Dave shook his head at this and accepted the money.
It was lonely after Magee left. Mother Johnston and Dave were alone in the club, and the empty chairs reminded him depressingly of the men who had been impressed. He wished that Gramps or the one-handed man would show up. Even Alec, with his nasty temper, would have been company—he wondered if Alec had been punished for resisting the draft.
Mother Johnston inveigled him into playing checkers in an attempt to relieve his evident low spirits. He felt obligated to agree to her gentle conspiracy, but his mind wandered. It was all very well for the senior judge to tell him to seek adventure in interplanetary exploration, but only engineers and technicians were eligible for such billets. Perhaps he should have gone in for science, or engineering, instead of literature; then he might now be on Venus, contending against the forces o£ nature in high adventure instead of hiding from uniformed bullies. It wasn’t fair. No—he must not kid himself; there was no room for an expert in literary history in the raw frontier of the planets; that was not human injustice, that was a hard fact of nature, and he might as well face it.
He thought bitterly of the man whose nose he had broken and thereby landed himself in Coventry. Maybe he was an “upholstered parasite,” after all—but the recollection of the phrase brought back the same unreasoning anger that had gotten him into trouble. Involuntarily he let his cortex drop out of his circuit of consciousness, and he let himself be dominated by his throbbing, emotional thalamus—the “old brain” of his prehistoric, tooth-and-claw ancestors, with its undelayed reactions and unreasoned evaluations. He was glad that he had socked that so-and-so! What right had he to go around sneering and calling people things like that?
He found himself thinking in the same vindictive spirit of his father, although he would have been at loss to explain the connection. As a matter of fact, the connection is not superficially evident, for his father would never have stooped to name-calling. Instead, he would have offered the sweetest of smiles and quoted something nauseating in the way of sweetness and light. For Dave’s father was one of the nastiest little tyrants that ever dominated a household under the guise of loving kindness. He was of the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, this-hurts-me-more-than-it-does-you-son school, and all his life had invariably been able to find an altruistic rationalization for always having his own way. Convinced of his own infallible righteousness, he had never valued his son’s point of view on anything, but had dominated him in everything—always from the highest moralistic motives.
He had had two main bad effects on his son: the boy’s natural independence, crushed at home, rebelled blindly at every sort of discipline, authority, or criticism which he encountered elsewhere and subconsciously identified with the not-to-be-criticized paternal authority. And secondly, through years of association he imitated his father’s most dangerous social vice—that of passing unself-critical moral judgments on the actions of others.
When Dave was arrested for breaking a basic custom— to wit, atavistic violence—his father washed his hands of him with the statement that he had tried his best to make a man of him, and could not be blamed for his son’s failure to profit by his instruction.
A faint knock caused them to put away the checkerboard in a hurry. Mother Johnston paused before answering. “That’s not our knock,” she considered, “but it’s not loud enough to be the nosies. Be ready to hide.”
MacKinnon waited by the fox hole where he had hidden the night before, while Mother Johnston went to investigate. He heard her unbar and unlock the upper door, then she called out to him in a low but urgent voice, “Dave! Come here, Dave—hurry!”
It was Fader, unconscious, with his own bloody trail behind him.
Mother Johnston was attempting to pick up the limp form. MacKinnon crowded in, and between the two of them they managed to get him downstairs and to lay him on the long table. He came to for a moment as they straightened his limbs. “Hi, Dave,” he whispered, managing to achieve the ghost of his debonair grin, “somebody trumped my ace.”
“You keep quiet!” Mother Johnston snapped at him, then in a lower voice to Dave, “Oh, the poor darling—Dave, we must get him to the doctor.”
“Can’t... do ... that,” muttered the Fader. “Got … to get to the ... gate—” His voice trailed off. Mother Johnston’s fingers had been busy all the while, as if activated by some separate intelligence. A small pair of scissors, drawn from some hiding place about her large person, clipped away at his clothing, exposing the superficial extent of the damage. She examined the trauma critically.
“This is no job for me,” she decided, “and he must sleep while we move him. Dave, get that hypodermic kit out of the medicine chest in the ‘fresher.”
“No, Mother!” It was Magee, his voice strong and vibrant. “Get me a pepper pill. There’s—”
“But, Fader—”
He cut her short. “I’ve got to get to the doctor, all right, but how the devil will I get there if I don’t walk?”
“We would carry you.”
“Thanks, Mother,” he told her, his voice soft. “But the police would be curious. Get me that pill.”
Dave followed her into the ‘fresher and questioned her while she rummaged through the medicine chest. “Why don’t we just send for a doctor?”
“There is only one doctor we can trust, and that’s the doctor. Besides, none of the others are worth the powder to blast them.”
Magee was out again when they came back into the room. Mother Johnston slapped his face until he came around, blinking and cursing. Then she fed him the pill.
The powerful stimulant, esoteric offspring of common coal tar, took hold almost at once. To all surface appearance Magee was a well man. He sat up and tried his own pulse, searching it out in his left wrist with steady, sensitive fingers. “Steady as a metronome,” he announced. “The old ticker can stand that dosage, all right.”
Magee waited while Mother Johnston applied sterile packs to his wounds, and then said good-by. MacKinnon looked at Mother Johnston. She nodded.
“I’m going with you,” he told the Fader.
“What for? It will just double the risk.”
“You’re in no fit shape to travel alone—stimulant or no stimulant.”
“Nuts. I’d have to look after you.”
“I’m going with you.”
Magee shrugged his shoulders and capitulated.
Mother Johnston wiped her perspiring face and kissed both of them.
Until they were well out of town their progress reminded MacKinnon of their nightmare flight of the previous evening. Thereafter they continued to the north-northwest by a highway which ran toward the foothills, and left the highway only when necessary to avoid the sparse traffic. Once they were almost surprised by a police patrol car, equipped with black light and nearly invisible, but the Fader sensed it in time and they crouched behind a low wall at the side of the road.
Dave inquired how he had known the patrol was near. Magee chuckled. “Damned if I know,” he said, “but I believe I could smell a cop staked out in a herd of goats.”
The Fader talked less and less as the night progressed. His usually untroubled countenance became lined and old as the effect of the drug wore off. It seemed to Dave as if this unaccustomed expression gave him a clearer insight into the man’s character—that the mask of pain were his true face rather than the unworried features Magee habitually showed the world. He wondered for the nth time what the Fader had done to cause a court to adjudge him socially insane.
This question was uppermost in his mind with respect to every person he met in Coventry. The answer was fairly obvious in most cases; their types of instability were gross and showed up at once. Mother Johnston had been an enigma until she had explained it herself. She had followed her husband into Coventry. Now that she was a widow she preferred to remain with the friends she knew and the customs and conditions she was adjusted to, rather than change for a possibly less pleasing environment.