Drunkard's Walk

CHAPTER XVI

Tai-i Masatura-san got up from his bed and walked to the strong new fence.

The crazy white people had not come up with dinner for them. It was getting very late, he judged, though the position of the stars was confusing. A few weeks ago, on his island, the Southern Cross, wheeling about the sky, was all the clock a man needed. These strange northern constellations were cold and unpleasant. They told him nothing he wanted to know, neither time nor direction.

His broad nostrils wrinkled angrily.

In order to become a tai-i he had had to become skilled in the art of reading the stars, among many other arts. Now that art was of no value, rendered useless by the stronger art of the white man. His gift of deepsmell, the reaching out with a part of his mind to detect truth or falsehood that made him a tribal magistrate, it had been voided by the old ones, who smelled so strongly and yet could baffle bis inner nose.

He should never have trusted the softspeaking white man of great age, he thought, and spat on the ground.

His second in command moaned at the door of the hut.

In the creolized speech which served them better than the tribe's pidgin or Masatura-san's painful English, the man whimpered: 'I have asked them to come, but they do not hear.'

'One hears,' said Masatura-san.

"The old ones are softspeaking endlessly,' whined the sick man.

'I hear,' said Masatura-san, closing his mind. He squatted, looking at the stars and the fence. Outside the campus was still noisy, voices, vehicles, even so late at night.

He thought very carefully what he wanted to do.

Masatura-san was a tai-i because of strength and learning, but also because of heredity. When the Japanese off the torpedoed destroyer had managed to reach his island in 1944 they had found a flourishing community. The Japanese strain in Masatura-san's ancestry came only from that generation. Before that his forebears were already partly exotic. The twelve Japanese were not the first sailors to wash ashore. Once 'Masatura-san' had been 'Masterson.' English fathers and Melanesian mothers had produced a sturdy race - once the objecting male Melanesians had been killed off. The Japanese repeated the process with the hybrids they found, as the English had done before them, except for a few.

One of these few was the great-grandfather of Tai-i Masatura-san. He had been spared for exactly one reason: he was the chief priest of the community, and had been for nearly a century; the islanders would have died for him. Many of them did.

Three hundred years later, his third-generation offspring had inherited some of his talents. One was 'deep smelling' -no sniff of the nostrils, but a different sense entirely. Another was age. Masatura-san himself was nearly a century old. It was the only thing he had managed to conceal from the owners of the strange softspeak voices who had found him on his island, and promised him much if he would help them.

'The 'deep smell' of the world beyond the barricade was very bad.

Tai-i Masatura-san thought carefully and made a decision. He moved over to the hut and poked his second in command with his foot. 'Speak along him-fella two-time again,' he ordered in pidgin. 'Me help.'

Cornut left his wife smiling laxly and sound asleep. 'I'll be back,' he whispered, and with Sergeant Rhame hurried out on to the campus. The wind was rising, and stars broke through scudding clouds. The campus was busy. Around the Med Centre hundreds of people still waited, not because they had hope of immunization - the fact that the vaccine was ineffective had been announced - but because they had nowhere else to go. Inside the Clinic, medics with white faces and red eyes laboured endlessly, repeating the same tasks because they knew no others. In the first hour they had discovered that the reference stacks had been looted of three centuries of epidemiology; they could not hope to replace them in finite time, but they could not help but try. Half the medics were themselves sick, ambulatory but doomed.

Cornut was worried, not for himself but for Locille. Thinking back to the Field Expedition, he remembered the shots that St Cyr himself had taken and felt it more than likely that everyone receiving them had been rendered immune to the smallpox. But what of Locille? She had had nothing.

He had already told Rhame about the shots, and Rhame had instantly reported to the police headquarters; they would radio the island, try to locate the medics who had administered the vaccine. Neither of them was hopeful. The immortals would surely have removed all traces of what might halt their attack against the short-lived bulk of humanity.

But that thought had a corollary too: If the immortals had removed it, the immortals had it now.

They found the aborigines waiting for them. 'You called us,' said Cornut - it was a question; he still could not really believe in it - and Masatura-san nodded and reached for his hand.

Rhame blinked at them dizzily. Cornut had made him take three large drinks too - not because Rhame had shown any signs of being telepathic, only because Cornut was not sure. It seemed like a drunken vision, the math teacher linking hands with the squat brown man, wordless. But it was no vision.

After a moment Cornut released the islander's hand. Masatura-san nodded and, without a word, took the bottle from Cornut, drank deep, and passed it to his second in command, barely conscious on the ground behind him. 'Let's go,' said Cornut thickly, his eyes glazed. (It was hard to be just drunk enough!) 'We need a popper. Can you get one?'

Rhame reached into his pocket automatically and spoke briefly into his police radio before he asked questions. 'What's happened?'

Cornut wavered and caught his arm. 'Sorry. It's all the immortals. You were right; they imported the smallpox carriers - went to a lot of trouble. But this fellow here, he's a lot older than he looks. He can read minds too.'

The police radio squawked faintly. 'They'll meet us over near Med Centre,' Rhame said, putting it back in his pocket. 'Let's go.' He was already moving before he asked. 'But where are we going?'

Cornut was having difficulty walking. Everything was moving so slowly, so slowly; his feet were like sausage-shaped balloons, he was wading through gelatine. He measured his movements carefully, in a drunken, painstaking effort at clarity; he did not dare get too drunk, he did not dare become sober. He said: 'I know where the the immortals are. He told me. Not words - holding my hand, mind to mind; bodily contact helps. He didn't know the name of the place, but I can find it in the popper.' He stopped and looked astonished. He said, 'God, I am drunk. We'll need some help.'

Rhame said, stumbling over the words, 'I'm drunk too, but I figured that out for myself. The whole Emergency Squad is meeting us.'

The cleared space near the Med Centre was ideal for landing helipoppers, even though it was dotted now with prostrate figures, sick or merely exhausted. Rhame and Cornut heard the staccato bark and flutter of the helipoppers and stood at the edge of the clear space, waiting. There were twelve police poppers settling towards them; eleven poised themselves in air, waiting; the twelfth blossomed with searchlights and came on down.

In the harsh landing light, one of the recumbent figures near them pushed himself up on an elbow, mumbling. His eyes were wide, even in the blinding light. He stared at Cornut, his lips moving, and he cried faintly: 'Carriers!'

Rhame first realized the danger. 'Come on!' he cried, beginning to trot, lurching, towards the landing popper. Cornut followed, but the others were walking feverishly. 'Carriers!' they cried, ten of them and then a dozen. It was like the birth of a lynch mob. 'Carriers! They did it to us! Get them!' Sick figures pushed themselves to their knees, hands clutched at them. Half a dozen men, standing in a knot, whirled and ran towards them. 'Carriers!'

Cornut began to run. Carriers? Of course they were not carriers; he knew what it was. It was St Cyr perhaps, or one of the others, unable to break through the barrier of alcohol to reach his own mind, working with the half-waking minds of the hopeless hundreds on the grass to attack and destroy them. It was quite astonishing, meditated one part of his mind with drunken gravity, that there were so many partial telepaths in this random crowd; but the other part of his mind cried Run, run!

Stones began to fly, and from fifty yards away, across the green, Cornut heard a sound that might have been a shot. But the popper was whirling its blades above them now; they boarded it and it lifted, leaving the sudden mob, wakened to fury, milling about below.

The popper rose to join the rest of the squad. 'That was just in time,' breathed Cornut to the pilot. 'Thanks. Now head east until—'

The co-pilot was turning towards him, and something in his eyes stopped Cornut. Rhame saw it as fast as he. As the co-pilot was reaching for his gun the police sergeant brought up his fist. Co-pilot went one way, the gun another. Sitting on the co-pilot, Cornut and Rhame stared at each other. They didn't have to speak; the communication that passed between them was not telepathic; they both came to the same conclusion at once. Cornut jumped for the gun, pointed it at the only other man in the popper, the pilot. 'This is an emergency popper, right? With medical supplies.'

Rhame understood at once. He leaped for the locker and broke out a half-litre of brandy in a sealed flask. He handed it to the pilot. 'Drink!' he ordered. Then: 'Get on the radio! Tell every man in the squad to take at least two ounces of brandy!'

It was, thought Cornut dizzily, a hell of a way to fight a war.