“Yeah,” she said tiredly. “Talking over old times.” She didn’t look at him. She was afraid that he would twist her arm again, and she knew that she still wouldn’t be able to tell him anything more than she had. She didn’t know what they had talked about for more than an hour; she hadn’t known she’d been with him that long.
The next day Merton was surprised when she didn’t seem angry with him. She acted, in fact, as if she had forgotten the whole thing.
A few days later Blake demonstrated to Merton his first miracle for Obie. He produced a clear plastic liner compound that, mixed with water, formed wine, or near enough to fool anyone but a connoisseur. He played with it for a few days, laughed when Merton, who hung about him like a loyal dog, inquired about it and tossed the thing to the detective. A toy, he said. A parlor trick.
He showed Merton how he could fit it into a container, glass, paper cup, plastic glass, anything, add water from the tap, wait a. second or two, and have ruby wine. Merton looked at it suspiciously. Blake laughed again and took it and drank it.
“You have any more of those things?”
“Sure. Over there.” Blake waved toward his desk and paid no more attention when Merton picked up a handful of the plastic disks and left with them. The chemists analyzed the substance and came up with a formula that did produce winelike liquid when mixed with water. It was harmless, although in quantities it could be intoxicating. Obie had his miracle.
Blake had a reprieve from some of the suspicion that had attached to him.
Four nights later he led an escape from the mountain citadel.
It was raining, a cold merciless rain that was steady for hour after hour. Blake went first to Obie’s office, where he ran his hands over the door, finding and disconnecting the alarm before he entered. Blake knew where the safe was, an old-fashioned one that used a combination of voice tones and finger pressure. He said, in Obie’s voice, “Three, ninety-four, eleven, and open now.” The door swung open soundlessly. He picked up his disk, the stone with the rose fire, and his coins. He touched nothing else.
The unrelenting rain was a black curtain through which he moved, heading back toward the hospital area, three miles away. Behind the main building was a cluster of small houses, one of which was Winifred’s. He opened the door and whispered her name. Winifred gasped just once, asked no questions, threw a mackintosh around her shoulders, and left with him.
“Lorna’s room,” he said and led the way. Lorna was more reluctant, but she too remained silent and followed. Blake led them past the guards who were huddled inside a building at the edge of the forest. He motioned for them to bend low now and again, and Winifred assumed that there were electronic devices of various sorts spotted throughout the property. When they were deep in the woods they had to hold hands; it was too dark to see each other. Blake let them stop to rest three times between midnight and dawn, but stopping was more miserable than continuing. The cold was penetrating when the motion ceased. Walking, slipping, sliding over the rough mountainside kept them warm.
When the sky paled, Blake stopped them again, this time in the shelter of a low spreading pine tree where the ground was relatively dry, and no rain beat down.
Lorna sank to the ground and her head on her arms folded across her knees. Winifred leaned back against the tree too tired to move or to speak even. Blake vanished and was gone for half an hour, then was back, with a rabbit and a small bag of nuts. He built a tiny fire in the shelter of the tree and roasted the rabbit and they ate it, and the nuts. Nothing had ever tasted so good before to Winifred.
“We won’t make it, Blake, but bless you for trying. I thought… I didn’t know what to think when you acted so compliant.”
He grinned at her. “I had to find out who was there, where we were, where Lorna was, all that.”
Lorna hadn’t said anything at all yet, but now she lifted her head and stared at him. “Why did you bring me out with you?”
“A precaution,” Blake said. “You keep getting me in trouble, so I decided to put you where you’d be quiet for a while.”
She stiffened and turned away from him. She looked very unhappy.
They rested for three hours, then started to walk again. They were walking north. Blake didn’t intend to lead them out of the mountains at all, but stay in them until they were clear of Obie’s domain. Winifred shuddered at the thought. She didn’t think she would last that long, but she knew that if they did descend, they’d surely be found in the lowlands that were virtually owned by Obie.
The days and nights became dreamlike. They walked. Blake produced food, or sometimes didn’t produce food; they ate or fasted, drank cold clear water from streams, and walked some more. They slept under pine trees whose branches swept the ground. They walked some more. They talked when they stopped to rest. Lorna said very little. Winifred and Blake talked a good deal.
“There’s a particular mentality permeating the land now,” Blake said once to Winifred. “The people don’t consider the land as theirs any longer. They have crowded together along the coasts, and they line the rivers, and all in between is a wilderness, except for the great stretches of cultivated fields. And they are a wilderness of another sort. You can fly over them for hours and hours and see nothing but fields. The roads have been obliterated, the towns razed, the farms vanished completely. The tractors roll day and night, controlled from the underground headquarters where they are dots moving in well-ordered lines. We aren’t likely to see anyone at all in the woods. Most people don’t believe anyone could live in the woods for more than a couple of days. They think the game is all gone, the streams polluted. Many of them are, but high as we will be staying the water is good. The only meat most people have seen has been canned, and mixed with other things. If they have seen vegetables at all, it’s been in packages of so many ounces, not growing out under the sun.” He tossed a walnut and caught it. “I bet not one in twenty has ever seen a nut.”
“God knows they flock to the woods in droves during vacations,” Winifred said. “Those who can afford it anyway.”
“Sure. They go to cities that are on the edge of the woods, with paved trails weaving in and out of the trees, with nothing growing along the trails on the floor of the woods because they have picked it all clean. Turn one of them loose fifty miles from his city, and he would probably die.”
Lorna looked at him then and said bitterly, “Are you pretending that we aren’t going to die in the woods?”
“We might,” Blake said easily. “I guarantee nothing. But everyone dies sooner or later, somewhere. Why not here in the woods rather than back in the camp?”
Lorna shivered. “I’m freezing. At least back there I was warm and full. Why don’t you ask me if I knew they were using me to lead them to you? Why don’t you ask if I still believe in Obie Cox and his Voice of God Church?”
Winifred sighed in satisfaction.
Blake laughed. “Lorna, I remember you as a pretty bratty kid, always talking, talking, full of importance, demanding attention. I thought you had reformed.”
It was teasing, but with such good humor that even Lorna grinned. “I give,” she said suddenly. “I’m sorry, Blake. I was stupid, stubborn. I should have known what the whole act was about, but I didn’t. When I saw you on New Year’s. Eve… I never had been so surprised in my life. Then they were there and I understood all of it all at once. I was so miserable. I wished they would simply shoot me, or hit me harder than they did, or “Something.”
“And the Church?” Winifred asked.
“Oh, you know. You told me all about it. I didn’t believe you. I went to the Listener’s Booth and found myself spilling everything. I didn’t want to. I really’ thought I wouldn’t, but there it all came….”