Baby Is Three (24 page)

“Cris …”

“Naome’s here,” he said inanely, and sat down to goggle at her.

Weiss laughed richly. “Why do you suppose you and Tillie got that pogo-plane cross country, stopping at every ball-park and
cornfield? Naome got a non-stop flight to within fifty miles of here, and air-taxi to the bottom of the mountain, and came up by cab.”

“I had to,” said Naome. “I had to see what you were getting into. You’re so—impetuous.” She came smiling to Tillie. “I am glad to see you.”

“Why, you idiot!” said Cris to Naome. “What could you have done if he—if—”

“I’m prettier than you are, darling,” laughed Naome.

“She came pussyfooting up to the house like a kid playing Indian,” said Weiss. “I circled through the woods and pussyfooted right along with her. When she was peeping into the side window, I reached out and put a hand on her shoulder.”

“You might have scared her into a conniption!”

“Not here,” said Weiss gravely.

Surprisingly, Tillie nodded. “You can’t be afraid here, Cris. You’re saying all those things about what might have happened, but they’re not frightening to think about now, are they?”

“No,” Cris said thoughtfully. “No.” He gazed around him. “This is—crazy. Everybody should be this crazy.”

“It would help,” said Weiss. “How do you like the place now, Cris?”

“It’s—it’s grand,” said Cris. Naome laughed. She said, “Listen to the vocabulary kid there. ‘Grand.’ You meant ‘Peachy,’ didn’t you?”

“Cris didn’t laugh with the others. “Fear,” he said. “You can’t eliminate fear. Fear is a survival emotion. If you didn’t know fear, you’d fall out of windows, cut yourself on rocks, get hunted and killed by mountain lions.”

“If I open the window,” Weiss asked, “would you be afraid to jump out? Come over here and look.”

Cris stepped to the great window. He had not known that the house was built so close to the edge. Crag on crag, fold after billow, the land fell down and away to the distant throat of the valley. Cris stepped back respectfully. “Open it if you like,” he said, and swallowed, “and somebody else can jump. Not me, kiddies.”

Sig Weiss smiled. “Q.E.D. Survival fear is still with us. What we’ve lost here is fear of anything that is not so. When you came here, you saw a very frightened man. Most of my fears were “might-be” fears. I was afraid people might attack me, so I attacked first. I was afraid of seeming different from people, so I stayed where my imagined difference would not show. I was afraid of being the same as people, so I tried to be different.”

“What does it?” Cris asked.

“What makes us all what we are now? Something I found. I won’t tell you what it is or where it is. I call it an amulet, a true magic amulet, knowing that it’s no more or less magic than flame springing to the end of a wooden stick.” He took a kitchen match from his pocket and ran his thumbnail across it. It flared up, and he flipped it into the fireplace. “I won’t tell you where or what it is because, although I’ve lost my fear, I haven’t lost my stubbornness. I’ve lived miserably, a partial, hunted, hunting existence, and now I’m alive. And I mean to stay this way.”

“Where did you find it?” Tillie asked. “Mind telling us that?”

“Not at all. A half mile down the mountain there was a tremendous rockfall a couple of years ago. No one owns that land; no one noticed. I climbed down there once looking for hawks’ eggs. I found a place …

“How can I tell you what that place was like, or what it was like to find it? It was a brush-grown, rocky hillside near the gaping scar of the slide, where the crust of years had sloughed away. Maybe the mountain moved its shoulder in its sleep. There were flowers—ordinary wildflowers—but perfect, vivid, vital. They lived long and hardily, and they were beautiful. The bushes had an extraordinary green and a fine healthy gloss, and it was a place where the birds came close to me as I sat and watched them. It was the birds who taught me that fear never walked in that place.

“How can I tell you—what can I say about the meaning of that place to me? I’d been a psychic cripple all my life, hobbling through the rough country of my own ideas, spending myself in battle against ghosts I had invented to justify my fears, for fear was there first. And
when I found that place, my inner self threw away its crutches. More than that—it could fly!

“How can I tell you what it meant to me to leave that place? To walk away from it was to buckle on the braces, pick up the crutches again, to feel my new wings molt and fall away.

“I went there more and more. Once I took my typewriter and worked there, and that was
The Traveling Crag
. Cris never knew how offended I was, how invaded, to find that he had divined the existence of that place through the story. That was why I turned out that other abortion, out of stubbornness—a desire to prove to Cris and to myself that my writing came from me and not from the magic of that place. I know better now. I don’t know what another writer would do here. Better than anything he could conceivably do anywhere else. But it wouldn’t be the
Crag
or
Fire
, because they could only have been mine.”

Cris asked, “Would you let another writer work here?”

“I’d love it! Do you mean to ask if I want to monopolize this place, and the wonders it works? Of course not. One or another fear or combinations of fear are at the base of any monopoly, whether it’s in industry, or in politics, or in the area of religious thought. And there’s no fear here.”

“There should be some sort of a—a shrine here,” murmured Naome.

“There is. There will be, as long as I can keep the amulet. I found it, you see. It was lying right out in the sun. I took it and brought it here. The birds wouldn’t forgive me for a while, but I’ve made them happy here since. And here it is and here it will stay, and there’s your shrine.”

Fear walked in then. It closed gently on Cris’s heart, and he turned to look at Tillie. Her eyes were closed. She was listening.

A hell of an agent I turned out to be, he thought. How much I was willing to do for Weiss, how much for all the world through his work! By himself he found himself, the greatest of human achievements. And I have done the one thing that will take that away from him and from us all, leaving only the dwindling memory of this life without fear—and two great short stories.

He looked at Tillie again. His gaze caught hers, and she rose. Her features were rigidly controlled, but through his mounting fear Cris could recognize the thing she was fighting. She surely understood what was about to happen to Weiss and to the world if she succeeded. Her understanding versus her … orders, was it?

Cris had sat in that incredible aura, listening to the joyous expression of Sig Weiss’s delivery from fear, and he had thought of killing. Now, he realized that part of her already thought as he did, and perhaps … perhaps …

“Sig, can we look around outside?” Cris had stepped over to Tillie almost before he knew he wanted to.

“You own the place,” said Weiss cheerfully. “Naome and I’ll stir up some food. You’ve had a nice leisurely trip. I wonder if you realize that Naome spent fourteen hours on a typewriter before she took that long hop?
Fire of Heaven’s
well launched now, thanks to her. Anyway, she deserves food.”

“And a golden crown, which I shall include in the next pay envelope. Thank you, Naome. You’re out of your mind.”

“Thank you,” she twinkled.

Cris led Tillie out, and they walked rapidly away from the house. “Not too far,” she cautioned. “Let’s stay where we can think. We’re in a magic circle, you know, and outside we’ll be afraid of each other, and of ourselves and of all our ghosts.”

He asked her, “What are you going to do?”

“I shouldn’t have got you into this. I should have come by myself.”

“I’d have stopped you then. Don’t you see? Sig would have told me. Even with whatever help you have, you couldn’t have succeeded in getting the weapon on the first try. He’s too alert, too alive, far too jealous of what the ‘amulet’ has given him. He’d have told me, and I’d have stopped you, to save him and his work. You made me an ally, and that prevented me.”

“Cris, Cris, I didn’t think that out!”

“I know you didn’t. It was done for you. Who is it, Tillie? Who?”

“A ship,” she whispered. “A space ship.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Where is it?”

“Here.”

“Here, in Turnville?”

She nodded.

“And it—they—communicate with you?”

“Yes.”

He asked her again. “What are you going to do?”

“If I tell you I’ll get the weapon, you’ll kill me to save Weiss, and his work, and his birds, and his shrine, and all they mean to the world. Won’t you, Cris?”

“I will certainly try.”

“And if I refuse to get it for them—”

“Would they kill you?”

“They could.”

“If they did, could they then get the weapon?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. They’ve never forced me, Cris, never. They’ve always appealed to my reason. I think if they could control me or anyone else, they’d have done it. They’d have to find another human ally, and start the persuading process all over again. By which time Weiss and everyone else would be warned, and it would be much more difficult for them.”

“Nothing’s difficult for them,” he said suddenly. “They can smash planets.”

“Cris, we don’t think as well as they do, but we don’t think the way they do, either. And from what I can get, I’m sure that they’re good—that they will do anything they can to spare this planet and the life on it. That seems to be one of the big reasons for their wanting to get that weapon away from here.”

“And what of their other aims, then? Can we take all this away from humanity in favor of some cosmic civilization that we don’t know and have never seen, which regards us as a dust-fleck in a minor galaxy? Let’s face it, Tillie: they’ll get it sooner or later. They’re strong enough. But let’s keep it while we can. A minute, a day of this aura is a minute or a day in which a human being can know what it’s like to live without fear. Look at what it’s done for Weiss; think what it can do for others. What are you going to do?”

“I—Kiss me, Cris.”

His lips had just touched hers when there was a small giggle behind them. Cris whirled.

“Bless you, my children.”

“Naome!”

“I didn’t mean to bust anything up. I mean that.” She skipped up to them. “You can go right back to it after I’ve finished interrupting. But I’ve just got to tell you. You know the fright Sig tried to throw into me when I got here last night? I’m getting even. I found his amulet. I really did. It was stuck to the underside of a shelf in the linen closet. You’d have to be my size to see it. I swiped it.”

Tillie’s breath hissed in. “Where is it? What did you do with it?”

“Oh, don’t worry, it’s safe enough. I hid it good, this time. Now we’ll make him wonder where it is.”

“Where is it?” asked Cris.

“Promise not to tell him?”

“Of course.”

“Well, it’s smack in the innards of one of his pet new possessions. You haven’t been in the west room—the ell he calls a library—have you?”

They shook their heads.

“Well, he’s got himself a great big radio. I lifted the lid, see, and down inside among the tubes and condensers and all that macaroni are some wire hoops, sort of. This amulet, it’s a tiny thing—maybe four inches long and as wide as my two thumbs. It’s sort of—blurry around the edges. Anyway, I stuck it inside one set of those hoops. Cris—you’re green! What’s the matter?”

“Tillie—the coil—the RF coil! If he turns that set on—”

“Oh, dear God …” Tillie breathed.

“What’s the matter with you two? I didn’t do anything wrong, did I?”

They raced into the house, through the living room. “In here!” bellowed Cris. They pounded to the west room, getting into each other’s way as they went in.

Sig Weiss was there, smiling. “Just in time. I want to show you the best damn transceiver in—”

“Don’t! Don’t touch it—”

“Oh, a little hamming won’t hurt,” said Sig.

He threw the switch.

There was a loud click and a shower of dust.

And silence.

Naome came all the way in, went like a sleepwalker to the radio and opened the lid. There was a hole in the grey crinkle-finished steel, roughly rectangular. Weiss looked at it curiously, touched it, looked up. There was a similar hole in the ceiling. He bent over the chassis. “Now how do you like that! A coil torn all to hell. Something came down through the roof—see?—and smashed right through my new transmitter.”

“It didn’t go down,” said Cris hoarsely. “It went up.”

Naome began to cry.

“What the hell’s the matter with you people?” Sig demanded.

Cris suddenly clutched Tillie’s arm. “The ship! The space ship! They wouldn’t let it go off while they’re here!”

“They did,” said Tillie in a flat voice.

“Will somebody please tell me what gives here?” asked Sig plaintively.

Through a thick silence, Tillie said, “I’ll tell it.” She sank down on her knees, slowly sat on the rug. “Cris knows most of this,” she said. Don’t stop to wonder if it’s all true. It is.” She told about the races, the wars, the weapons of greater and greater destructiveness and, finally, the ultimate weapon, and its strange effect on living tissue. “Eight months ago, the ship contacted me. There was a connection made with my nerve-endings. I don’t understand it. It wasn’t telepathy; they were artificial neural currents. They talked to me. They’ve been talking ever since.”

“My amulet!” Sig suddenly cried. “Sit down,” said Tillie flatly. He sat.

Cris said, “I thought you required some physical contact for them to communicate with you. But I’ve been with you while you were communicating, and you had no contact.”

“I hadn’t?” She began to unbutton her blouse at the throat. She stopped with the fourth button, and gently drew out a metal object
shaped somewhat like a bulbous spearhead with a blunt point. It glittered strangely with a color not quite that of gold and not quite of polished brass. It seemed to be glazed with a thin layer of clear crystal.

“Oh-h-h,” breathed Naome, in a revelatory tone.