Magee sat down beside the road. “It’s no use, kid,” he admitted, “I can’t make it.”
“The hell we can’t. I’ll carry you.”
Magee grinned faintly.
“No, I mean it,” Dave persisted. “How much farther is it?”
“Matter of two or three miles, maybe.”
“Climb aboard.” He took him pickaback and started on.
The first few hundred yards were not too difficult; Magee was forty pounds lighter than Dave. After that the strain of the additional load began to tell. His arms cramped from supporting Magee’s knees; his arches complained at the weight and the unnatural load distribution; and his breathing was made difficult by the clasp of Magee’s arms around his neck.
Two miles to go—maybe more. Let your weight fall forward and your foot must follow it, else you fall to the ground. It’s automatic—as automatic as pulling teeth. How long is a mile? Nothing in a rocketship, thirty seconds in a pleasure car, a ten-minute crawl in a steel snail, fifteen minutes to trained troops in good condition. How far is it with a man on your back, on a rough road, when you are tired to start with?
Five thousand two hundred and eighty feet—a meaningless figure. But every step takes twenty-four inches off the total. The remainder is still incomprehensible—an infinity. Count them. Count them till you go crazy—till the figures speak themselves outside your head, and the jar!— jar!—jar! of your benumbed feet beats in your brain.
His world closed in, lost its history and held no future. There was nothing, nothing at all but the torturing necessity of picking up his foot again and placing it forward. No feeling but the heartbreaking expenditure of will necessary to achieve that meaningless act.
MacKinnon was brought suddenly to awareness when Magee’s arms relaxed from around his neck. He leaned forward and dropped to one knee to keep from spilling his burden, then eased it slowly to the ground. He thought for a moment that the Fader was dead—he could not locate his pulse, and the slack face and limp body were sufficiently corpselike, but he pressed an ear to Magee’s chest and heard with relief the steady flub-dub of the heart.
He tied Magee’s wrists together with his handkerchief and forced his own head through, the encircled arms. But he was unable, in his exhausted condition, to wrestle the slack weight into position on his back.
Fader regained consciousness while MacKinnon was struggling. His first words were, “Take it easy, Dave. What’s the trouble?”
Dave explained. “Better untie my wrists,” advised the Fader, “I think I can walk for a while.”
And walk he did, for nearly three hundred yards, before he was forced to give up again. “Look, Dave,” he said after he had partially recovered, “did you bring along any more of those pepper pills?”
“Yes—but you can’t take any more. It would kill you.”
“Yeah, I know—so they say. But that isn’t the idea—yet. I was going to suggest that you might take one.”
“Why, of course! Good grief, Fader, but I’m dumb.”
Magee seemed no heavier than a light coat, the morning star shone brighter, and his strength seemed inexhaustible. Even when they left the highway and started up the cart trail that led to the doctor’s home in the foothills, the going was tolerable and the burden not too great. MacKinnon knew that the drug burned the working tissue of his body long after his proper reserves were gone, and that it would take him days to recover from the reckless expenditure, but he did not mind. No price was too high to pay for the moment when he at last arrived at the gate of the doctor’s home—on his own two feet, his charge alive and conscious.
MacKinnon was not allowed to see Magee for four days. In the meantime, he was encouraged to keep the routine of a semi-invalid himself in order to recover the twenty-five pounds he had lost in two days and two nights, and to make up for the heavy strain on his heart during the last night. A high caloric diet, sun baths, rest, and peaceful surroundings, plus his natural good health, caused him to regain weight and strength rapidly, but he “enjoyed ill health” exceedingly because of the companionship of the doctor himself—and Persephone.
Persephone’s calendar age was fifteen. Dave never knew whether to think of her as much older or much younger. She had been born in Coventry, and had lived her short life in the house of the doctor, her mother having died in childbirth in that same house. She was completely childlike in many respects, being without experience in the civilized world Outside, and having had very little contact with the inhabitants of Coventry, except when she saw them as patients of the doctor. But she had been allowed to read unchecked from the library of a sophisticated and protean-minded man of science. MacKinnon was continually being surprised at the extent of her academic and scientific knowledge—much greater than his own. She made him feel as if he were conversing with some aged and omniscient matriarch, then she would come out with some naive conception of the outer world, and he would be brought up sharply with the realization that she was, in fact, an inexperienced child.
He was mildly romantic about her. Not seriously, of course, in view of her barely nubile age, but she was pleasant to see, and he was hungry for feminine companionship. He was young enough himself to feel a continual interest in the delightful differences, mental and physical, between the male and the female of his species. The cock-bird strutted and preened his feathers.
Consequently it was a blow to his pride as sharp as had been the sentence to Coventry to discover that she classed him with the other inhabitants of Coventry as a poor unfortunate who needed help and sympathy because he was not quite right in his head.
He was furiously indignant, and for one whole day he sulked alone, but the human necessity for self-justification and approval forced him to seek her out and attempt to reason with her. He explained carefully, with complete emotional candor, the circumstances leading up to his trial and conviction, and embellished the account with his own philosophy, then awaited her approval.
It was not forthcoming. “I don’t understand your viewpoint,” she said. “You did him a very real damage when you broke his nose, yet he had done you no damage of any sort. Apparently you expect me to approve that.”
“But, Persephone,” he protested, “you ignore the fact that he called me a most insulting name.”
“I don’t see the connection,” she said. “He made a noise with his mouth—a verbal label. If the condition designated by the verbal label does not apply to you, the noise is meaningless. If the noise is a label customarily used to designate a condition which is true in your case—if you are the thing that the noise refers to, you are neither more nor less that thing by reason of someone uttering the verbal label. In short, the noise has not damaged you.
“But what you did to him was another matter entirely. You broke his nose. That is damage. In sheer self-protection, the rest of society must seek you out and determine whether or not you are so unstable as to be likely to damage someone else in the future. If you are, you must be treated or leave society—whichever you prefer.”
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” he accused.
“Crazy? Not the way you mean it. You haven’t paresis, or a brain tumor, or any other lesion that the doctor could find. But from the viewpoint of your semantic reactions you are as socially unsane as any fanatic witch burner.”