybe half a mile. The gopher was directed by it, maybe gave back a signal that told where it was and what it was doing. The electrodes to the brain probably connect with pleasure and pain areas… that way the gopher could be controlled.” He glanced at Tony Costner. “How’d you like to have a harness like that on you?”

“I wouldn’t,” Tony said, shivering. He wished, all at once, that he was back on Terra, overcrowded as it was; he longed for the press of the crowd, the smells and sounds of great throngs of men and women, moving along the hard sidewalks, among the lights. It occurred to him then, in a flash, that he had never really enjoyed it here on Mars. Far too lonely, he realized. I made a mistake. My wife; she made me come here.

It was a trifle late, however, to think that now.

“I guess,” Hoagland said stonily, “that we’d better notify the UN military police.” He went with dragging steps to the wallphone, cranked it, then dialed the emergency number. To Tony he said, half in apology, half in anger, “I can’t take responsibility for handling this, Costner; it’s too difficult.”

“It’s my fault too,” Tony said. “When I saw that girl, she had taken off the upper part of her garment and—”

“UN regional security office,” the phone declared, loudly enough for Tony Costner to hear it.

“We’re in trouble,” Hoagland said. And explained, then, about the Falling Star Entertainment Enterprises ship and what had happened. As he talked he wiped his streaming forehead with his handkerchief; he looked old and tired, and very much in need of a rest.

An hour later the military police landed in the middle of the settlement’s sole street. A uniformed UN officer, middle-aged, with a briefcase, stepped out, glanced around in the yellow late-afternoon light, made out the sight of the crowd with Hoagland Rae placed officially in front. “You are General Mozart?” Hoagland said tentatively, holding his hand out.

“That’s correct,” the heavy-set UN officer said, as they shook briefly. “May I see the construct, please?” He seemed a trifle disdainful of the somewhat grimy settlement people; Hoagland felt that acutely, and his sense of failure and depression burgeoned.

“Sure, General.” Hoagland led the way to his store and the workshop in the rear.

After he had examined the dead m-gopher with its electrodes and harness, General Mozart said, “You may have won artifacts they did
not
want to give up, Mr. Rae. Their final—in other words actual—destination was probably not this settlement.” Again his distaste showed, ill-disguised; who would want to bother this area? “But, and this is a guess, eventually Earth and the more populated regions. However, by your employment of a parapsychological bias on the ball-throwing game—” He broke off, glanced at his wristwatch. “We’ll treat the fields in this vicinity with arsine gas, I think; you and your people will have to evacuate this whole region, as a matter of fact tonight; we’ll provide a transport. May I use your phone? I’ll order the transport—you assemble all your people.” He smiled reflexively at Hoagland and then went to the telephone to place his call back to his office in M City.

“Livestock, too?” Rae said. “We can’t sacrifice them.” He wondered just how he was supposed to get their sheep, dogs and cattle into the UN transport in the middle of the night. What a mess, he thought dully.

“Of course livestock,” General Mozart said unsympathetically, as if Rae were some sort of idiot.