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“That’s the idea,” Blaine told him. “Just like an old-fashioned, hell-raising Halloween. But to the victims it would not be merely mischief. It would be all the forces of the ancient darkness let loose upon the world. It would be goblins and ghosts and werewolves. On its surface it would be bad enough, but in the imagination of the victims it would grow out of all proportion. There would be, by morning, guts strung along the fence and men with their throats slashed ragged and girl children carried off. Not here, not where it was being told, but always somewhere else. And the people would believe. They’d believe everything they heard.”
“But still,” said Jackson, “you can’t criticize the teen-age parries too harshly if they should want to do this. I tell you, mister, you can’t imagine what they have been through. Snubbed and ostracized. Here, at the begi
“I know,” Blaine said, “but even so you have got to stop it. There must be a way to stop it. You can use telepathy on the telephone. Somehow or other—”
“A simple device,” said Andrews. “Although ingenious. Developed about two years ago.”
“Use it then,” said Blaine. “Call everyone you can. Urge the people you talk with to pass the warning on and the ones they talk with to pass the warning on. Set up a chain of communication—”
Andrews shook his head. “We couldn’t reach them all.”
“You can try,” Blaine shouted.
“We will try, of course,” said Andrews. “We’ll do everything we can. Don’t think that we’re ungrateful. Very far from that. We thank you. We never can repay you. But—”
“But what?”
“You can’t stay here,” said Jackson. “Fi
“My God,” yelled Blaine, “I came here—”
“We are sorry,” Andrews told him. “We know how you must feel. We could try to hide you out, but if you were found—”
“All right, then. You’ll let me have a car.”
Andrews shook his head. “Too dangerous. Fi
“What then? The hills?”
Andrews nodded.
“You’ll give me food?”
Jackson got up. “I’ll get you grub,” he said.
“And you can come back,” said Andrews. “When this all blows over, we’ll be glad to have you back.”
“Thanks a lot,” said Blaine.
THIRTY
He sat beneath a lone tree that stood on a lesser spur of one of the great bluffs and stared out across the river. A flock of mallards came winging down the valley, a black line against the sky above the eastern hills.
There had been a day, he thought, when this season of the year the sky had been blackened by the flights that came down from the north, scooting before the first boisterous outriders of the winter storms. But today there were few of them — shot out, starved out by the drying up of areas which had been their nesting places.
And once this very land had teemed with buffalo and there had been beaver for the taking in almost every stream. Now the buffalo were gone and almost all the beaver.
Man had wiped them out, all three of them, the wild fowl, the buffalo, the beaver. And many other things besides.
He sat there thinking of Man’s capacity for the wiping out of species — sometimes in hate or fear, at other times for the simple love of gain.
And this, he knew, was what was about to happen in large measure to the parries if Fi
Although, he told himself, he should be the last to worry, for they had thrown him out; they had run him off. His own people, in a town that felt like home, and they had run him off.
He leaned over and fastened the straps of the knapsack in which Jackson had packed the food. He lifted and set it and the canteen close beside him.
To the south he could see the distant chimney smoke of Hamilton and even in his half-anger at being thrown out, he seemed to feel again that strange sense of home which he had encountered as he walked its streets. Over the world there must be many such villages as that — ghettos of this latter-day, where paranormal people lived as quietly and as inconspicuously as was possible. They were the ones who huddled in the corners of the earth, waiting for the day, if it ever came, when their children or their children’s children might be free to walk abroad, equals of the people who still were only normal.
In those villages, he wondered, how much ability and genius might be lying barren, ability and genius that the world could use but would never know because of the intolerance and hate which was held against the very people who were least qualified as the targets of it.
And the pity of it was that such hate and such intolerance would never have been born, could never have existed, had it not been for men like Fi
There was little moderation in humanity, he thought. It either was for you or it was against you. There was little middle ground.
Take science, for example. Science had failed in the dream of space, and science was a bum. And yet, men of science still worked as they had always worked, for the benefit of all humanity. So long as Man might exist, there would be need of science. In Fishhook there were corps of scientists working on the discoveries and the problems that stemmed from the galaxy — and yet science, in the minds of the masses, was a has-been and a heel.
But it was time to go, he told himself. There was no use staying on. There was no use thinking. He must be moving on, for there was nothing else to do. He had sounded the warning and that was all the men of Hamilton had allowed.
He’d go up to Pierre and he’d ask for Harriet at the café with the elk horns nailed above the door. Perhaps he’d find some of Stone’s men and they might find a place for him.
He rose and slung the knapsack and canteen from one shoulder. He stepped out from the tree.
Behind him there was a sudden rustle and he swung around, short hairs rising on his neck.
The girl was settling to earth, feet just above the grass, graceful as a bird, beautiful as morning.
Blaine stood watching, caught up in her beauty, for this was the first time that he’d really seen her. Once before he’d seen her in the pale slash of light from the headlamps of the truck, and once again last night, but for no more than a minute, in a dimly lighted room.
Her feet touched ground and she came toward him.
“I just found out,” she said. “I think that it is shameful. After all, you came to help us. . . .”
“It’s O.K.,” Blaine told her. “I don’t deny it hurts, but I can see their reasoning.”
“They’ve worked so hard,” she said, “to keep us quiet, away from all attention. They have tried to make a decent life. They can’t take any chances.”
“I know,” said Blaine. “I’ve seen some who weren’t able to make a decent life.”
“Us young folks are a worry to them. We shouldn’t go out halloweening, but there’s nothing we can do. We have to stay at home so much. And we don’t do it often.”
“I’m glad you came out that night,” Blaine told her. “If I hadn’t known of you, Harriet and I would have been trapped with Stone dead upon the floor. . . .”
“We did what we could for Mr. Stone. We had to hurry and we couldn’t be too formal. But everyone turned out. He’s buried on the hill.”
“Your father told me,”