“I do,” said Cushing, “because I have read the History.”
Perhaps, he thought, it was not wise to argue so with this man sitting in the chair, to contradict so directly all that he had said. But it would be worse, he sensed, to buckle in to him. It would not do to show a weakness. There still might be reason here. Mad Wolf still might be willing, once the initial sparring had been done, to listen to the truth.
“The History?” asked Mad Wolf, speaking far too softly. “What is this history that you speak of?”
“A history written by a man named Wilson, a thousand years ago. It’s at a university…”
“The university on the bank of the Mississippi? That is where you came from—a sniveling, cowardly egghead hoeing his potato patch and huddling behind a wall? You come walking in here, as if you had a right, wanting what you call our sensitives…”
“And that’s not all,” said Cushing, forcing himself to speak as brashly as he could. “I want your blacksmiths and your spear- and arrow-makers. And I want the brain cases that you have.”
“Ah, so,” said Mad Wolf, still speaking softly. “This is all you want. You’re sure there’s nothing else?”
There was a secret amusement, a sly amusement, on the faces of the men who circled them. These men know their chief, knew the ways of him.
“That is all I’ll need,” said Cushing. “Given these things, it will be possible to find a better way of life.”
“What is wrong with the way we live?” asked Mad Wolf. “What is bad about it? We have food to fill our bellies; we have far lands to roam in. We do not have to work. It is told that in the old days all men had to work. They woke and ate their breakfasts so they could get to work. They labored all the day and then went home again and tumbled early into bed so they could get up early to return to work. They had no time to call their own. For all this, they were no better off than we are. For all their labor, they got only food and sleep. This we get, and much more, and do not have to work for it. You have come from that egghead fort of yours to change all this, to go back to the olden ways, where we will labor dawn to dusk, working out our guts. You would wake the Sleepers, an event we have stationed guards all these centuries to guard against, so they cannot come ravening from the butte…”
“I have told you there are no Sleepers,” Cushing said. “Can’t you take my word for that? Up there on the butte is knowledge that men have gathered from the stars. Knowledge that will help us, not to regain the old days, which were bad, but to find a new way.”
It was no use, he knew. They did not believe him. He had been mistaken. There was no reason here. They would never believe him.
“The man is mad,” the warden said.
“Yes, he truly is,” said Mad Wolf. “We have wasted time on him.”
Someone who had come up behind him seized Cushing, almost gently, but when he lunged to get away, hard hands closed upon him, forced his arms behind him and held him helpless.
“You have sinned,” Mad Wolf told him. “You have sinned most grievously.” To the men who had their hands on Cushing, he said, “Tie him to the post.”
The men who had stood in the circle now were breaking up, wandering away, and as they left, Cushing saw the post which until now had been hidden by their massed bodies. It stood no more than five feet high, fashioned from a new-cut tree, perhaps a cottonwood, with the bark peeled from it.
Without a word the men who held him forced him to the post, pulled his arms behind the post and tied them there, the thongs positioned in deep notches on either side of the post so he could not slide them free. Then, still without a word, they walked away.
He was not alone, however, for the gangs of small boys still were on the prowl.
He saw that he was in what appeared to be the center of the encampment. The larger space where the post was planted was the hub of a number of streets that ran between the lodges.
A clod of dirt went humming past his head, another hit him in the chest. The gang of boys ran down the street, howling at their bravado.
For the first time, Cushing noticed that the sun had gone and the landscape darkened. An unnatural silence encompassed everything. A great black cloud, almost purple in its darkness, boiled out of the west. The first broken forerunners of the cloud, racing eastward, had covered the sun. Thunder rumbled far off, and above the butte a great bolt of lightning lanced across the heavy blackness of the cloud.
Somewhere in one of the lodges, he told himself, the principal men of the tribe, among them Mad Wolf and the warden, were deciding what was to be done with him. He had no illusions, no matter the form their decision took, what the end result would be. He pulled against the thongs, testing them. They were tight; there was no give in them.
It had been insane, of course, this gamble of his—that men still might listen to reason. He realized, with a faint, ironic amusement, that he’d not been given a chance to explain what it was all about. His conversation with Mad Wolf had been in generalities. The failure of his attempt, he knew, hung on the concept of the Sleepers, a myth repeated so many times over so long a time that it had taken on the guise of gospel. Yet, yesterday, when he had talked it over with the others, he had been convinced that if his arguments were properly presented, there was better than an even chance they would be listened to. It was his years at the university, he told himself, that had betrayed him. A man who dwelled in a place of sanity was ill-equipped to deal with reality, a reality that still was colored by Collapse fanaticism.
He wondered, with a quaint sense of unreality, what would happen now. None of those still on the butte was equipped to carry forward the work, even to attempt to begin to form the organization of an elite corps that over the years could wrest the secrets from the data banks. Rollo was canceled out; as a robot he had no chance at all. Through Meg, for all her ability, ran a streak of timidity that would make her helpless. Ezra and Elayne were simply ineffectual.
Andy, he thought, half-grinning to himself. If Andy could only talk, he would be the best bet of them all.
Heavy peals of thunder were rippling in the west, and above the crest of Thunder Butte the lightning ran like a nest of nervous snakes. Heat and mugginess clamped down hard against the land. The huge cloud of purple blackness kept on boiling higher into the sky.
People were coming out of the lodges now—women and children and a few men. The hooting boys threw more clods and stones at him, but their aims were poor. One small pebble, however, hit him on the jaw and left a paralyzing numbness. Down the street he could see, still far out on the prairie, the guards driving a herd of horses toward the camp.
Watching the horses, he saw them break into a run, thundering toward the camp, with the guards frantically quirting their mounts in an endeavor to head them off or slow them down. Something had spooked the herd—that was quite evident. A sizzling lightning bolt, perhaps, or a nearby crack of thunder.
At the far edge of the camp someone shouted in alarm and the shout was picked up by others, the frightened shouts ringing through the camp between the pealing of the thunder. People were piling in panic out of the lodges, filling the street, running and screaming, instinctively reacting to the terror of the shouting.
Then he saw it, far off—the flicker of the lights, the zany sparkle of many Shivering Snakes against the blackness of the sky, riding before the approaching storm, sweeping toward the camp. He caught his breath and strained against the thongs. The Snakes, he asked himself, what were those crazy Snakes about?
But it was not, he saw, as the Snakes swept closer, the Snakes alone. Andy ran at the head of them, mane and tail flowing in the wind, his feet blurred with the speed of his running, while beside him raced the pale glimmer that was Rollo, and behind them and to each side of them, the dark blobs of a great horde of Followers, seen in the darkness only by virtue of the Snakes that spun in dizzy circles about each of them, illuminating them, picking out the wolflike shape of them. And behind the pack, the bouncing, bobbing spheres that were
the Team, straining to keep up.
At the edge of the camp the frightened horse herd came plunging down the street, rearing madly, screaming in their terror, careening into lodges that came tumbling down. People were running madly and without seeming purpose, screaming mouths open like wide O’s in the center of their faces. Not only women and children but men as well, running as if the hounds of hell were snapping at their heels.
As the horses came at him, Cushing hunkered low against the post. A lashing hoof grazed a shoulder as a screaming horse reared and swerved to go around him. Another crashed into a lodge and fell, bringing the lodge down with him, collapsed, tangled amid the leather and the poles, kicking and striking with its forefeet in an effort to get free. Out from under the fallen lodge crawled a man, clawing to pull himself along until he was able to get on his legs and run. A lightning flash, for a moment, lined his face, lighting it so it could be recognized. It was Mad Wolf.
Then Rollo was beside Cushing, knife in hand, slashing at the thongs. The camp was deserted now except for a few people still trapped beneath the fallen lodges, howling like gut-shot dogs as they fought their way to freedom. All about, the Shivering Snakes swirled in loops of fire and the Followers were dancing, with Andy capering in their midst.
Rollo put his head down close to Cushing’s ear and shouted so he could hear above the steady roll of thunder. “This should take care of it,” he shouted. He swept an arm at the camp. “We don’t need to worry about them anymore. They won’t stop running until they are over the Missouri.”
Beside Rollo bounced one of the Team, jittering in excitement. It bellowed at Cushing, “Fun you say we do not have and we know not what you speak of. But now we know. Rollo say to come and see the fun.”
Cushing tried to answer Rollo, but his words were swept away and drowned as the forefront of the storm crashed down upon them in a howl of rushing wind and a sudden sheet of water that beat like a hammer on the ground.
26
The dry cactus plains of the Missouri were behind them and ahead lay the rolling home prairies of the one-time state of Minnesota. This time, Cushing reminded himself, with some satisfaction, they need not follow the winding, time-consuming course of the gentle Minnesota River, but could strike straight across the prairie for the ruined Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and their final destination, the university. No nomad band, no city tribe, would even think of interfering with their march.
The first frosts of autumn had touched the trees with brushes of gold and red; hardy prairie flowers bloomed on every side. When spring came around, they would head back again for Thunder Butte, this time with a string of packhorses carrying supplies and with at least a few university residents added to the expedition. Perhaps, he thought, with more than that—some sensitives, perhaps, and a few brain cases, for during the winter, they would contact some of the city tribes and more eastern bands, who might be more open to reason than the nomad encampment had proved to be.
Far ahead of them Rollo ranged, scouting out the land, and, at a shorter distance, Andy, with his pack of Followers gamboling all about him like a bunch of pups at play. The Team rolled along sedately to one side, and, sparkling in the pleasant autumn sunshine, the swarms of Shivering Snakes were everywhere. They accompanied Rollo on his scouting runs; they danced with the Followers and with Andy; they swung in shimmering circles about everyone.
“You’ll clean me out,” the A and R had said in mock sorrow when they left. “You’ll leave me not a single Follower or Snake. It’s that silly horse of yours and that equally silly robot. They, the two of them, blot up all the crazy things they meet. Although, I’m glad they’re going, for any roving band that might intend to do you dirt will reconsider swiftly when they see the escort that goes along with you.”
“We’ll head back,” promised Cushing, “as soon as winter lifts enough to travel. We’ll waste no time. And I hope we’ll have others with us.”
“I’ve been alone so long,” the A and R had said, “that such a little interval does not really matter. I can wait quite easily, for now I have some hope.”
Cushing cautioned him, “You must realize that it all may come to nothing. Try as hard and earnestly as we may, we may not be able to untangle the mysteries of the data. Even if we do, we may find nothing we can use.”
“All that man has done throughout his history,” said the A and R, “has been a calculated gamble without assurance of success. The odds, I know, are long, but in all honesty, we can ask for nothing better.”
“If Mad Wolf had only gone along with us. If he had only listened.”
“There are certain segments of society that will never lend an ear to a new idea. They squat in a certain place and will not budge from it. They will find many reasons to maintain a way of life that is comfortable to them. They’ll cling to old religions; they’ll fasten with the grip of death on ethics that were dead, without their knowing it, centuries before; they will embrace a logic that can be blown over with a breath, still claiming it is sacrosanct.
“But I’m not like this. I am a foolish sentimentalist and my optimism is incurable. To prove that, I shall start, as soon as you are gone, sending out the probes again. When they begin returning, a hundred years from now, a millennium from now, we shall be here and waiting, eager to find out what they have brought back, hoping it will be something we can use.”
At times there had been small bands of scouts who sat their horses on a distant skyline and looked them over, then had disappeared, carrying back their word to the waiting tribes. Making sure, perhaps, that the march of this defiant group still traveled under the protection of the grotesques from Thunder Butte.
The weather had been good and the travel easy. Now that they had reached the home prairies, Cushing estimated that in another ten days they’d be standing before the walls of the university. There they would be accepted. There they would find those who would listen and understand. It might be, he thought, that it was for that very moment that the university had preserved itself all these long years, keeping intact a nucleus of sanity that would be open to a new idea—not accepting it blindly, but for study and consideration. When they set out next spring for Thunder Butte, there would be some from the university, he was certain, who would travel the return journey with them.
Meg was a short distance ahead of him and he trotted to catch up with her. She still carried the brain case, awkward as it might be to carry. During all the miles they’d traveled, it had been always with her. She had clutched it to her, even in her sleep.
“One thing we must be sure of,” she had told him days before. “Any sensitive who uses a brain case must realize and accept the commitment to it. Once having made contact with it, that contact must continue. You cannot awaken a brain, then walk away from it. It becomes, in a way, a part of you. It becomes best friend, your other self.”
“And when a sensitive dies?” he asked. “The brain case can outlive many humans. When the best friend human dies, what then?”
“We’ll have to work that out,” she said. “Another sensitive standing by, perhaps, to take over when the first one’s gone. Another to replace you. Or, by that time, we may have been able to devise some sort of electronic system that can give the brain cases access to the world. Give them sight and hearing and a voice. I know that would be a return to technology, which we have foresworn, but, laddie boy, it may be we’ll have to make certain accommodations to technology.”
That might be true, he knew—if they only could. Thinking of it, he was not sure that it was possible. Many years of devoted research and development lay as a background to the achievement of even the simplest electronic device. Even with the technological library at the Place of Going to the Stars, it might not be possible to pick up the art again. For it was not a matter of the knowledge only, of knowing how it worked. It was, as well, the matter of manufacturing the materials that would be needed. Electronics had been based not on the knowledge of the art alone but on a massive techn
ological capability. Even in his most hopeful moments he was forced to realize that it was probably now beyond man’s capacity to reproduce a system that would replace that old lost capability.
In destroying his technologic civilization, man might have made an irreversible decision. In all likelihood, there was no going back. Fear alone might be a deterrent, the deep, implanted fear that being successful, there’d be no stopping place; that once reinstituted, technology would go on and on, building up again the monster that had once been killed. It was unlikely that such a situation could come about again, and so the fear would not be valid, but the fear would still be there. It would inhibit any move to regain even a part of what had been lost in the Time of Trouble.
So, if mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology. In sleepless nights he had tried to imagine that other method, that other path, and there had been no way to know. It was beyond his mental capability to imagine. The primordial ancestor who had chipped a rock to fashion the first crude tool could not have dreamed of the kind of tools that his descendants would bring about, based on the concept implicit in the first stone with a contrived cutting edge. And so it was in the present day. Already mankind, unnoticed, might have made that first faltering step toward the path that it would follow. If it had not, the answer, or many different answers, might be in the data banks of Thunder Butte.
He caught up with Meg and walked beside her.
“There is one thing, laddie boy, that worries me,” she said. “You say the university will let us in and accept us and I have no doubt of that, for you know the people there. But what about the Team? Will they accept the Team? How will they relate to them?”
Cushing laughed, realizing it was the first time he had laughed in days.
“That will be beautiful,” he said. “Wait until you see it. The Team picking the university apart, the university picking the Team apart. Each of them finding out what makes the other tick.”