Long Ago, Far Away

CHAPTER 8

She smiled faintly in the darkness after they'd paused on the way to the cottage, and after Soames had released her.

"When this is all over, we'll have our life together, you know that, don't you?"

"I'm glad," she said quietly, "that you feel the way you do. I'm thinner. I'm not very pretty just now. But it's because I'm worried, Brad."

He muttered angrily. He felt that infuriated rage which was appropriate because something worried Gail.

"I told the children you were coming," Gail added. "I think they'll be glad to see you. I've an idea Fran especially liked you, Brad."

"No word of him?"

"N-no," said Gail in an odd tone.

"Did he run away?" demanded Soames. They were walking through a soft-warm dusk toward the cottage where Gail stayed with the children.

Gail said in a low tone:

"Careful! The idea of telepathy is alarming. Everything's overheard, Brad. The children are watched every second. I even think there are microphones...."

Soames scowled.

"It's security," said Gail. "It would be taking too big a gamble to risk that the children can only receive sensory impressions and only through those little devices in their belts. Nobody's been able to make the belt-devices do more than that, but they can't be sure...."

"They took the belts away!" insisted Soames.

"Yes. But it doesn't seem enough. You destroyed their signalling device. But you don't feel safe. They've taken the devices, but they still don't feel sure that the children can't do more.

"And, I thought it was wise to tell Captain Moggs about us. To explain why you might want to come back here. They know I'm rather protective of the children. An explanation for you to come back seemed wise. The children aren't popular since they've been thought able to read minds. So I wanted you to be able to come back without anybody suspecting you of friendly feelings for them."

"I'd have come back on account of you," growled Soames. "So it mustn't appear that anybody wants to be decent to them, eh?" Then he said abruptly, "About Fran...."

"He ran away," said Gail with a hint of defiance. "I'll tell you more later, maybe."

They reached the cottage, and Soames reminded himself that anything he said would very probably be overheard and recorded on tape. They went inside. The boy Hod, and the younger girl Mal lay on their stomachs on the floor, doggedly working at what would be lessons. Zani sat in a chair with a book before her and her hand seemingly shielding her eyes. Her expression was abstracted.

As they entered, Hod made a clicking sound in his throat. Zani put one hand quickly in her pocket and opened her eyes. They had been closed. The book was a prop to hide something.

Soames had a flash of insight. He'd worn a belt with a built-in quasi-telepathic device just once and for the briefest of times. While he wore it, too, he'd been fiercely intent upon the use of it to recover another such device that had been looted in the broadcast studio during the most disastrous of all public-relations enterprises. He'd had no time for experiment; no time to accustom himself to the singular feeling of seeming to inhabit more than one body at a time. He'd had no opportunity to explore the possibilities of the device. But he'd worked out some angles since.

And because of it, he knew intuitively what Zani had been doing when he arrived. With closed eyes, hidden by her hand, she'd been receiving something that came from somewhere else. The two other children had kept silent. Hod clicked his tongue as a warning of Gail's and Soames' approach. And Zani put her hand in her pocket quickly and opened her eyes. She'd put something away. And Soames knew with certainty that she'd been receiving a message from Fran, in the teeth of merciless watching and probably microphonic eavesdropping on every word.

But the children's belt with the sensory-transmitters and receivers had been taken from them.

Little Mal said politely:

"Fran." A pause. "Where is?"

"I'd like to know," Soames told her.

"That's almost the only thing they're ever questioned about, nowadays," said Gail. "As a security measure only Captain Moggs and enlisted personnel without classified information, and the police who're hunting for Fran, are allowed to talk to them."

"Fran's been gone—how long? A week? Over?" Soames scowled. "How can he hide? He knows little English! He doesn't even know how to act so he won't be spotted if he walks down a street!"

Gail said with an odd intonation:

"I'm afraid he's in the wilds somewhere. He won't know how to get food. He'll be in danger from wild animals. I'm terribly afraid for him!"

Soames looked at her sharply.

"How'd he get away?"

"He roamed around, like boys do," said Gail. "He made friends, more or less, with the children of a staff sergeant's family. It was thought there could be no harm in that. And one morning he left here apparently to go and play with them, and they didn't see him, and he hasn't been seen since."

Hod was on his stomach again, doggedly working over a book, murmuring English words as he turned the pages from one picture to another. Mal and Zani looked from the face of Soames to that of Gail, and back again.

"They understand more than they can speak," said Gail.

Soames searched the walls of the room. Gail had said microphones were probable. He looked intently at Zani. He duplicated her position when he'd entered and her actions, the quick movement of her hand to her pocket and the opening of her eyes. She tensed, staring at him. He shook his head warningly and put his finger to his lips.

She caught her breath and looked at him strangely. He settled down to visit. Gail, with the air of someone doing something that did not matter, had the children display their English. Their accent was good. Their vocabularies were small. Soames guessed that Gail drilled them unceasingly in pronunciation so they wouldn't acquire so many words that they could be expected to answer involved questions. It was a way to postpone pressure upon them.

But it was not a good idea for Soames to have too parental or too solicitous an attitude. He said with inner irony:

"I'm disappointed in Fran. He shouldn't have run away. He made some sketches for me, of things boys his age make, at home. I wanted to get more such pictures from him. Hmmm.... Did he leave any sketches around when he disappeared?"

Gail shook her head.

"No. Every scrap of paper the children use is gathered up every night, for study. They don't like it. It disturbs them. Actually, I believe language experts are trying to find out something about their language, but they feel like it's enmity. They're jumpy."

"And with reason," said Soames. He stirred. "I'm disappointed. I'll go talk to the people who're hunting Fran. Walk back with me to the store, Gail?"

Gail rose. Zani stared at Soames. She was pale. He nodded to her again.

Gail and Soames went out into the now fully fallen night. Soames said gruffly:

"We'd better walk closer together.

"When we're married," he said abruptly, "I doubt we'll hide many things from each other. We'd better start being frank right now. The kids' belts may have been taken away, but they've got sensory-transmission gadgets just the same. Zani was using one when we went in the cottage."

Gail's footsteps faltered. "Wh-what are you going to do?"

"Give some good advice," said Soames. "Tell the kids you know about it. Point out that the Security people have three of the four belts, and they can wear them and pick up communications. Sooner or later they will and the kids will be caught. If Fran talks aloud they can pick up and identify his voice. If Zani writes, and looks at what she's written so he can read it through her eyes, her hand or her dress in what she sees could identify her. I'm telling you to remind Zani that communication by those sensory transmitters can be overheard. Sooner or later it will be. She must work out ways to avoid being identified. If they think more people of her race have landed, that's all right. But it may be bad if she's caught communicating with Fran."

Gail said nothing for a long time.

"That's—that's all?"

"Just about. I'm Fran's antagonist in one matter only. I'll do anything I can to keep him from calling all his race to come here. I hate it, but I'll do it. Outside of that, I feel that he's here through my fault. I do not want him to be psychologically vivisected by people who want everything he knows, and won't believe there are limits to it. So long as he's at large, there probably won't be frenzied questioning of the others."

"The—things in the belt are very simple," said Gail unsteadily, "and the children were scared and jumpy when they were taken away. So Fran told me, and he'd picked up some scraps of metal. Copper, it was. And I watched for him."

Soames said nothing.

"He took a straw," said Gail, "and used it as a sort of blowpipe. He could direct the flame of a candle I made for him. It would be heat-treatment?"

Soames nodded, in the darkness.

"It would. A pattern of heat-treatment might give a metal all sorts of properties we haven't guessed at." He added sardonically, "And it could be so simple that a boy could remember and do it!"

"He made six communicators," said Gail. "I insisted on six. And then I chose two at random for safety's sake, I suppose. And he and the other children hid theirs. I tried these two. They work. One is for you. Of course."

She fumbled something into his hand. It was tiny; hardly larger than a match.

"You push in the end. It works as long as you push it."

Soames pressed on one end where there was something that felt like the head of a pin. It probably was. It gave a little, and instantly he saw what Gail saw and felt what she felt, his hand clasping hers. He released the tiny object and again was only himself.

"Turn yours off," he said harshly. "Remind the kids that this sort of thing can be intercepted."

"I'll tell them," said Gail.

"They're much worse off than they were," he told her. "A little while ago all the world wanted to learn from the kids. Now it's afraid they'll learn from it, about the people in it. I think everybody'd be quite willing to forego all possible benefits from their coming, if only something would happen to them."

"But they can't pry into secrets!" protested Gail. "You know they can't read minds! They can't!"

"But they have the reputation and have to suffer for it," said Soames.

They were then very close to the pseudo general store. Gail put her hand lightly on Soames' arm. "Brad, please be careful."

He went into the store. He went through to the stock-room behind, pressed a button, and an elevator door opened in a rather surprising manner. He stepped inside and the elevator lowered him three hundred feet into the earth.

On the way out from the East he'd sunk into gloomy meditation about the situation of the children and for that matter of the world, since their arrival. Fran had an urgent mission he felt he must perform at any risk. He couldn't do it on the missile base.

Fran felt the hatred surrounding all of them from the conclusion of the broadcast. He knew that nobody, anywhere, would help him do something he had to do. So he fled in order to try somehow to send the signal Soames had prevented from beside the wrecked spaceship.

But why must Fran send it? Why hadn't an automatic device been used? Something which could be so ruggedly built that it could not possibly smash....

And suddenly there was an explanation.

Up to this moment Soames had doggedly accepted the idea that the children came out of a past so remote that numbers of years simply had no meaning. The evidence was overwhelming even though the law of the conservation of mass and energy denied the possibility of time-travel. Now, abruptly, Soames saw the infinitely simple answer. Time-travel was possible, provided certain conditions were met. Those conditions would at first instance inevitably produce a monstrous burst of static and an implosion to cause an earth-shock and a concussion wave audible at eighty miles distance. Once communication between time-frames had been established, however ...

The flight of Fran instantly became something so much more alarming than mere danger to Fran, that there was only one thing Soames could possibly do. He'd said he was not Fran's enemy. But he must do anything to keep Fran from carrying out the mission he'd been sent to accomplish.

So when Soames got out of the elevator from the village store, he went directly to a security officer.

"I'm worried about the boy Fran, who ran away," he observed. "Can you tell me what happened?"

"I'd like somebody to tell me!" said the security officer morbidly. "If he ran, he had wings on his shoes. And now he's out he's got me scared! You know those telepathic gadgets in the belts the children wore? We took 'em away. We opened one of 'em up, but we left the others in working order. We tried them. When two men wear them, with both turned on, they sort of half-way read each other's minds. Each man knows what the other is doing and seeing. But one man by himself can't do a thing. Two men can do a lot. It's been suggested that if they knew the trick of it, three men could do all the telepathy they wanted, read minds and all that. We haven't found out the trick, though."

Soames nodded, marvelling at the ability of the human race to find reasons to believe anything it wanted to, whether for sweet vanity's sake or for the sake of scaring itself to death.

"When we first got the belts from the kids," pursued the security officer, "we figured there might be some other folks of the kids' race on Earth, figuring on ways to get 'em loose. We had a belt worn night and day. Nothing. So we stopped monitoring. Then this Fran got away and we started monitoring all over again, trying to pick up any working of belts like these that we didn't know about. And we started picking up stuff right away!"

Soames stared. Zani'd been using one such instrument.

"A man's got one of those belts on," said the security man, frowning, "and it's like he didn't. Nothing happens at all. But after maybe hours, maybe a day or two, suddenly, with his eyes closed, he sees a page of outlandish writing. The kind of writing those kids do. It can't be photographed, because it's only inside your head that you see it. You can't make sense of it. The alphabet isn't ours. The words are the language they talk among themselves. I figure there's a ship somewhere, broadcasting a call to the kids. The call's printed. If the kids had their belts on, and turned on, they could read it. But we got their belts. So this Fran, he broke away to try to make some kind of way to answer that call!"

Soames said nothing. But he was unhappily amused, at himself as well as the security officer. He'd gone to some pains to tell Gail how the children might communicate with Fran without being caught at it. But they knew. They'd produced this theory of a hovering ship of space, broadcasting to Earth to four children hidden somewhere on it. There was no ship. There was only Fran, desperate to perform the task he'd been sent here to do, keeping in touch with the other three children by a tiny unit he'd made out of scrap copper and a straw and a candle-flame. And it was so natural that the fact wasn't guessed!

"How's he managing to eat?" asked Soames. "He's no money and next to no English, and he doesn't know how to act...."

"He's smart!" said the security officer grimly. "He's hiding by day. At night.... People don't usually tell the cops about a bottle of milk missing from their doorsteps. A grocer doesn't report one loaf of bread missing from the package left in front of his store before daybreak. He'd pick a loaf of bread today, and a bottle of milk tomorrow. Sometimes he'd skip. But we figured it out. We got every town in five hundred miles to check up. Bread-truck drivers asked grocery stores. Any bread missing? Milk-men asked their customers. Has anybody been pinching your milk? We found where he was, in Bluevale, close to the Navajo Dam, you know. We set cops to watch. Almost got him yesterday morning. He was after a loaf of bread. A cop fired five shots at him, but he got away. Dropped the loaf of bread, too."

Soames wanted to be sick. Fran was possibly fourteen years old and desperate because his whole civilization depended on him to save them from the destruction falling out of the sky. He was a fugitive on a strange world.

Then Soames' mouth went dry as he realized. Fran had been shot at in Bluevale, which was near the Navajo Dam. The Navajo Dam generated almost as much electric power as Niagara.

"I had a hunch," said the security officer with some grimness, "the kid got past three electric fences, and we don't know how. He must know plenty about electricity. So I began to wonder if he might be hoping to answer that broadcast signal with a signal of his own. He was in Bluevale. We checked up. A roofer lost some sheet copper a couple of days ago. Somebody broke in a storehouse and got away with forty or fifty feet of heavy-gauge copper wire. A man'd have stolen the whole roll. It would be only a kid that'd break off as much as he could carry. See?

"He's getting set to make something, and we know he's near Bluevale. He'll need tools. I've got Bluevale crammed with cops and plainclothesmen. That whole town is one big trap for that kid right now. And the cops will shoot! Because we don't know what that kid will make. If those kids had something that'll read your mind, made by grownups, maybe he'll make something that'll burn it out! He looks human, but he came out of space from Godknowswhere. Maybe he'll make deathrays!"

Soames swallowed. He knew what Fran would want to make. A mere local projector of deathrays would be trivial beside the consequences of what Fran was desperately resolved to do for his own people.

He heard himself say something relatively soothing.

"Maybe," he observed, "he's not that dangerous. You're worried about how he passed those electrified fences. He used stilts. He knew about them. They interested him. So he must have made a pair some seven or eight feet high, and learned to walk on them. And then he simply went to a tree near the fence, climbed up it and mounted the stilts, and then walked to the fence and stepped over it. At his age he wouldn't realize the danger. He'd do it and worm his way past watchers.... He could have done that!"

The security officer swore.

"Yes! Dammit, yes! We should've watched him closer."

"I want to get back East," said Soames.

"When do you want to head East?" asked the officer.

"Now," said Soames. "We've got a project started that's more or less linked to the kids' gadgets, even though we don't understand them. The sooner I can get back, the better."

The security officer used the telephone. He found there was a plane due to take off shortly. Soames could get passage on that plane, not to the East, but to a military airfield outside Denver where a cab could be had to take him to the commercial airport to make connections East.

Before starting on this trip he'd suspected that he might need to take part in the search for Fran. He'd cleaned out his bank account and had the cash in his pocket. In half an hour he was on board the outbound plane.

In two hours Soames was in Denver. In three he was lost beyond all discovery. He'd taken an inter-urban bus instead of a plane out of Denver, and gotten off at a tiny town whose name he did not even notice. During the night, with closed eyes and in a silent hotel room in the little town, he pressed one end of the miniature device that Fran had made and Gail had given him.

He felt a queer sensation. He inhabited two bodies at once. It was eerie. The other body did nothing. It only breathed and waited. Someone at the hidden base from which he had come wore one of the children's belts and patiently waited to eavesdrop on any communication that might be made by similar devices.

Soames waited for morning. Very early, again with closed eyes and with his body made comfortable so that he felt no distinct sensation from it, he pressed the end of the miniature instrument. He saw writing of the kind the children used for memoranda about their English lessons. He released the turn-on switch, which was probably the head of a pin. He turned on a light. He opened a notebook. Its first page showed two sketches. One was of the runner of a boy-made air-sled. Fran had sketched it for Soames on the plane headed for New York and the disastrous broadcast. The other was a sketch of a boy on stilts. Soames had drawn that for Fran. Nobody but Soames would have looked at such drawings for Fran to see through his eyes. They were at once a call and an identification of Soames as a person using a device like a tiny copper firecracker, with the head of a pin where a fuse would belong.

He turned on the device again while looking at the sketches. He felt that he shared the physical sensations of two other bodies, no, three. He was momentarily convinced of a third. All three now kept their eyes tightly closed. All three saw only through his eyes, saw rough sketches which would have meaning only to two. Soames felt that he heard a smothered noise which only he would have known was a suppressed giggle.

Then he felt one of the other bodies shaking hands with itself. That would be Fran, acknowledging the message of the drawings that only Soames would know about. He shook hands with himself for Soames to experience. Then he patted his knee as one would pat a dog, and scratched his knee as one scratches a dog, as he did with Rex on Antarctica. He had identified himself. There was the stirring of another of the bodies with which Soames was linked. That would be the security officer, wearing a belt which brought him these sensations. He could have no idea, however, who was communicating with whom, and pattings and scratchings would have no meaning at all. He could only know that the weird experience stopped when someone shook hands with himself and that was all.

But Soames rose and dressed with many forebodings. Fran would not meet him. Soames had given warning of traps and close hunting. But Fran would not meet him. It looked bad.

He bought a second-hand motorcycle at ten o'clock in the morning. He knew motorcycles. By three in the afternoon he threaded through the traffic of Bluevale. To him, on the watch for such matters, there seemed an unusual preponderance of men on the streets of that small town. Fran wouldn't notice it. Soames did. But he wasn't noticed. He'd bought a leather jacket and a cap. He rode a battered motorbike. He didn't even faintly resemble Fran.

He rode casually through Bluevale and along the wide, smooth highway to the much smaller village of Navajo Dam—at the edge of the big lake the dam had backed up behind it—and then at a leisurely pace along the same highway as it went over the crest of that massive structure. The lake to his right rose within feet of the highway. To the left there was a chasm, with a winding truck-road going down to the generator buildings at the dam's foot.

Soames jittered. He went two miles on and into forest, dragging the motorcycle out of sight from the road. He made himself as comfortable as possible, to avoid transmitting any information about his whereabouts. He stuffed his ears to mute the sounds of open country. From four o'clock to eight, at irregular intervals, he turned on the sensory-linkage device for a second or two at a time. He came to recognize the physical sensations of the man who, back in the hidden missile base, wore a child's belt and monitored for sensory communications. Between seven and eight the identity of that man changed. Someone else took the place of the first.

At ten o'clock there was the briefest possible sensation of a third body. Soames knew it was Fran. He shook hands with himself, quickly. Fran would recognize it as a greeting. Soames had contrived a way to offer argument, but he only felt a boy's small, smooth hands shaking each other in reply, and Fran was gone out of communication.

He did not come back.

At midnight Soames got his motorcycle out of the woods and onto the highway. He rode slowly back toward Bluevale. He stopped at a hot-dog stand outside the town and waited there for another signal.

At one, nothing had happened. Soames was close enough to the town to have heard any tumult, certainly any shots.

At two and three—nothing.

At four o'clock, without warning, there was a flash of intolerably vivid blue-green light. It came from the chasm below the Navajo Dam. The lights across the dam's curving crest went out. The street-lights of Bluevale and the little village of Navajo Dam went out. The world went dark, while a mountainous blue-green flame shed intolerably bright light toward the stars.

It went out, too.

Soames, cold with fear, pressed the end of the sensory device. He felt pain, lancing, excruciating pain. He heard Fran's voice gasping hopelessly:

"Try! Try! Try!"

He felt Fran's body turn in pain, and he saw that Fran's eyes looked up at stars, and the stars were cut off at one side by the curving bulk of the monstrous concrete dam.

Soames shook hands with himself. He let go the button. He started the motorcycle. He raced toward the dam. He did not again press on the sensory device until he'd gone frantically through the village and hair-raisingly down the truck-road to the generator buildings. There he cut off the motor, and he heard men's voices, profane and agitated and alarmed. He saw the small flickerings of flashlights.

He found Fran, crumpled on the ground and trying desperately not to make sounds of pain. Soames knew where the hurt was. He'd experienced it as Fran did. He'd guessed its cause and seriousness. He knew he had to move quickly.

He put Fran swiftly on the saddle behind his own on the motorcycle. He gave the motorcycle all the gas it would take and went racketing up the truck-road from the chasm below the dam.

He made it. The motorcycle, its lights turned off, was across the dam and streaking for the first curve beyond before the flickerings of car headlights began to show on the road from Bluevale.

Fran held on fiercely. But presently Soames felt the quiverings behind him. He stopped the motorcycle where the road was empty. Fran ground his teeth and stared at him defiantly in the reflected light of the now functioning single headlight.

"If I were you," said Soames, not expecting to be understood, but speaking as one man to another, "If I were you I wouldn't be ashamed of crying. I feel pretty much like it myself, from relief that your signalling device blew out."