“All right,” Alvah said bitterly. “When do we start?”
VI
HE refused to be hypnotized.
“You promised to help,” B. J. said in annoyance. “We can’t break the conditioning till we find out how it was done, you big oaf!”
“The whole thing is ridiculous anyhow,” Alvah pointed out. “I said I’d let you try and I will―you can prod me around to your heart’s content ― but not that. I’ve put in a lot of Required Contribution time in restricted laboratories. Military secrets. How do I know you wouldn’t ask me about those if you got me under?”
“We’re not interested in―” B. J. began furiously, but Bither cut her off.
“We is, though, Beej. Might be important for us to know what kind of defenses New York has built up, and I going to ask him if I got the chance.” He sighed. “Well, there other ways to skin a glovebeast. Lean back and relax, Alvah.”
“No tricks?” Alvah asked suspiciously.
“No, we just going to try to improve your conscious recall. Relax now; close your eyes. Now think of a room, one that’s familiar to you, and describe it to me. Take your time .. . Now we going further back―further back. You three years old and you just dropped something on the floor. What is it?”
Bither seemed to know what he was doing, Alvah had to admit. Day after day they dredged up bits and scraps of memory from his childhood, events he had forgotten so completely that he would almost have sworn they had never happened. At first, all of them seemed trivial and irrelevant, but even so, Alvah found, there was an unexpected fascination in this search through the dusty attics of his mind. Once they hit something that made Bither sit up sharply ― a dark figure holding something furry, and an accompanying remembered stench.
Whether or not it had been as important as Bither seemed to think, they never got it back again. But they did get other things―an obscene couplet about the Muckfeet that had been popular in P. S. 9073 when Alvah was ten; a scene from a realie feature called Nix on the Stix; a whispered horror story; a frightening stereo picture in a magazine.
“What we have to do,” B. J. told him at one point, “is to make you realize that none of this was your own idea. They made you feel this way. They did it to you.”
“Well, I know that,” said Alvah.
She stared at him in astonishment. “You knew it all along―and you don’t care?”
“No.” Alvah felt puzzled and irritated. “Why should I?”
“Don’t you think they should have let you make up your own mind?”
Alvah considered this. “You have to make your children see things the way you do, otherwise there wouldn’t be any continuity from one generation to the next. You couldn’t keep any kind of civilization going. Where would we be if we let people wander off into the Sticks and become Muckfeet?”
HE finished triumphantly, but she didn’t react properly. She merely grinned with an exasperating air of satisfaction and said, “Why should they want to―unless we can give them a better life than the Cities can?”
This was absurd, but Alvah couldn’t find the one answer that would flatten her, no matter how long and often he mulled it over. Meanwhile, his tolerance of Muckfoot dwellings progressed from ten minutes to thirty, to an hour, to a full day. He didn’t like it and nothing, he knew, could ever make him like it, but he could stand it. He was able to ride for short distances on Muckfoot animals, and he was even training himself to wear an animal-hide belt for longer and longer periods each day. But he still couldn’t eat Muckfoot food―the bare thought of it still nauseated him―and his own supplies were running short.
Oddly, he didn’t feel as anxious about it as he should have. He could sense the resistance within him softening day by day. He was irrationally sure that that last obstacle would go, too, when the time came. Something else was bothering him, something he couldn’t even name ― but he dreamed of it at night and its symbol was the threatening vast arch of the sky.
After the Fair was over, it seemed that B. J. had very little work to do. As far as Alvah could make out, the same was true of everybody. The settlement grew mortuary-still. For an hour or so every morning, lackadaisical trading went on in the central market place. In the evenings, sometimes, there was music of a sort and a species of complicated ungainly folk-dancing. The rest of the time, children raced through the streets and across the pastures, playing incomprehensible games. Their elders, when they were visible, sat―on doorsteps by ones and twos, grouped on porches and lawns ― their hands busy, oftener than not, with some trifle of carving or needlework, but their faces as blank and sleepy as a frog’s in the Sun.
“What do you do for excitement around here?” he asked B. J. in a dither of boredom.
She looked at him oddly. “We work. We make things, or watch things grow. But maybe that’s not the kind of excitement you mean.”
“It isn’t, but let it go.”
“Our simple pleasures probably wouldn’t interest you, she said reflectively. They’re pretty dull. We dance, go riding, swim in the lake …”
So they swam.
IT wasn’t bad. It was unsettling to have no place to swim to―you had to head out from the shore, gauging your distance, and then turn around to go back―but the lake, to Alvah’s considerable surprise, was clearer and bettertasting than any pool he’d ever been in.
Lying on the grass afterward was a novel sensation, too. It was comfortable―no, it was nothing of the sort; the grass blades prickled and the ground was lumpy. Not comfortable, but―comforting. It was the weight, he thought lazily, the massive mother-weight of the whole Earth cradling you―the endless slow pendulum-swing you felt when you closed your eyes.
He sat up, feeling cheerfully torpid. B. J. was lying on her back beside him, eyes shut, one arm flung back behind her head. It was a graceful pose. In a detached way, he admired it, first in general and then in particular ―the fine texture of her skin, the firmness of her bosom under the halter that half-covered it, the delicate tint of her closed eyelids―the catalogue prolonged itself, and he realized that B. J., when you got a good look at her, was a uniquely lovely girl. He wondered, in passing, how he had missed noticing it before.
She opened her eyes and looked at him. There was a groundswell of some sort and, without particular surprise, Alvah found himself leaning over and kissing her.
“Beej,” he said some time later, “when I go back to New York―I don’t suppose you’d want to come with me? I mean ― you’re different from the others. You’re educated, you can read; even your grammar is good.”
“I know you mean it as a compliment and I’m doing my best not to sound ungrateful or hurt your feelings, but …” She made a frustrated gesture. “Take the reading―that’s a hobby of Doc’s and I picked it up from him. It’s a primitive skill, Alvah, something like manuscript illuminating. We have better ways now. We don’t need it any more. Then the grammar ― didn’t it ever strike you that I might be using your kind just to make things easier for you?”
She frowned. “I guess that was a mistake. As of now, I quit. No, listen a minute! The only difference between your grammar and ours is that yours is sixty years out of date. You still use ‘I am, you are, he is’ and all that archaic nonsense of tenses, case and gender. What for? If that’s good, suppose we hunted up somebody who said ‘I am, thou art, he is,’ would his grammar be better than yours?”