Demons' World

Chapter Two

“But he is a baby!”

“Amnesia, my dear,” said Simon, thin fingers cupping his chin. “Everything has gone. Everything. And that is strange. A man usually remembers language, habits, generalized information when he loses his memory. Usually all that is lost is personal history.”

“His brain just isn’t working.” Delia put one slender finger to her lips, mentally correcting that flat statement. “I mean, his upper conscious brain isn’t working. The thalamus, the automotive controls, they’re all right. He’s a husky brute, isn’t he? She turned under the lights of the austere, bare room with its single table and chair, stared down on the stranger who lay, naked and unsmiling, upon the table. The bandage around his head struck a hard blow of whiteness against the tawny flush of his skin. His eyes, wide open, a pale distant blue, regarded the ceiling without knowledge, without intelligence, without any flicker of self.

The stranger lay there on the table; a single glance told anyone that here lay a tough, competent, ruthless, dedicated man with yet a wide streak of sympathy and humor. The face, lax now and revealed, was hard and well-formed, the nose nobly beaked, the lips wide and thin, the chin stubborn yet pliant—a strong face, a face used to handling men and situations and forcing them to the will of the brain dominating that skull and body. Yet now that efficient human machine was informed and animated by no intelligence, no understanding, no pride of self.

“Just a baby,” said Delia, a tiny quirk pulling one corner of her soft mouth down in a smile she knew Simon would not altogether approve. “What did you call him?”

“Stead,” said Simon. He looked up at his assistant, the redoubtable and beautiful Delia, with her red curls cut barbarously short, her wide gray eyes that, as yet, no man had seen turn violet, her tall lissomness that shook a man’s guts with sudden savage power. Simon looked at her and sighed and, as he had done a thousand times, wished he were twenty years younger.

“Stead,” he said again. “That was the first word he spoke with he regained consciousness. The first and the only word.”

“Stead. Well, it means nothing in any language I know. It could be his name—” Delia stopped. Then she said, “The reports you handed me seemed rather confused. I’d like to see Forager Leader Thorbum myself, if you don’t mind. If we knew just what had happened to the stranger, to Stead, in the moments before he became unconscious, we might have a clue to the—”

“He most probably was in danger. So the word might be a cry for help, a warning to comrades.”

“I thought the report indicated he was alone.”

“So he was.” Simon turned as a low bubbly gasp came from the lax figure on the table. “But before you essay any further guesses, Delia, I’d like you to examine the artifacts found on his body. They form a most singular collection. Ah, he’s going to cry again.”

Going towards the door, Delia said with that dimpling smile, “All babies cry. At least, that’s what I’ve been told.”

Simon couldn’t bear to watch her as she left the room. His dead youth cried out in wrath that the merciless progress of time had irreparably separated them. Then, with a visible effort of his scrawny body and\ scraggy features, he banished Delia from his mind, turned to the oversize baby on the table.

Stead’s face creased. His eyes closed and the lids bulged. His mouth opened. “Baawwl!” said Stead.

“Flora,” called Simon. He felt suddenly alone, there with a crying baby. The quick sense of desperate urgency, that the baby’s crying should be investigated and stopped in the appropriate manner, filled him with alarm.

“All right, sir.” Flora bustled in, broad and smiling arid comforting, her stiff white apron rustling with every breath. “Don’t worry about him, Controller Simon, sir. I’ll soon give him his feed. Then he’ll be as right as a square meal.” She chuckled. “And I haven’t got to burp him. Fancy me trying to stroke his back!”

Simon left her to her ministrations with bottle and glass and feeding tube, ignoring the nurse’s joke. The problem of this stranger had been thrust onto him and while all his scientific ardor leaped at the challenge, his essential bachelor shyness cowered at these infant mysteries and filled him with a faint disgust. He’d never married because he had not found any woman he considered suitable, and now that Delia had come as his assistant, it was too late.

In the next room of the warren where the stranger’s clothes had been spread out on a workbench, Delia examined Stead’s strange one-piece outer garment.

“Practical,” she said, turning its greeny-gray, smoothly sliding material over in her hands. “No buttons, just this ingenious litde sliding thing that opens it from neck to ankle. Somebody had to think twice before they invented that one.”

The man’s underclothes lay in a neat pile to one side: white, hygienically clean, again woven of some material with which she was not familiar; they were recognizably a man’s undergarments. She dropped them back quickly. She had touched them only with the tips of her slender, delicate fingers.

He had apparently worn no helmet. At least, none had been brought in. He didn’t seem to have worn any armor at all. Delia thought that strange. Her work had brought her into contact with Foragers, rough uncouth men and women with athletic bodies and ferocious instincts and brains of unsuspected resilience, and she knew that no human being ventured outside without all the safeguards he could command. Even here, home inside the warren, the safeguards were sometimes necessary.

The electric light shone steadily upon the hand weapon. Someone had wired up the trigger so that it could not be pulled. A label had been tied on: Dangerous. Not to be operated without permission.

Characteristically of one class of secretary, no indication of what authority was needed to give permission was indicated. Delia touched her lips again with a finger, stirred the gun gently with the other.

It did not seem heavy. A ridged butt, a trigger and guard, a barrel, slender at the muzzle, heavily masked around the square magazine section. She assumed that must be the magazine although no sign of hopper or ejector met her interested gaze. Well, Tony or somebody like htm over at Physics would have to sort that one out.

For the rest, there were a writing implement, a pad of blank paper, a wrist watch that had no winding knob, a box of extraordinarily thin and tough tissue paper, a leather wallet that wasn’t leather, containing papers and small books filled with line after line of impossibly neat printing in a language that meant nothing to Delia. In a little transparent sheath was a photograph of Stead.

The photograph differed little from any photograph Delia had seen before of a handsome, tough young man, not smiling, level eyes gray-blue, fixed in watchful, grave regard. And there, of course, lay the one difference. For this photograph, if it was a photograph, was colored. And the color was not a photographic water tint, but gleamed and sparkled from the paper itself.

“Somewhere,” Delia said to herself, “somewhere or other on earth there is a_i empire or federation a little in advance of us.”

The thought did not please her. Like any young woman with a scientific training, she was proud of her own Empire of Archon, believing in her own psychological work, only half believing in the tales of Demons. Moreover, she was conscious of an upward destiny for mankind that might end anywhere, or at any rate far beyond the walls that confined the human race now.

A slip of paper lay among the items, bright pink with heavy printing that had deeply indented the thick paper. Delia recognized it at once. These receipt forms had been issued by her many times when confiscating some item from a worker or cleric or Forager or Soldier; she flicked it around with one manicured fingernail and saw that it had been signed by Shardiloe.

“Funny,” she mused. “If he took this gadget which they believe to be an antigrav, why didn’t he take the gun? I’d have thought that to be more important. Oh, well.” She turned to the last item on the workbench.

This was a small box, again constructed from the unfamiliar material of the gun butt, with a slender but recognizable aerial telescoping out from one corner. A dial was set in the center, marked with weird hieroglyphs, and a couple of switches appeared to be the only controls. One end of the box was sadly broken in to reveal a myriad of tiny wires and glistening beads. Radio was a field somewhat outside Delia’s experience. But she knew, with a little moue of anticipatory unpleasantness, that Belle would be along to collect the radio soon.

A tiny secret satisfaction titillated her that Belle, too, would be in for a shock when she tried to fathom the mystery. This radio, along with the buttonless coverall, the gun, the printing and the missing antigrav, posed problems the scientists of Archon were not yet equipped to solve.

She turned away from the bench with a quick, decisive movement. These, after all, were mere artifacts, the outward symbols of a civilization. Her job was vastly more complicated, exciting and important: to pry into the mind of this strange man, strip away all the appurtenances of his way of life and reach down through the man’s mind to the core of his being. Once she knew that, the rest would follow inevitably.

Or so she thought.

Unfortunately, the stranger had received a severe head injury, a blow that had jolted all memory from him, to leave him as receptive to impression and as aware of the past as a newborn baby. Delia’s face became taut and unconsciously drew itself into a dedicated mask.

“I’ll teach him,” she said softly. “I’ll reach down to him, show him who he is and what he is, and then I’ll stretch past that new self and pluck his old self, his real self, out from its crippled skull and hold it up and know!”

The door opened. Delia turned, guiltily, as though caught pilfering. Belle stood there, laughing at her, hazel locks tumbled about her elfin, urchin face, her snub nose lifted defiantly, her merry eyes shining with the knowledge that here she trespassed on the sacred precincts of Delia’s laboratory.

“Hullo, Delia, dear,” Belle said, advancing with both hands outstretched. “You do look solemn!”

“Do I? I’d have said you looked as though you’d just come in from a tumble in a corner.”

“And suppose I had? Isn’t that fun?”

“For those who like it.” Delia took Belle’s hands, feeling the quick warmness of them, knowing that Belle was feeling the cool composure of her own hands.

“Well, I do. Now, where’s the body?”

“Next door. Simon is still making preliminary observations.”

“Is it true he can’t remember a thing?”

“Quite true.”

“My dear, how wonderful! He can meet me—us—without any prior complications.”

“Why, Belle dear, I didn’t know you were frightened of competition.”

“I was thinking of you, dear.”

“You came for the radio? Well, here it is.”

Delia fumed and kept a bright smile as Belle walked across to the bench. These cheerfully catty, insulting matches meant nothing to Belle, but Delia sometimes really meant what she said. And Belle could be so infuriating at times.

Delia topped Belle by a good head and so far Belle, in a world of Belle-sized women, hadn’t brought out her most crushing remark. Delia quivered inwardly as she awaited its inevitable occurrence.

Belle looked at the stranger’s radio. She bent closer and a frown knit her beautiful eyebrows. She glanced at Delia and a pink tongue wetted her beautiful lips. Taking all this in, Delia felt glee.

The words Belle and beautiful belonged together somehow, and they could never be separated by any act of rationalism. Belle said slowly, “This is a radio—of sorts—all right. But hardly any valves. In fact—what are all these beads? And some of the wiring joins up with circuit-directions printed on the— Or are they solid transparent blocks? This is going to be a tough one.”

“You’ll understand it well enough,” Delia said sweetly. “One day.”

“Thank you for that kind thought, Delia, dear.” Belle picked up the radio and stood, cradling it, looking hard at Delia. “But then, you always were such a big girl…”

Delia writhed all over the inside of her face at the way, this time, Belle had done it. But the smile rigidly adhering to her face did not slip; the pegs of her self-control had been well rammed home.

Simon walked in, breaking the blue haze of the moment. “Hullo, Belle! Come for your part of the loot?”

“Yes, Simon. And if you’re faced with a nut like this one, you’re welcome.”

“The stranger poses problems right enough. Care to have a peep at him?”

“Try to stop me.”

“I don’t think,” Simon said in his dry, deliberate way, “it would pay anyone to try.”

They all walked through the connecting door. Flora wiped the table where much of the stranger’s food had found its way and smiled at Belle. She picked up a pair of men’s undergarments and began methodically to put them on Stead. Belle stood, face attentive, her bosom moving a little faster than when she and Delia had slanged each other.

“But,” Belle said. “But he’s so masculine!”

For some obcure but vital reason, Delia let that go. She felt some indecorousness about scratching at Belle in the presence, however unconscious, of this man, when he was not aware. He was asleep now. When he woke up she might forget that momentary jab of inner conflict and understanding.

“You have your radio,” she said brusquely. “Simon and I have work to do, real work.”

“Tinkering about with people’s brains, and you call it work. Now if you had the problem of maintaining wireless communication with all this infernal new howling that’s hitting the air these days, you’d find that real work.”

Simon, ready to enter into a discussion of the interference that had so recently begun on the air, said, “But some wavebands are free of it, and that could mean—”

“We don’t want to keep Belle,” interrupted Delia, pushing the shorter girl to the door with a genteel controlling wave of her hand. “She is so busy.”

“I’m going, Delia, dear. I’ll look forward to seeing you again.” And Belle, with a quick-blown kiss to Simon, went out.

“The cat.” said Delia.

Simon looked at her, frowned, smiled, put a hand on her arm. His profession had little need to show him what was needed here. “Oh, Delia. We’d better begin a chart of Stead’s reactions right away. We can teach him what we want him to know, but only he can tell us what we want to know.”

Delia responded easily. “Right, Simon. I’ll open a fresh chart right away.” She glanced down at Stead’s sleeping form which Flora had now clothed in a bright scarlet wrap. “We’d better put him in a proper bed. And I’ll need a whole slew of children’s toys, teaching blocks, the ^whole bag of tricks. He’s going to be a tough pupil, I feel that.”

“But you’ll teach him, Delia.”

“I’ll teach him, all right. Of course, I shall be giving him the education received by a Controller’s child. Perhaps, Simon, he isn’t a Controller. Maybe he’s a Forager or a Hunter, maybe a soldier.”

“That doesn’t matter. We want to know what he is and everything we can give him to make him remember will help. You fill him up, Delia, until he flows over.”

“I’ll teach him,” Delia said again. Her slender finger touched those ripe lips, her tiny secret smile flowered again. “Of course, he’ll fall in love with me during the process. I only hope that doesn’t hurt him too much.”