“You promised him that you would take him back to Dingley Dell. You never mentioned putting him right into the arms of his mother and father, Ruth.”
“You’re playing with words.”
“You can’t let him see his family, Ruthie. You can’t let him see anyone but the intake clerk at Bedlam. No one but that small complicitous cadre at the Hospital can know that he’s come back.”
“What if we get Newman to promise that he won’t talk about anything he’s seen out here?”
Phillips arched an eyebrow. “You think that boy could keep his trap shut for two minutes? Anyway, Towlinson, Feenix and the others — sooner or later they’re going to know that he’s back. And eventually they’re going to find out that it was you what ‘brung ‘im.’ You saw the look on Caldwell’s face at the Reptilarium. He knows it wasn’t mere coincidence that you and I shewed up there the same morning as Newman. He knows that Newman is your new charity project. Well, it strongly mitigates your culpability in Newman’s return if you are the one to deposit him in Bedlam. It’ll even earn you a few brownie points. You opposed the Project by not letting Caldwell put a bullet in Newman’s head but you helped the Project in a way, by placing him with the other Limbo Returnees.”
Ruth nodded.
“Look, honey: you want to get permanently out of Dingley Dell yourself, right?”
Another nod.
“And I take it you still plan to rescue your hospital friend — the one you went and fell foolishly in love with. You’re still planning to take your beloved Bevan with you.”
Ruth nodded once more.
“Then don’t muck it up by letting Newman talk. He breathes even a few words about what he’s been through out here, there’ll be an armed militia of pissed and peeved, pitchfork-wielding Dinglians perched on the Summit as of to-morrow morning. You know that the natives have started getting restless, honey. The Bashaws are getting careless and people have started asking questions. Throwing a loner Returnee like Walter Skewton into Bedlam is one thing but a boy like Newman…”
“But maybe they need to get restless, Phillips. Maybe that gives them a fighting chance. They won’t be sitting ducks for whatever the Project plans to do with them.”
“Right. And then whatever genocidal plans the Project has in store will go into effect immediately — as of right then and there, Ruthie. You and Bevan die along with all the rest of them. I never had you pegged for a martyr, honey.”
“Martyrdom might be preferable to spending the rest of my life knowing that I saved my own ass at the expense of everyone else in the valley. I know you feel the same way or you wouldn’t have spent the last two years of your life helping me save some of these runaways. The Dinglians didn’t ask for this life. And they sure as hell don’t deserve the death that you think is being devised for them.”
“Then I suggest you find a small and circumspect group within the Dell, unconnected with the Petit-Parliament or any of the other Bashaws. Go to them. Explain what’s happening. Explain the consequences if they move too swiftly. But also explain to them the consequences should they choose not to act at all.”
“There is a group that I know of — they meet every other week. It’s ostensibly a poetry society, but I don’t think it’s poetry they’re discussing with one another, given the make-up of their membership. I don’t know the exact purpose of their meetings — maybe they’re researching the true history of the Dell, rather than the official bogus version. Maybe they’re planning some class uprising against the excesses of the Petit-Parliament. But I’m pretty sure they’d be the bunch most willing to listen to me — to take seriously what I could tell them.”
“And in the meanwhile, you’ll send Newman to Bedlam to buy yourself some time?”
Ruth Wolf cast a worried glance back at my nephew.
“It breaks my heart, too, Ruth. To have survived as he has in this forbidden place, and then to be put away in Bedlam for all his pluck. But you can’t lose sight of the bigger picture.”
Newman wasn’t looking at Ruth Wolf and Phillips anymore. His gaze had been captured by a pencil-trail of manufactured cloud high up in the sky. Newman had always wondered what they were, these strange clouds, and now he knew. Phillips had told him. Phillips had told him a great deal about terrestrial man and his ability now to reach up and touch the sky.
Newman Trimmers had always wanted to touch the sky. It is not so strange a wish for a valley-bound boy to have.
Darkness had settled in, and it was difficult at first to find the head of the trail that would take the three up the eastern wooded ridge. In time, though, it was located, and Phillips and Ruth Wolf shined their hand torches upon the ground to light the way. The trail branched off in two directions: one spur went west through the thickest part of the woods and terminated at a wicket. Here one entered the Dell without fanfare and sometimes even a bit covertly through the eastern perimeter. The other spur meandered northward to join the higher Northern Ridge where it ended at the Summit of Exchange. Ruth and Phillips had considered taking the first spur, for it was certainly the far less-traveled of the two, but there was an important reason that they could not — a reason to be conveyed shortly.
In addition to the fence that girdled the whole of the Dell of Dingley, there was another equally oppressive fence that separated those who managed the Project from the casually curious or deliberately prying Outlander. It was through this enclosure that Gus had come down from the Summit upon his own journey into the Outland, little knowing how lucky he was not to be detected by any of the Tiadaghton personnel who worked in that compound, generally a hornet’s nest of activity, except for those quiescent mornings in which even a guardhouse could become a dormitory.
But Gus’s son Newman hadn’t taken either route on his trip out of Dingley Dell. Instead, he had broken through the encircling Dinglian fence in a place far distant from the Tiadaghton Compound. The path that Ruth Wolf and Mr. Phillips and Newman now took was unfamiliar to Newman, though the look of the thick, crowding trees nonetheless comforted him, the smells and the soft muted sounds of the nocturnal forest reminding him that he was drawing close to home.
These woods were once closely and heavily patrolled, but it was simpler and cheaper now to track down a Dinglian after he had fully left the vicinity of the valley and to deal with him upon that terrain. For once in the Outland, Dinglians were, as the reader has no doubt observed, quite conspicuous in their appearance and address. It wasn’t easy for one of Newman’s countrymen to hide who he was from an Outlander — especially from an Outlander whose job it was to make him disappear forever.
Even though the woods were supposedly empty now of threats, Newman did not let down his guard, and continued to worry that men like Caldwell might still be in pursuit of him — that even in this late hour of his rescue there were those who sought him to do terrible harm to him for having brazenly walked amongst them. Newman would not feel completely safe until the three had reached the Summit and he could see his welcoming homeland spread out below.
The climb was slow and quite taxing in places where the ascent was difficult for an old man such as Phillips, or even for a boy and young woman with insufficient illumination to guide their way. On more than one occasion, Phillips, who had been leading the other two to keep the pace of his companions in line with his aged gait, stopt and remarked that he had lost the path altogether, and some time was spent in reclaiming it. On another occasion the climb had so tired and winded the septuagenarian that Ruth Wolf was compelled to ask if it would not be better for him to end his escort and suffer Newman and her to make their way up to the Summit without his companionship.