Sharkko got up then and I hit with my other fist but only a glancing blow along his jaw. It hurt my fist more than it hurt his jaw. He spun around and took off, and I went after him. The others took off, too, with Monat beating them on the tail with his spear. I chased Sharkko up the next hill and caught him on the downslope and punched him but good! He crawled away, begging for mercy, which I gave him with a kick in the rear that rolled him howling all the way down the hill.'
Frigate was still shaking with reaction, but he was pleased.
'I was afraid I was going to torn chicken there for a while,' he said. 'After all, all that had been so long ago and in another world, and maybe we’re here to forgive our enemies — and some of our friends — and be forgiven. But on the other hand, I thought, maybe we’re here so we can give, a little back of what we had to take on Earth. What about it, Lev? Wouldn’t you like a chance to turn Hitler over a fire? Very slowly over a fire?'
'I don’t think you could compare a crooked publisher to Hitler,' Ruach said. 'No, I wouldn’t want to turn him over a fire. I might want to starve him to death, or feed him just enough to keep him alive. But I wouldn’t do that. What good would it do? Would it make him, change his mind about anything, would he then believe that Jews were human beings? No, I would do nothing to him if he were in my power except kill him so he couldn’t hurt others. But I’m not so sure that killing him would mean he’d stay dead. Not here.'
'You’re a real Christian,' Frigate said, grinning.
'I thought you were my friend!' Ruach said.
12
This was the second time that Burton had heard the name Hitler. He intended to find out all about him, but at the moment everybody would have to put off talking to finish the roofs on the huts. They all pitched in, cutting off more grass with the little scissors they had found in their grails, or climbing the irontrees and tearing off the huge triangular green and scarlet-laced leaves. The roofs left much to be desired. Burton meant to search around for a professional thatcher and learn the proper techniques. The beds would have to be, for the time being, piles of grass on top of which were piles of the softer irontree leaves. The blankets would be another pile of the same leaves.
'Thank God, or Whoever, that there is no insect life,' Burton said.
He lifted the gray metal cup, which still held two ounces of the best scotch he had ever tasted.
'Here’s to Whoever. If he had raised us just to live on an exact duplicate of Earth, we’d be sharing our beds with ten thousand kinds of biting, scratching, stinging, scraping, tickling, bloodsucking vermin.' They drank, and then they sat around the fire for a while and smoked and talked. The shadow darkened, the sky lost its blue, and the gigantic stars and great sheets, which had been dimly seen ghosts just before dusk, blossomed out. The sky was indeed a blaze of glory.
'Like a Sime illustration,' Frigate said.
Burton did not know what a Sime was. Half of the conversation with the non-nineteenth centurians consisted of them explaining their references and he explaining his.
Burton rose and went over to the other side of the fire and squatted by Alice. She had just returned from putting the little girl, Gwenafra, to bed in a hut.
Burton held out a stick of gum to Alice and said, 'I just had half a piece. Would you care for the other half?' She looked at him without expression and said, 'No, thanks.'
'There are eight huts,' he said. 'There isn’t any doubt about who is sharing which but with whom, except for Wilfreda, you, and me 'I don’t thick there’s any doubt about that,' she said.
'Then you’re sleeping with Gwenafra?' She kept her face turned away from him. He squatted for a few seconds and then got up and went back to the other side and sat down by Wilfreda.
'You can move on, Sir Richard,' she said. Her lip was curled. 'Lord grab me, I don’t like being second choice. You could of asked 'er where nobody could of seen you. I got some pride, too.' He was silent for a minute. His first impulse had been to lash out at her with a sharp-pointed insult. But she was right. He had been too contemptuous of her. Even if she had been a whore, she had a right to be treated as a human being. Especially since she maintained that it was hunger that had driven her to prostitution, though he had been skeptical about that. Too many prostitutes had to rationalize their profession; too many had justifying fantasies about their entrance into the business. Yet, her rage at Smithson and her behavior toward him indicated that she was sincere.
He stood up and said, 'I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.'
'Are you in love with her?' Wilfreda said, looking up at him.
'I’ve only told one woman that I ever loved her,' he said.
'Your wife?'
'No. The girl died before I could marry her.'
'And how long was you married?'
'Twenty-nine years, though it’s none of your business.'
'Lord grab me! All that time, and you never once told her you loved her!'
'It wasn’t necessary,' he said, and walked away. The hut he chose was occupied by Monat and Kazz. Kazz was snoring away; Monat was leaning on his elbow and smoking a marihuana stick. Monat preferred that to tobacco, because it tasted more like his native tobacco. However, he got little effect from it. On the other hand, tobacco sometimes gave him fleeting but vividly colored visions.
Burton decided to save the rest of his dreamgum, as he called it. He lit up a cigarette, knowing that marihuana would probably make his rage and frustration even darker. He asked Monat questions about his home, Ghuurrkh. He was intensely interested, but the marihuana betrayed him, and he drifted away while the Cetan’s voice became fainter and fainter.
'…cover your eyes, boys!' Gilchrist said in his broad Scots speech.
Richard looked at Edward; Edward grinned and put hands over his eyes, but he was surely peeking through the spaces between his fingers. Richard placed his own hands over his eyes and continued to stand on tiptoe. Although he and his brother were standing on boxes, they still had to stretch to see over the heads of the adults in front of them.
The woman’s head was in the stock by now; her long brown hair had fallen over her face. He wished he could see her expression as she stared down at the basket waiting for her, or for her head, rather.
'Don’t peek now, boys!' Gilchrist said again.
There was a roll of drums, a single shout, and the blade raced downward, and then a concerted shout from the crowd, mingled with some screams and moans, and the head fell down. The neck spurted out blood and would never stop. It kept spurting and spurting while the sun gleamed on it, it spurted out and covered the crowd and, though he was at least fifty yards from her, the blood struck him in the hands and seeped down between his fingers and over his face, filling his eyes and blinding him and making his lips sticky and salty. He screamed…
'Wake up, Dick!' Monat was saying. He was shaking Burton by the shoulder. 'Wake up! You must have been having a nightmare!'
Burton, sobbing and shivering, sat up. He rubbed his hands and then felt his face. Both were wet. But with perspiration, not with blood.
'I was dreaming,' he said. 'I was just six years old and in the city of Tours. In France, where we were living then. My tutor, John Gilchrist, took me and my brother Edward to see the execution of a woman who had poisoned her family. It was a treat, Gilchrist said. I was excited, and I peeked through my fingers when he told us not to watch the final seconds, when the blade of the guillotine came down. But I did; I had to. I remember getting a little sick at my stomach but that was the only effect the gruesome scene had on me. I seemed to have dislocated myself while I was watching it; it was as if I saw the whole thing through a thick glass, as if it were unreal. Or I was unreal so I wasn’t really horrified.'
Monat had lit another marihuana. Its fight was enough so that Burton could see him shaking his head. 'Flow savage! You mean that you not only killed your criminals, you cut their heads off! In public! And you allowed children to see it!'
'They were a little more humane in England,' Burton said. 'They hung the criminals!'
'At least the French permitted the people to be fully aware that they were spilling the blood of their criminals,' Monat said. 'The blood was on their hands. But apparently this aspect did not occur to anyone. Not consciously, anyway. So now, after how many years — sixty-three? — you smoke some marihuana and you relive an incident which you had always believed did not harm you. But, this time, you recoil with horror. You screamed like a frightened child. You reacted as you should have reacted when you were a child. I would say that the marihuana dug away some deep layers of repression and uncovered the horror that had been buried there for sixty-three years.'
'Perhaps,' Burton said. He stopped. There was thunder and lightning in the distance. A minute later, a rushing sound came, and then the patter of drops on the roof. It had rained about this time last night, about three in the morning, he would guess. And this second night, it was raining about the same time. The downpour became heavy, but the roof had been packed tightly, and no water dripped down through it. Some water did, however, come under the lick wall, which was uphill. It spread out over the floor but did not wet them, since the grass and leaves under them formed a mat about ten inches thick. Burton talked with Monat until the rain ceased approximately half an hour later. Monat fell asleep; Kazz had never awakened. Burton tried to get back to sleep but could not. He had never felt so alone, and he was afraid that he might slip back into the nightmare. After a while, he left the but and walked to the one which Wilfreda had chosen. He smelled the tobacco before he got to the doorway. The tip of her cigarette glowed in the dark. She was a dim figure sitting upright in the pile of grass and leaves.
'Hello,' she said. 'I was hoping you would come.'
'It’s the instinct to own property,' Burton said.
'I doubt that it’s an instinct in man' Frigate said. Some people in the '60’s — 1960’s, that is — tried to demonstrate that man had an instinct which they called the territorial imperative But…'
'I like that phrase: It has a fine ring to it,' Burton said.
'I knew you’d like it,' Frigate said. 'But Ardrey and others tried to prove that man not only had an instinct to claim a certain area of land as his own, he also was descended from a killer ape. And the instinct to kill was still strong in his heritage from the killer ape. Which explained national boundaries, patriotism both national and local, capitalism, war, murder, crime, and so forth. But the other school of thought, or of the temperamental inclination, maintained that all these are the results of culture, of the cultural continuity of societies dedicated from earliest times to tribal hostilities, to war, to murder, to crime, and so forth. Change the culture, and the
