The man was still shouting as he emerged into the bright morning sun, hands out and innocent of weapons, the woman saving her breath as she followed. Quantrill tossed one stone in high trajectory, part one of the rockfighter's one-two punch, the one they were supposed to watch while he bifurcated the nearest sucker with number two, a bullet of stone hurled as though from a pitcher's mound.
He missed, nearly grazing the woman's head with number two, and saw her mouth grow round in anger and astonishment. He scrabbled for more rocks, heedless of pain, watching the man who made no move to gather stones but raised his hands aloft instead. Then he paused to listen.
"Will you stop? Can't you understand, for God's sake? If you keep on like this you're going to hurt yourself, you stupid idiot!"
He might hurt himself, the man said. An incomparable jest under the circumstances. But the circumstances were no longer clear to Quantrill. No one else approached. The entrance to the tunnel was a natural one, and carefully painted on its stone brow was, of all things, a weathered Masonic emblem.
Faint traces of an unsurfaced road undulated in grass across the brown prairie nearby, and the velvet breeze off the hills above was softly pungent with scents of dry weed and sage.
Through the pounding in his head, Quantrill tried to fit pieces of his puzzle together. He had gone down in the kitchen of a Catholic Church in arid coal country, and come up in what was evidently a natural lava tube in open range country. Central New Mexico? He gestured at the ancient pathway, managed to croak, "Where does that lead?"
"To Route seventy-eight. In a couple of days, if you're up to it, I'll take you there."
"I'm up to it now!"
The woman, heavy-bodied and sunbaked like the man, strode near with folded arms. "I wouldn't be barking out demands if I were you, sonny," she said, dull anger smoking in her face. "You managed to survive getting a hunk cut out of your skull, you nearly got meningitis from an infection in what's left of your mastoid, you're all but mother-naked, and all you can think of is throwing rocks at us. Now I know what I agreed to do for the Masonics but as far as I'm concerned, you throw one more fit like that and you can go to hell. Wander back to Streamlined America for all I care."
Back? What was left of his mastoid? Quantrill's puzzlement must have shown in his face. The man said,
"He's still confused, Claire. Mr. Quantrill, a young woman cut a tiny radio out of your head over a week ago, and managed to explain who you were, and naturally the Masonic brotherhood was interested in helping. This is Malheur Cave, Mr. Quantrill. You're in Oregon Territory. You're a free man." Oblivious to thistles and to the two strangers, Quantrill sat down, hugged his knees, and let the storm of tears overtake him.
CHAPTER 41
Ted Quantrill wasn't entirely convinced of his freedom until an hour later as he sat in one of the small rooms far back in Malheur Cave. He would never learn who had taken his signet ring, but focused on something far more important. He held the clear plastic container between thumb and forefinger and peered through light cotton packing at the device inside. "Doesn't look very potent now. How can we be sure my critic isn't listening to us?"
"I only know what Doc Keyhoe told me," shrugged Ed Caufield, a thirty-second-degree Mason who knew a little veterinary medicine but little of high-tech electronics. "This came out of your head and half of it blew up a minute later. They put it in cotton inside this vacuum vial to make sure it wouldn't receive conducted sound. And to make double-sure, somebody in Elko wrapped the vial in metal foil. Anyway, we're under thirty meters of rock here. I reckon it's pretty safe."
"I'd like to grind it to powder," Quantrill growled. "S & R won't rest 'til it's back in their hands."
"I don't think so." Claire Connor had spent long days and nights tending Quantrill, had listened carefully to the men discuss their unconscious patient. "Doc Keyhoe knew he'd have to abandon his practice once he got involved with you, so he risked his skin and rigged some false evidence. Even conked a poor old priest and tied him up so the good Father wouldn't seem part of it." Supposedly, she added, Quantrill had fallen into the machinery that fed pulverized coal into the steam plant after his head burst open from detonation of the critic.
Haunted by his earlier fury at Marbrye Sanger, Quantrill asked, "And you're certain the woman didn't make it?"
"We weren't there," said the Connor woman. She'd needed half an hour to overcome her anger at Quantrill but found herself warming to him. He reminded her of her youngest boy, lost during the Bering Shoot before Oregon became a Canadian protectorate peppered with U.S. Army deserters.
"Doc Keyhoe was there," said Caufield as if apologizing. "I think it was seeing, um, well, seeing her die that got his dander up. Close friend, was she?"
Quantrill could find no words to explain how far that phrase fell short of the truth. He nodded, looked at the ceiling, brushed moisture from his cheeks. He could not yet appreciate that his tears were talismans of human emotions which Control had sought to drive from him, and that Control had failed.
Finally he pointed at the encapsulated solid-states of the critic and said, "Whatever comes of this, we owe to Marbrye." Then with a quick sad smile: "You have no idea what it's like to talk freely after six years with that thing in your head. I can say anything I like, recite poetry, even say, 'I love you, Marbrye.'
Only she can't hear it," he finished.
"I think she might," the woman replied, but saw that Quantrill fought bitter tears. "Let's get you back to bed now, Ted Quantrill. You won't be ready to travel for awhile yet. I don't know what you have in mind, but Doc Keyhoe is in touch with some people who want very much to meet you."
"But that's all up to you," Caufield chimed in. "You're in Oregon Territory now and you can do as you damn' please. That's something to sleep on, son"
In time Quantrill did sleep, but only after he had cried for Sanger, and for himself for having lost her. Yet his tears could not wash all his accumulated poisons away; his last waking thoughts were of personal combat against those who were twisting Streamlined America into a daily twenty-four-hour nightmare.
CHAPTER 42
For the record, health service officials announced that Father Matthew Klein died of a particularly virulent form of paranthrax. Off the record, he died from the effects of virulent questioning methods by Search & Rescue after he admitted under torture that Quantrill still lived. The paranthrax cover story became a blanket explanation for inoculation teams that flew into the mining community and, one at a time, hyposprayed two categories of the locals: members of Klein's parish, and patients of the — missing Dr. Keyhoe.
As inoculations, the hyposprays were useless. Each patient and parishoner returned home ignorant and safe. Ignorant that they had babbled honest answers to all queries put to them by Howell's rovers; safe because none had guilty knowledge of Quantrill or of any other conspiracy against the system. With Sanger dead and Keyhoe beyond its grasp, S & R had to proceed with what little the priest could tell them. That little was enough.
Lon Salter called his meeting exclusively for top-level staff and eventually found it necessary to send out for sandwiches. The decisions were not reached quickly or easily. But then, their latest data had not come without painstaking legwork and two more missing persons.
At one point, Salter raised a hand to ward off more data. "Stop right there, Reardon, I don't need to know what you did with the teamster's body. If you say he admitted hauling those two into Elko it's good enough for me."
Mason Reardon was a medium man, a man so average in appearance and mannerism that he could move almost unnoticed in a business suit or a coverall. Long before, he had taught surveillance methods to Quantrill, Sanger, and many others. More recently he had moved into the comm center as one of the voices of Control. Very recently he had made a quick trip afield, tracing Quantrill's route.