Turncoat

VII

BASS whirled and ran back into the house, past the flames that were beginning to curl up the wall, through the dark kitchen. Footsteps pounded after him.

He burst through the outside door, crossed the yard in three strides, and heard the door slam again as he leaped the hedge into the yard behind. He swerved to the right, barely avoiding a child’s wagon that lay upturned on the ground, then forward again into the deep shadow along the side of the next house. Behind him he heard a crash and an explosive curse.

Chest straining, Bass reached the front of the house, turned left to the door, opened and closed it soundlessly after him. The desperate energy of the last few moments was already fading; he knew he was no match for anyone in an open chase. He mounted the dark stairs, keeping close to the bannister. He paused at the top, listened, heard nothing but the wild pounding of his own heart.

Light flared in the room below an instant after he stepped away from the landing.

They knew he was in the house. One of them must have circled it the other way, and they had met in front… .

Footsteps thudded faintly in the rooms below; he heard a door open and shut directly below him, then another farther away.

Bass took off his shoes. Carrying them, he moved cautiously into the front bedroom and closed the door. He put the shoes under the bed. The left-hand window was stuck, and he dared not force it. He pushed carefully at the other one, forcing it up a fraction of an inch at a time, dreading the shriek of wood on wood. Finally the space was high enough to let him out.

He looked down at the empty yard, then sat on the windowsill and swung his legs over.

Below him the door slammed and a red-uniformed man stepped out onto awl Walk. He glanced up, nodded, and spoke into the instrument in his hand, “He’s here, Harry. In the second-floor front.” Bass, with his legs half drawn inside the window again, heard brisk footsteps crossing the room below.

“Stay where y’are,” the man outside said pleasantly.

Desperately, Bass glanced up. The roof was just above him, an iron-gray blur against the sky. He gathered his legs under him, eased his head and shoulders out and stood up precariously, facing the house, fingers gripping the underside of the raised window. He shifted one hand to the top of the sash, leaned backward and reached up, with his free hand. His fingers closed over the rough, dry edges of the shingles. He gripped them convulsively, brought up his other hand to catch the roof, and swung out into space.

“Hurry it,” said the man below, urgently. Inside, the bedroom door was flung open with a crash.

With a lurch that nearly tore loose his grip on the roof-edge, Bass got one stockinged foot over the top, then his knee.

“Hell,” said the man below. There was a ping, and something shattered against the house-wall under Bass’s head. White vapor swirled around his face for an instant, blinding him; then the wind had whirled it away. Suddenly dizzy, with a gigantic effort he hoisted himself up and over.

He was lying halfway down the shallow pitch of the roof ; it was rolling vertiginously under him, and he felt as if he were going to be sick again.

A voice drifted up to him: “Gas didn’ work, too much wind, Harry. Better go up after him.”

A hand appeared on the roof-edge, then another. Bass flung himself at them dizzily, seized the fingers, pried them away from the room.

“Look out below,” said a resigned voice; then the fingers disappeared. Bass heard a thud.

He stood up carefully, hair flying in the wind, bending his knees to keep his balance on the slope. Across the ridge of the roof, the sky was one gigantic gold wild-pink glare.

In the other direction was the roof of the adjoining house. The gap between the two looked to be no more than four feet.

“Bass,” called a voice. One of the Guardsmen had backed into view down the lawn. “C’mon down, boy. We won’t hurt you.”

Bass moved down to the edge of the roof. Another gas-capsule burst at his feet, but the vapor whipped away instantly. He gathered himself and leaped across, clutching frantically as he landed to keep from slipping off the edge. He scrambled up again with his palms full of splinters and climbed to the ridge.

ONE Guardsman, limping, was heading around the corner of the first rouse; the other was still on the front lawn. Bass turned, straddling the center line, and moved back until he was out of sight from either direction before he clambered down the opposite slope.

One of the Guardsmen was standing between the houses, looking up at him. Be reasonable, will ya?” he said. Bass jumped across to the next roof.

It was harder to keep from sliding off this time, and harder to get up, but he managed it. He was very tired, and his mind was sluggish, but he knew they could never catch him. He would keep on walking across these roofs forever, if necessary, and by that time the whole city would have burned down. Then they would have to go away and leave him alone.

Here he was at the ridge again. “Bass,” called the Guardsman’s voice from somewhere to his left. “Lissen to me, Bass! Can ya hear me? It’s important, Bass! Lissen, we’ll make a deal ‘th ya—you come down, and we’ll leave ya family alone! Y’understand?”

His family … Bass’s mind snapped to clarity for a moment. How did they know who his family was? How did they know his name? Bewildered, he turned and walked a few steps toward the front of the house.

… But how did he know the Guard would keep its word to a “demon”? And anyhow, curse it, these weren’t Glenbrook Guardsmen. It didn’t make any sense. If they were Stamford Guardsmen, how could they hurt his family in Glenbrook? And if they weren’t, how did they know his name?

Too late, he heard the roaring swell up behind him and felt the wind suddenly blowing straight down along his body. Flailing his arms desperately to keep his balance, he turned to see a metal-andglass monster looming over him—a copter, its undercarriage almost brushing the ridge.

He had just time to see the head framed in the open doorway, the white hair, whipping wildly, orange-tinted in the glare. The face, contorted in a fearful scowl, was that of His Excellency, the Archdeputy Laudermilk.

“Hang on!” shouted the old man. Then the undercarriage touched Bass’s chest; he clutched it automatically as he felt himself being shoved backwards; and then he was dangling while the roof moved out from under him and the street gently rose.

When his feet touched, the Guardsman was there to seize his arms and hustle him into the copter’s open doorway. Bass made no resistance.

Someone closed the door and pushed him into a seat, and the copter rose again.

“Now,” said Laudermilk severely, “do you see how much trouble you’ve caused?”

Bass stared down through the copter’s transparent wall. They were cruising high over Stamford’s business district; he could see the fire from one end to the other. It stretched in a blazing arc halfway down the slope, the flames shooting forward at an acute angle, five-times the height of the buildings, sparks fountaining upward as if from a battery of titanic Roman candles. But it had not reached the wall at either end.

At the west end, the nearer one, Bass could see that the streets were clogged by streams of cars and people moving out of the danger area. Here and there, clumps of tiny green fire-engines were playing threads of water against the buildings in the fire’s path.

Bass could not see much of what was going on in the center, there was too much smoke. But he saw the white clouds that came billowing up out of the sepia: first one, then two together, then a whole row. Buildings were being dynamited to clear a firebreak.

That in itself, it occurred to Bass, must mean that most of the crowds had been evacuated already.

“The people in Glenbrook,” he said bitterly, “will see the red light and the smoke, and hear the explosions, and tell each other the demons are having a party.”

“Yes,” Laudermilk agreed, “and the Stamford people will think the demons in Glenbrook caused the fire. What did you expect?”

“It doesn’t matter what I expected,” Bass said.

“No, it doesn’t, unfortunately. You see, Arthur, it wouldn’t have done any good even if you had succeeded … yes, I know what you wanted to do. You wanted to drive the two peoples together, and make them see the truth about each other. As it is, I’m afraid you’ve only managed to remind the authorities once more what a dangerous thing a possessed man can be … and you’ve killed a few people, no doubt, not to speak of the property damage.”

“I’m not sorry I did it,” said Bass.

“No, neither am I, as a matter of fact,” Laudermilk said good-humoredly. “If you hadn’t, we might never have found you. That would have been a great pity.”

HE WASN’T making sense, Bass thought confusedly. They’d had him surrounded—his setting the fire had only helped them capture him a little sooner, that was all.

“Are you wounded?” Laudermilk asked abruptly. Fingers , probed under his shirts, rolling them back, turning him gently to examine the other side. “That’s not too bad—it went straight through. Hold still.” Something cool and gelatinous was smeared over the painful area; then an adhesive bandage, tight around his ribs.

“But don’t you suppose,” Laudermilk said, “that there have been catastrophes in the world before this? Not only local fires, but real catastrophes, that dislocated millions of people at a time. The great Missouri flood, for example, in 2097. The G.P.‘s and the U.M.‘s were mingled then, so thoroughly that it took five months to get them all sorted out. Or the powerplant explosion in the Urals in 2081. The Obprods and the Luchuvels both shot a great many of their own people then—there was a great stench about it in the World Court afterwards—but it really wasn’t at all necessary.”

Bass stared at him. “Why not?” he demanded.

“Because people looked at each other, and saw what they had been taught to see, plus a good deal that they made up themselves on the spot. And the stories grew in the telling. In Kentucky, for example, they don’t say that the Others have bat wings and fingers like pitchforks, or anything so tame and ordinary as that … they say that the Others are fifty feet tall, with heads that are all bones and teeth, and that worms crawl in and out of their eyes.”

Bass put his head in his hands. “We’d better move along now, Davy,” Laudermilk said to the pilot. “We’re very late.”

“Right.”

Bass felt the copter shudder and dip as the vanes were retracted; then the jets fired, the back-rest shoved hard against him, and the landscape below began to unreel majestically, carrying the fire, and Stamford, and all the scurrying little people in it out of sight.

“No,” said Laudermilk, “what you did was justified only because it helped us find you before the Stamford Guard did. And at that, Arthur, I doubt if you can appreciate now what a difficult situation you put us in. I had to disrupt my schedule with a very flimsy excuse, which will take weeks of work to cover up—and then when we did locate you, of course, we had to broadcast misdirections to the Stamford Guard units in order to give ourselves time to work. The consequences of that could be very serious indeed. You can consider yourself very fortunate, young man, that you’re as valuable to us as you are. I mean by that, of course, your genes. Yes. A very important strain. We thought it was lost.”

Bass chose one question at random out of the dozens that were crowding his mind. “Where are you taking me?”

“To Pasadena, Arthur.”

“Why?”

“To enroll you in the College. Not as Arthur Bass, of course—you’ve spoilt that name, I’m afraid. How would you like to be called Martyn? That’s an old and honorable name. Arthur Martyn. Yes. Rather too euphonious, if anything, but if you don’t mind—”

The submersible organ, whatever it was, that had choked Bass during his first interview with Laudermilk, was throttling him again now. “I don’t understand,” he managed.

“Arthur,” said the old man gently, “the people at the College are all like us —all sane. Faculty and students. There isn’t an angel-ridden person among them.”

Bass clutched the seat-arms fiercely, as if to make sure they were still there.

“Then,” he said desperately, “you mean that if I’d stayed in Glenbrook and not talked to anybody, or anything—”

“Yes,” said Laudermilk. “I’m afraid I must take the blame for that, Arthur. When I gave you the test this afternoon, your response was so well-acted that I wasn’t sure of you. And I assumed that was my error—that if you were acting, then your father must have told you about yourself, taught you to counterfeit the angel-reaction. He would have done so, of course, if he had lived. He was one of us, you know; so was your mother. I’ve checked the available records; there’s no doubt of it.”

Bass gaped at him. All at once things he had half-forgotten were coming back into focus. That book in his father’s study; a way both his parents had of looking at him sometimes, as if they knew a delightful secret that they mustn’t tell him just yet … and he had never, he realized abruptly, seen his angel outside the house they lived in. “I never had an angel at all,” he said aloud.

“No. Your parents, I rather think, persuaded you that you had by using a training film in darkened rooms—very difficult, and risky, but there’s no other way—people like us can’t be hypnotized. They kept you away from the cinema, I suppose, so that you wouldn’t realize you were being tricked.”

“I never saw a movie until I was ten.”

“Yes. You see, Arthur, twenty years ago we weren’t as well organized as we are now—we could neither support any great part of our numbers in hiding, as we do now in the College and other places, nor could we protect them adequately among ordinary people. So a great many of us—your parents included—had to sever their connections with us completely, and live just as if they were ordinary, orthodox citizens. We’re making up for that now; we’re gathering in their children.

“You see, those who pass the test I gave you are sent on to the College, where they’re given more thorough tests, and if they pass those, somehow or other they always fail their scholastic examinations, and we send them home. On the other hand, those who fail the first test are the ones we’re really after. We put them under immediate confinement, so they can’t betray themselves, ship them off to the College—and they stay. That was what I should have done with you.”

“But I still don’t understand,” said Bass. “You control the College of Religious Sciences—that must mean the Deacons are all your people—”

“Not all,” the Archdeputy corrected him. “Only a little more than thirty percent, and it’s taken us a long time to get that far. In another fifty years we’ll have complete control of the analogue machines—that’s their proper name, by the way—and something like half the Executive group will be our people, and perhaps thirty or forty percent of the Guard—like the two gentlemen who helped me coax you down off that roof.”

“And then,” said Bass, “you’ll stop all this—this—”

“Tyranny is the word, Arthur. It isn’t in any of the dictionaries you’ve seen, but you’ll learn it at the College, along with a lot of other old words. Politics. Democracy. Freedom … but the answer to your question is no. I’ll explain why, but first let me ask you a question. If we could somehow take Dean Horrock’s angel away from him tomorrow, would he be able to go on doing his job?”

“No. He wants to kill people.”

“Exactly. The group that you belong to now, Arthur, differs from the rest of the world’s population in two ways, not one. We’re immune to all forms of psychic compulsion—we owe that to a mutation—and we’re sane. That’s another word you’ll learn: the Mercantile jargon for it is ‘inherently stable.’

“Now do you begin to see? The analogue treatment was originally developed as a control for dangerously unstable persons—like your Dean. It worked so well that in the hundred and fifty years since then, mental instability has become the norm … we can’t get adequate figures, but we have good reason to believe that three people out of ten would be hopelessly insane without their ‘angels.’

“So all we can do is increase our own numbers as fast as we can, protect ourselves, consolidate our position, and try to keep the Mercantile system from smashing itself apart before we’re ready to take over. You know, there are some things even an ‘angel’ can’t do. It can’t keep a District Executive from making an irrational decision, for instance. You recall the protein-concentrate shortage last year? The man who made that mistake was replaced, naturally, but the man who replaced him isn’t much better. The angels can’t do anything about catatonia or epilepsy, either. More than three-quarters of the cases of ‘possession’ you hear about aren’t people like ourselves being caught, but normal people, so-called, collapsing into insanity. “The world our descendants will build eventually will be a good one, Arthur —no more hypnotism, in the analogue rooms or on the air or in the papers … and, I think, little insanity of any kind. But when the crash comes, it isn’t going to be pretty—that reminds me. I meant to show you these.” He handed Bass a half-dozen photographs. Bass examined them; they were not scenes of disaster, but pictures of girls about his own age. “Pretty” was evidently the word that had made Laudermilk think of them.

“Some of your fellow-students. All unmarried, so far. You have no objection to marriage, have you, Arthur?”

Bags was staring at the picture of al slender girl with smooth dark hair there was something intriguing about her smile and the way she stood. For an instant Gloria Andresson’s image rose up in his mind, looking oddly oven fleshed and stupid; then it vanished. “No,” he said abstractedly.

“Or children? But that comes a little later; I mustn’t rush you. Well. I’m going to catch a few winks of sleep now, I believe; it’s been a busy day.” He tilted his seat back and closed his eyes in repose, his face fell into tired lines but there was the suggestion of a benign smile among the wrinkles.

The plane droned on, past a final tendril of cloud, into the depthless night and the stars.