After that there was nothing for an hour or more. We did our rather unconvincing best to soothe and reassure Petra. She understood little of what had passed between us, but she had caught the intensity and that had been enough to frighten her.
Then there was Sally again; dully, miserably, forcing herself to it:
‘Katherine has admitted it; confessed. I have confirmed it. They would have forced me to it, too, in the end. I—’ she hesitated, wavering. ‘I couldn’t face it. Not the hot irons; not for nothing, when she had told them. I couldn’t… Forgive me, all of you… forgive us both…’ She broke off again.
Michael came in unsteadily, anxiously, too.
‘Sally, dear, of course we’re not blaming you — either of you. We understand. But we must know what you’ve told them. How much do they know?’
‘About thought-shapes — and David and Rosalind. They were nearly sure about them, but they wanted it confirmed.’
‘Petra, too?’
‘Yes… Oh, oh, oh…!’ There was an unshaped surge of remorse. ‘We had to — poor little Petra — but they knew, really. It was the only reason that David and Rosalind would have taken her with them. No lie would cover it.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘No. We’ve told them that there isn’t anyone else. I think they believe it. They are still asking questions. Trying to understand more about it. They want to know how we make thought-shapes, and what the range is. I’m telling them lies. Not more than five miles, I’m saying, and pretending it’s not at all easy to understand thought- shapes even that far away…. Katherine’s barely conscious. She can’t send to you. But they keep on asking us both questions, on and on…. If you could see what they’ve done to her…. Oh, Katherine, darling…. Her feet, Michael — oh, her poor, poor feet….’
Sally’s patterns clouded in anguish, and then faded away.
Nobody else came in. I think we were all too deeply hurt and shocked. Words have to be chosen, and then interpreted; but thought-shapes you feel, inside you….
The sun was low and we were beginning to pack up when Michael made contact again.
‘Listen to me,’ he told us. ‘They’re taking this very seriously indeed. They’re badly alarmed over us. Usually if a Deviation gets clear of a district they let him go. Nobody can settle anywhere without proofs of identity, or a very thorough examination by the local inspector, so he’s pretty well bound to end up in the Fringes, anyway. But what’s got them so agitated about us is that nothing shows. We’ve been living among them for nearly twenty years and they didn’t suspect it. We could pass for normal anywhere. So a proclamation has been posted describing the three of you and officially classifying you as deviants. That means that you are non-human and therefore not entitled to any of the rights or protections of human society. Anyone who assists you in any way is committing a criminal act; and anyone concealing knowledge of your whereabouts is also liable to punishment.
‘In effect, it makes you outlaws. Anyone may shoot you on sight without penalty. There is a small reward if your deaths are reported and confirmed; but there is a very much larger reward for you if you are taken alive.’
There was a pause while we took that in.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Rosalind. ‘If we were to promise to go away and stay away–?’
‘They’re afraid of us. They want to capture you and learn more about us — that’s why there’s the large reward. It isn’t just a question of the true image — though that’s the way they’re making it appear. What they’ve seen is that we could be a real danger to them. Imagine if there were a lot more of us than there are, able to think together and plan and co-ordinate without all their machinery of words and messages: we could outwit them all the time. They find that a very unpleasant thought; so we are to be stamped out before there can be any more of us. They see it as a matter of survival — and they may be right, you know.’
‘Are they going to kill Sally and Katherine?’
That was an incautious question which slipped from Rosalind. We waited for a response from either of the two girls. There was none. We could not tell what that meant; they might simply have closed their minds again, or be sleeping from exhaustion, or perhaps dead already…. Michael thought not.
‘There’s little reason for that when they have them safely in their hands: it would very likely raise a lot of ill- feeling. To declare a new-born baby as non-human on physical defects is one thing: but this is a lot more delicate. It isn’t going to be easy for people who have known them for years to accept the non-human verdict at all. If they were to be killed, it would make a lot of people feel uneasy and uncertain about the authorities — much the same way as a retrospective law does.’
‘But
‘You aren’t already captives, and you aren’t among people who know you. To strangers you are just non- humans on the run.’
There was not much one could say to that. Michael asked:
‘Which way are you travelling tonight?’
‘Still south-west,’ I told him. ‘We had thought of trying to find some place to stop in Wild Country, but now that any hunter is licensed to shoot us, we shall have to go on into the Fringes, I think.’
‘That’d be best. If you can find a place to hide-up there for a bit we’ll see if we can’t fake your deaths. I’ll try to think of some way. Tomorrow I shall be with a search-party that’s going south-east. I’ll let you know what it’s doing. Meanwhile, if you run into anyone, make sure that you shoot first.’
On that we broke off. Rosalind finished packing up, and we arranged the gear to make the panniers more comfortable than they had been the previous night. Then we climbed up, I on the left again, Petra and Rosalind together in the right-hand basket this time. Rosalind reached back to give a thump on the huge flank, and we moved ponderously forward once more. Petra, who had been unusually subdued during the packing-up, burst into tears, and radiated distress.
She did not, it emerged from her snuffles, want to go to the Fringes, her mind was sorely troubled by thoughts of Old Maggie, and Hairy Jack and his family, and the other ominous nursery-threat characters said to lurk in those regions.
It would have been easier to pacify her had we not ourselves suffered from quite a residue of childhood apprehensions, or had we been able to advance some real idea of the region to set against its morbid reputation. As it was, we, like most people, knew too little of it to be convincing, and had to go on suffering her distress again. Admittedly it was less intense than it had been on former occasions, and experience did now enable us to put up more of a barrier against it; nevertheless, the effect was wearing. Fully half an hour passed before Rosalind succeeded in soothing away the obliterating hullabaloo. When she had, the others came in anxiously; Michael inquiring, with irritation:
‘What was it this time?’
We explained.
Michael dropped his irritability, and turned his attention to Petra herself. He began telling her in slow, clear thought-forms how the Fringes weren’t really the bogey place that people pretended. Most of the men and women who lived there were just unfortunate and unhappy. They had been taken away from their homes, often when they were babies, or some of them who were older had had to run away from their homes, simply because they didn’t look like other people, and they had to live in the Fringes because there was nowhere else people would leave them alone. Some of them did look very queer and funny indeed, but they couldn’t help that. It was a thing to be sorry, not frightened, about. If we had happened to have extra fingers or ears by mistake we should have been sent to the Fringes — although we should be just the same people inside as we were now. What people looked like didn’t really matter a great deal, one could soon get used to it, and —
But at about this stage Petra interrupted him.
‘Who is the other one?’ she inquired.
‘What other one? What do you mean?’ he asked her.
‘The somebody else who’s making think-pictures all mixed up with yours,’ she told him.
There was a pause. I opened right out, but could not detect any thought-shapes at all. Then:
‘I get nothing,’ came from Michael, and Mark and Rachel, too. ‘It must be—’
There was an impetuous strong sign from Petra. In words, it would have been an impatient ‘Shut up!’ We subsided, and waited.
