“I just didn’t believe anyone could create and maintain a trap like that without knowing what they were doing,” he said. “You’re holding six powerful people captive. How can you do that by accident or instinct or whatever?”
“I don’t know.”
He withdrew from my thoughts in disgust. “You also have some very Dorolike ideas,” he said. “I don’t know how the others feel about it, Mary, but you don’t own me.”
It took me a minute to realize what he was talking about. Then I remembered. My proprietary feelings. “Are you going to blame me for thoughts I had while I was in transition?” I asked. “You know I was out of my head.”
“You were when you first started to think that way. But you aren’t now, and you’re still thinking that way.”
That was true. I couldn’t help the feeling of rightness that I had about the pattern about the people of the pattern being my people. I felt it even more strongly than I had felt Doro’s mental keep-out sign. But that didn’t matter. I sighed. “Look, Karl, no matter what I feel, you find me a way to break this thing, free you and the others, and I’ll cooperate in any way I can.”
He had gotten up. He was standing by the bed watching me with what looked like
hatred. “You’d better,” he said quietly. He turned and left the room.
PART TWO
Chapter Four
SETH DANA
There was water. That was the important thing. There was a well covered by a tall, silver-colored tank. And beside it there was an electric pump housed in a small wooden shed. The electricity was shut off, but the power poles were all sturdily upright, and the wire that had been run in from the main road looked all right. Seth decided to have the electricity turned on as soon as possible. Otherwise he and Clay would either have to haul water from town or get it from some of the nearer houses.
Seth looked over at Clay, saw that his brother was examining the pump. Clay looked calm, relaxed. That alone made Seth’s decision to buy him this desert property worthwhile. There were few neighbors, and those widely scattered. The nearest town was twenty miles away. Adamsville. And it wasn’t much of a town. About twelve hundred dull, peaceful people. Clay had been reasonably comfortable even while they were passing through it. Seth wiped the sweat from his forehead and stepped into the shadow cast by the well’s tank. Just morning and it was hot already.
“Pump look all right, Clay?”
“Looks fine. Just waiting for some electricity.”
“How about you?” He knew exactly how Clay was, but he wanted to hear his brother say it aloud.
“I’m all right too.” Clay shook his head. “Man, I better be. If I can’t make it out here, I can’t make it anywhere. I’m not picking up anything now.”
“You will, sooner or later,” said Seth. “But probably not much. Not even as much as if you were in Adamsville.”
Clay nodded, wiped his brow, and went to look at the shack that had served to house the land’s former occupant. An old man had lived there pretty much as a hermit. He had built the shack just as, several years before, he had built a real housea home for his wife and children. A home that they had lived in for only a few days when the wind blew down the power lines and they had to resort to candles. One of the children had invented a game to play with the candles. In the resulting fire, the man had lost his wife, his two sons, and most of his sanity. He had lived on the property as a recluse until his death, a few months back. Seth had bought the property from his surviving daughter, now an adult. He had bought it in the hope that his latent brother might finally find peace there.
Clay shouldn’t have been a latent. He was thirty, a year older than Seth, and he should have gone through transition at least a decade before. Even Doro had expected him to. Doro was father to both of them. He had actually worn one body long enough to father two children on the same woman with it. Their mother had been annoyed. She liked variety.
Well, she had variety in Clay and Seth. One son was not only a failure but a helpless failure. Clay was abnormally sensitive even for a latent. But as a latent, he had no control. Without Seth he would be insane or dead by now. Doro had suggested privately to Seth that a quick, easy death might be kindest. Seth had been able to listen to such talk calmly only because he had been through his own agonizing latent period before his transition. He knew what Clay would have to put up with for the rest of his life. And he knew Doro was doing something he had never done before. He was allowing Seth to make an important decision.
“No,” Seth had said. “I’ll take care of him.” And he had done it. He had been nineteen then to Clay’s twenty. Clay had not cared much for the idea of being taken care of by anyone, least of all his younger brother. But pain had dulled his pride.
They had traveled around the country together, content with no one place for long. Sometimes Seth workedwhen he wanted to. Sometimes he stole. Often he shielded his brother and accepted punishment in his stead. Clay never asked it. He saved what was left of his pride by not asking. He was too unstable to work. He got jobs, but inevitably he lost them. Some violent event caught his mind and afterward he had to lie, tell people he was an epileptic. Employers seemed to accept his explanation, but afterward they found reason to fire him. Seth could have stopped them, could have seen to it that they considered Clay their most valuable employee. But Clay didn’t want it that way. “What’s the point?” he had said more than once. “I can’t do the work. The hell with it.”
Clay was slowly deciding to kill himself. It was slow because, in spite of everything, Clay did not want to die. He was just becoming less and less able to tolerate the pain of living.
So now a lonely piece of land. A so-called ranch in the middle of the Arizona desert. Clay could have a few animals, a garden, whatever he wanted. Whatever he could take care of in view of the fact that he would be incapacitated part of the time. He would be receiving money from some income property Seth had insisted on stealing for him in Phoenix, but in more personal ways he would be self-sufficient. He would be able to bear his own painnow that there would be less of it. He would be able to make his land productive. He would be able to take care of himself. If he was to live at all, he would have to be able to do that.
“Hey, come on in here,” Clay was calling from within the hermit’s shack. “Take a look at this thing.”
Seth went into the shack. Clay was in what had been a combination kitchen-bedroomliving room. The only other room was piled high with bales of newspapers and magazines and stacked with tools. A storage room, apparently. What Clay was looking at was a large cast-iron wood-burning stove.
Seth laughed. “Maybe we can sell that thing as an antique and use the money to buy an electric stove. We’ll need one.”
“What we?” demanded Clay.
“Well, you, then. You don’t want to have to fight with that thing every time you want to eat, do you?”
“Never mind the stove. You’re starting to sound like you changed your mind about leaving.”
“No I haven’t. I’m going as soon as you’re settled in here. And” He stopped, looked away from Clay. There was something he had not mentioned to his brother yet.
“And what?”
“And as soon as you get somebody to help you.”
Clay stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Man, you need somebody.”
“The hell I do! Some crazy old man lived out here by himself, but me, I need somebody. No! No way!”