Fay's skin had turned paper-gray. She looked at him, and the pupils of her eyes began to slide up out of sight. Ewing caught her as her knees buckled.
"Soon as she comes to," said Krasnow quietly, "you and her can start loading whatever ya want on ya trailer. I'll give ya half an hour. And meantime, you can be thinking about why I done that." He jerked his head toward the body in the weeds below.
Up on the road, in the cabs and front seats of all the parked vehicles, the faces of the drivers had turned to look down on them. Their expressions had not changed, but was as if a common string had pulled them all around, like so many puppets.
At nightfall, the caravan was winding northward along the ridge highway toward Tejon Pass. The air was cool. Off to Ewing's left the sun went down behind the mountains in great tattered scarlet and orange streamers; the riding lights of the van ahead glowed in the deepening twilight.
Fay and the girls were in one of the house trailers, sharing it with some other poor devil's family. Ewing was alone with the oncoming night, in the steady drone of the engine, with his wrist manacled to the steering wheel.
A slave ...
And the father of slaves.
He'd had more than enough time to think about what Krasnow had meant back there at the mountain house. Krasnow had murdered Platt for an object lesson, and because he knew Platt would never make a good slave ... too reckless and unstable. Besides, Platt was unmarried. Platt was not the slave type.
The slave type ...
Funny to think that there were physicist types even among the natives of the Congo, who had never heard of physics ... and slave types, even among the physicists of America, who had forgotten there was such a thing as slavery.
And it was curious, how easy it was to accept the truth about himself. Tomorrow, after he had slept and the sun was high, he might fill up with anger again -- the brittle anger, so easily broken -- and swear to himself, futilely, that he would escape, kill Krasnow, rescue his family ... But now, alone, he knew he never would. Krasnow was wise enough to be "a good master." Ewing's lips moved: the phrase was bitter.
What about fifty, a hundred years from now? Wouldn't the slave society break down -wouldn't the Gismo become at last what Ewing had thought it would be, an emancipator? Wouldn't men learn to respect each other and live in peace?
Would it be worth all the misery and death, then? Ewing felt the earth breathe under him, the long slow swell of the sleeping giant ... On that scale, had he done good or evil?
He did not know. The car droned onward, following the tail lights of the van ahead. From the west, slowly, darkness scythed out across the land.
4
Dick Jones opened his eyes lazily to a green-and-gold morning, knowing as he awakened that there was something special about this day. Comfortably asprawl, giving himself to the cool breeze as sensuously as a cat, he wondered what it might be: a hunt today? visitors? or a trip somewhere?
Then he remembered, and sat up suddenly. This was the day he was leaving Buckhill to go to Eagles.
He stretched and swung himself out of the big circular bed, lithe, tanned, and big for his sixteen years. His body was proportioned like a man's, broad in the shoulders and chest, but all his muscles were buried under a layer of boyish fat There was a subtly unfinished look about him, a bluntness.
He padded across the silken carpet and into the bathroom, toes splaying on the cold marble. Taking a deep breath and letting it out, he dived into the pool. Goldfish scattered as he plunged down into the center; the tiles underwater were a blurred sea-green, lit by yellow disks along the walls. He turned upward, and broke surface. Two strokes brought him to shallow water, and he rolled over on his back, awash to the chest, dripping and blowing. He looked around, saw no one, and shouted, "Sam!"
The body-slob tumbled in, half asleep, carrying a canister and brush. He was a tall, pasty-skinned boy, a year older than Dick; they had grown up together. Without speaking he began to soap his master and work up a lather. He rubbed emollients into Dick's hair and scalp, shaved him with a safety razor, finally brought the hose over and rinsed him down with a cold spray. Sam's heavy underlip never stayed closed, and he had big ears that stuck out. Between his shoulderblades was a design in purple ink, a stag leaping, with the word "BUCKHILL" and a series of numbers under it, enclosed by purple leaves. Still sleepily silent, he wrapped a towel around his master and began to chafe him dry.
"Sam, this is my last day at Buckhill," Dick said.
"Yes, Misser Dick. You going away by Colorado tomorrow."
"I'll be away four years. I'll be over twenty when I come back."
"Dess right. You be twenty. Dess right, Misser Dick."
Dick snorted, feeling a vague sense of outrage. All right, the boy was only a slob -- or "slave"; if you wanted to please Dad and use the old term -- but even slobs were supposed to have some feelings. In magazines and teledramas they were always bawling when they thought about their young masters going away; so what was the matter with Sam?
Then he discovered he was hungry, and forgot the matter. "I'll have ham and eggs," he said, taking the towel himself. "Eggs over, and a plate of wheat cakes, Sam -- and milk, and coffee. Tell them to hurry up, I'm starving to death."
While the slob phoned his order down to the kitchen, Dick got fresh clothing from the wardrobe and began dressing himself. In passing he turned on the wall screen: it was tuned to KING-TV in Buffalo Keep, and Dick watched the cavorting musicians with half an eye, nodding his head to the rhythm. He liked military music; it was the only kind he understood.
Sam had come back from the phone and was talking in his ear; the music drowned him out. "What?" said Dick irritably. "Turn that thing down."
Sam reached over and found the right button on the bedside table console; the music faded to a hoarse umpah, umpah. "Cook says," he repeated, "is too busy by banquet for make you breakfas'. So you got to send me down by Stores for dupe one, or either -- "
"Damn it," said Dick angrily, and paused to suck in his stomach while he zipped up the tight blue-and-saffron trousers. That wasn't just the way the suit was cut; he was outgrowing his measurements again, "Why does everything have to go to pieces around here, every time there's some damn banquet?"
"Misser?"
"Never mind. Hurry up and get out of here, and I'll go myself."
In the corridor, two slobs in light overalls were taking down the wall panels one at a time and putting up new ones, identical except that the old ones were turning blue-green with corrosion, and these were shining new bronze, fresh from the Gismo. Dick recognized the figures of the bas-reliefs as old friends; they had been in the corridor all his life, slowly changing from bright to dull in an eternal rhythm. He paused to look at a familiar hand clutching a rifle stock, and at the familiar hard-set face above it, both glittering raw, bright metal -- newly reborn.
Down below, the Big Hall was deserted except for a common house slob busily scrubbing, his bare arms gleaming with sweat. The rows of tables were all bare under the lights; the covers had not yet been laid.
It was twenty-five after seven by the big electric clock. Dick's parents would still be lying abed; so would his sister Constance, who had been turning into a sluggard lately. His brothers Adam, Felix and Edward might be up, but there was no telling where. Unfeeling brats, they were probably off riding or boating somewhere by themselves, not caring whether he might want to see them on his last morning.
All this, he realized belatedly, was at least partly before-breakfast crankiness. The duped eggs might choke him, but he needed some food in his stomach.