hands when we have so few?” He made a lost, helpless gesture. “When we’re reduced to this, I’m not sure any longer whether we can continue the struggle.”
Horrified, Nestamay drew back her arm as the old man moved to a more comfortable position. His gnarled fingers sought and clasped her work-toughened young ones. He continued in a haunted voice, pleading for understanding with his eyes.
“I remember foreseeing this a long time ago, Nestamay! I talked about it, over and over, with you father. I’ve never discussed your father with you, have I? Or not properly. For all I know, you may think I drove him to his death out of overweening pride!” He gave a short bitter laugh.
“I didn’t drive him. He went, bravely and willingly. He knew-I knew-we’d come in a little while to the state we’re now in, where we have to keep a tainted genetic line because we have nothing else to replace it. Generation after generation there’s been a fining-down; at first the mixing could be random, but the recessives showed up eventually, and lines which could have masked them were lost in accidents or because
“It was baby Dan who drove your father out, if anyone drove him,” He wiped his brow with his hand.
“Baby Dan?” echoed Nestamay in an incredulous tone. She stared at the pasty-pale fatness of her brother, playing with his blanket on the other side of the hovel.
“Of course. Only an accident kept the same thing from happening to you. He’s a mere three years younger than you, you realise-a total failure as a human being, a mere vegetable, an infant until he dies. He’s proof of what I’d previously just warned about. When he was a year old, or thereabouts, it was beyond doubt that he was an imbecile. And, seeing he could hide the truth no longer from himself, your father-my son also, remember! — set out to hunt for someone else. Anyone else! Anyone would be better than your Jaspers, your Danianel’s, and the other blockheads of this generation!”
After that they sat in silence for a long time. Baby Dan grew tired of playing with his blanket, rolled over and went to sleep as unfussily as a real baby. Nestamay watched him.
“You should have told me before, Grandfather,” she said. “I–I thought some very bad things about you because you didn’t.”
“I don’t like talking about it,” Grandfather snapped. “Didn’t I just remind you your father was also my son-my only son?”
He picked up his pointer-stick and sighed heavily. “Well, it’s no use fretting about what might have been. We have to make the best of what we’ve got. And you’re the best of what we’ve got right now, Nestamay-the brightest member of your generation, the only person in the Station who could possibly learn everything I know and hope to add to it.”
“But-!” The tortured cry was wrung from Nestamay. “But what for? If our genetic lines are all going to produce a baby Dan sooner or later, what’s the use of struggling?”
“We aren’t the only people in the universe,” Grandfather said. “Sometimes it seems like it. But somewhere there are other people, and some day we may find them, and when we do meet strangers we must be able to say to them, ‘We kept up the struggle.’ Because if we can’t say that, what right will we have to be respected as human beings?”
XV
Conrad was completely dazed by the speed of events after Yanderman forced the insane-seeming promise out of him. A score of times a protest or withdrawal rose to his lips; always Yanderman forestalled the utterance with some point requiring immediate action.
A safe place for them to go, first. Conrad dredged one up from the not-so-distant past-a hideaway under an overhanging shelf of rock on the eroded side of a hill, where he had sometimes taken refuge from taunting children when he was ten or twelve years old. (He had sometimes dreamed of one day taking Idris there, in privacy. That was dead.)
Things necessary for them to take, next. Yanderman’s directions were crisp and rapid. Certain things he chose himself; Conrad would never have known they were important, for he didn’t know what they were at all. A magnetic compass, for instance. He had never seen one in Lagwich.
On the other hand, he knew very well what a gun was. The fact that he didn’t even consider looking for one was due to his assumption that a gun was the last thing the departing soldiers were likely to have abandoned. Yanderman knew better. Intensive searching located several, of which he chose the two best, as well as a bag of ammunition. Conrad was awed when the weapons were handed to him, but his companion allowed him no time to examine them.
“Get on with it, boy!” Yanderman rapped again and again. “The soldiery will be back some time, you know- they’ll regret wrecking the camp, and they’ll drift back when they get bored watching Lagwich defy them.”
“Yes-what
“Do you care?” Yanderman grunted. “You said not any more. And I certainly don’t. Let ’em sweat it out as best they can. Pick up that side of meat over there. I thought I’d never have an appetite again, but I’m getting hungry. And you look as though you never had a square meal in your life “
Obeying, Conrad persisted, “But what’s going to happen to Lagwich? What’s going to happen to the army?”
“It doesn’t matter what happens to them!” Yanderman exclaimed. “Oh-! Oh, I guess the town can stand a siege for a while, and the men aren’t properly officered and we didn’t come equipped to tackle even such rudimentary fortifications as Lagwich has. Maybe some bright character will put a ballista together and toss some incendiaries into the town-smoke the people out. More likely he won’t be able to organise a big enough squad of co-operative men. They’ll drift away, pick up some loot from the camp, or wander to another town and raid it before the people get wise.
“And back in Esberg there’ll be political chaos, and half a dozen would-be usurpers will impugn Duke Paul’s heir and try to confiscate his property and withdraw his titles on the grounds of wilful malfeasance, and-and the
He settled an immense burden of salvaged equipment around himself on an improvised harness made from half a dozen soldiers’ belts, and ended, “Right! Lead me to this safe hiding place you told me of.”
That was the point at which Conrad almost turned and fled. The single thing which restrained him was his burning need to know what only Yanderman could tell him: the explanation of the mysterious visions which had plagued him all his life, and which-having believed them to be unique to himself-he now knew were shared by a certain Granny Jassy and any number of other people.
“That’s better,” Yanderman sighed, rubbing his fingers on a tuft of grass to cleanse them of grease from the meat they had charred, rather than cooked, over a clear smokeless fire of minute wood-chips. “Now, Conrad, I’ll ease your mind a little. Pass me that canteen of water, will you?”
Conrad did so. Yanderman sucked lengthily at it and gave it back with a murmur of thanks.
“Yes!” he resumed. “It was sheer sick anger, of course, which made me conceive this crazy plan in the first place-this plan to venture into the barrenland. That was before I knew about you. And then, when you said what you said, all of a sudden the idea seemed less crazy. In fact, it began to make excellent sense.”
He gave Conrad a shrewd glance. “Don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? I can read it in your face-deep down you’re scared stiff of the suggestion. If you had anywhere else to go, any friends to turn to, you wouldn’t be out here in the lee of a sandstone hill with a foreigner whose head is ringing with grandiose delusions!”
Conrad managed a threadbare smile in reply.
“Did you hear from any of our men who had liberty in Lagwich how we worked our way here-how we knew what sort of terrain we had to cross even before sending out scouts?”
“No-uh-I don’t think so.”
“That was thanks to Granny Jassy. And this.” Yanderman caught up the crystal ball and let it swing on its chain. “Take a good look at it. In fact-keep on looking at it while I tell you the story.”
