Young Bleys - Childe Cycle 09

  "It's Green Pastures District," said Bleys, "maybe ninety miles from Ecumeny here."

  "Yes. I see," said McKae.

  There was a shrewdness in the man, Bleys noted, that was at odds with his religious appearance. If this had been any world but a Friendly one, he would have suspected McKae's religiousness to be merely a front behind which his ambition worked.

  However, since this was one of the Friendly Worlds and McKae had grown up on it, it was highly unlikely that he would be a charlatan in any sense of the word. In short, thought Bleys, McKae was in somewhat the same position as Bleys himself. He wished to gain control, but only in order to direct what he controlled in the path that he believed was right.

  McKae had obviously been taking a few moments out to think. But now he spoke up again.

  "What can you do, then?" he asked Bleys.

  "Any farm work, Great Leader," said Bleys, "and I can handle goats of course, harness them to a cart or a plow and care for them. Outside of that, not really anything. I was hoping there'd be work to be done with my hands, here in the city, because we need the money back on the farm. So far I haven't found any."

  "Have you ever handled a gun?" asked McKae.

  Bleys hesitated, as he knew that someone who was what he was pretending to be would do, in case of a question like this. It was normal for all but the poorest of farmers to own some sort of weapon, both for hunting rabbits as well as for defense against raids from an opposing church group. But McKae's question also hinted that Bleys might be involved in such raiding himself.

  McKae would be unlikely to be concerned over such, but the man Bleys was pretending to be would be cautious about admitting it.

  "I've done a little shooting with a needle gun," he said. "We had our land posted to keep foreign rabbit hunters off. But they come anyway, you know. One of them must've left his gun behind, because I found it in the tall grass. It was pretty dirty, but I got it working and we used to use it ourselves, to hunt rabbits."

  McKae, who was clearly country-bred himself, let these words of Bleys' story about how he came to have a needle gun pass without comment. Of course, thought Bleys, he knew better.

  "How good a shot are you?" he asked Bleys.

  "Pretty good," said Bleys, "usually I always came back with some rabbits when I took the gun out. And—I'm a powerful wrestler."

  "Powerful wrestler, you say," said McKae with another sudden smile, broader than he had given Bleys before. "Now that's interesting. With your size, and if you're any good with a needle gun and as good a wrestler as you say, there might be a way you could serve our church and me."

  He got up unexpectedly and came around from behind the desk. He was about four inches shorter than Bleys, but his shoulders were nearly as broad and he tapered down to a slim waist. "I'm a fairly powerful wrestler myself. Do you think you could throw me?"

  "Oh, Great Leader," said Bleys, "I wouldn't want to hurt you."

  "Don't worry about that," said McKae. He stood with his body perfectly balanced, one foot a little behind the other and apart, his elbows bent and his hands out and half curled, ready to grab. It was the typical country wrestling style that Bleys had seen a number of times during the years he had been at Henry's. "You see, I don't think you can throw me. Do you think you can?"

  "Great Leader," said Bleys in a distressed voice, "I really don't want—"

  "Do as you're told," said McKae. "Now, you better throw me or I'm going to throw you." He began circling Bleys.

  "If you say so, Great Leader," said Bleys with a sigh. There were very few rules in country wrestling, Bleys knew. He would have known more about it if he had gone to the local school near Henry's, since wrestling was one of the primary recreations for rural males of all ages.

  He took a step toward McKae, his forearms half upraised; and with very creditable speed, McKae seized his left arm, stepped in and attempted a hip throw. Bleys dropped to one knee however, and with one arm holding McKae's arm and the other grasping his collar, levered him over the bent leg and onto the carpet. He let go immediately and stood back. McKae bounced back to his feet.

  "Very interesting," said McKae, looking at him. "I've done more than a little wrestling and I never ran into that before. Boris!"

  The last word was a summons to the man by the door. He came over to them.

  "No, no, Boris," McKae's voice stopped the other man before he could lay hands on Bleys himself, "I don't want you to try him out. Take him off, run him through Weapons and Unarmed Combat; and then come back and tell me how he did."

  He turned to Bleys.

  "I'll hope to see you again, Bleys MacLean," he said. "Thank you, Great Leader," said Bleys. He followed Boris out the door.

  They went down several floors to one whose long central corridor had been turned into a practice range for shooting with needle guns. The door at the far end of it that led to whatever room or suite was beyond it—probably a suite—had been blocked and heavily padded to stop any of the fired needles from going through and doing damage. When they got there Boris turned him over to another man who was easily into his fifties. A lean, dried, brown man with a sharp nose and a narrow mouth, but with a pair of very bright, brown eyes under his thinning brown hair on a brown skull.

  "Bleys MacLean," said Boris, "this is Seth Tremunde. He'll tell you what to do."

  Bleys offered his hand but Tremunde merely waved it aside.

  "We don't waste time in courtesies here," he said. "What are you down here for?"

  "He's to be tested with a needle gun and anything else you're set up to test with. Great Leader's orders."

  "All right," said Tremunde.

  He turned to a large cupboard set up along the wall of the corridor, slid its door back a little and brought out a transparent case holding a needle gun in its two parts. He stripped the case off the two parts and handed them separately to Bleys.

  Bleys grinned. It was an old trick. Someone who was well used to needle guns could snap the stock and trigger assembly part to the barrel-section in half a second. Anyone who had not handled a needle gun repeatedly over a period of time would have to fumble, getting the two to lock together. Bleys snapped them into one piece in the blink of an eye.

  Tremunde did not look impressed; although, Bleys knew, he had scored on the other man.

  "All right," said Tremunde, waving at the far end of the corridor, "there's a target pinned up down there. Let's see what you can do with it."

  Bleys looked down the corridor and lifted the needle gun to his shoulder, pressing the target-read button with his thumb as he brought the sights in line with the white square of the target.

  This, he knew, was a second test. One of the things that was important about shooting a needle gun was to adjust your pattern of needles to the size you wanted at the distance the target was from you. The needles spread in a ring-pattern as they went out, and if distance was not known, or misjudged, then the pattern might well be so wide when it at last reached the target, that it simply encircled it without doing any real harm. At the same time as Bleys set the pattern size for the distance he got off the target-read dial—for the target-read went by light reflected off the surface it was aimed at and had to be adjusted for the ambient lighting—he blinked twice, very quickly together with both eyes.

  An invisible, transparent telescopic contact lens dropped down into his right eye, his sighting eye.

  Bleys was a good shot without any artificial aids; but in this case he wanted to make no mistake in impressing them with his marksmanship. The lens that he had kept tucked up under his lid and practiced with until he could put it either up or down with the proper blinking move of his eyelid, was adjusted in rings from its outer circle inward so that he was able to focus not only on the target but on both the rear and front sights of the needle gun.

  He fired a very brief burst. That, he knew, was a test also. Anyone without experience with a needle gun tended to fire long bursts. The briefest touch on the trigger was all that was nece
ssary if the aim was correct. He blinked the lens back up into hiding under his lid and lowered the needle gun.

  "Sure you don't want to take a second shot?" said Tremunde. But the sarcastic tone of his voice indicated that Bleys had scored on all tests so far. In the meantime Tremunde had pressed a button on the wall and the white target was off the backing and being slid along a runner rail up to them.

  Three pairs of eyes looked at it as Tremunde took it off. The pattern of hits was no larger than Bleys' thumbprint, and in the very center of the bull's-eye of the target.

  CHAPTER 34

  "You're too good to be true," said Tremunde, filling out a form and writing several lines near the bottom in a box that was obviously there for comments. Bleys could sympathize with him.

  Bleys had done very well with a power pistol on one-tenth charge in an adjoining room, which had obviously been several hotel rooms before it had been opened out to make another, shorter range for the power weapons; and he had done exceptionally well, without any need at all for the hidden lens over his right eye, on the range in another such room with the pop-up targets.

  In this final exercise, Bleys had held a needle rifle in one hand at his belt level and walked through the range, firing from that position. He was, both by inclination and training, a superb hip-shooter; and he suspected it was mainly this to which Tremunde was referring as he filled out the form.

  The form filled out, Tremunde folded it and passed it to Boris, without giving Bleys a chance to read it.

  "You've been a Soldier of God?" he asked. "No," said Bleys.

  "Well, we're most of us former Soldiers, here," said Tremunde. He turned to Boris. "We'll take him on, anyway."

  Bleys and Boris left the shooting gallery area and went down another floor, which turned out to have been remodeled into one huge gym. In charge down here was a little, brown man, no taller than the average twelve- or thirteen-year-old on Association, almost bald, but very brisk and gray-eyed and obviously in superb physical condition.

  "He claims to be a wrestler," Boris said, jerking his thumb at Bleys. "The Great Leader tried him out and this man threw him. The Great Leader wants him checked out."

  "Right," said the small man, sharply, in an accent that Bleys recognized as being Old Earth of some kind or another.

  He made a wild guess that it might be Australian.

  "I'm Jimmy Howe," said the little man, extending his hand to Bleys, "since Boris didn't think to introduce us. And you're—?"

  "Bleys MacLean," said Bleys.

  "Pleased to meet you, Bleys," said Howe. "This way, then." He led the way off about thirty feet to a wrestling mat, and stepped up on it. He was wearing high-laced gym shoes, Bleys noticed. Bleys had already begun to take his shoes off.

  "That's right," said Jimmy Howe, approvingly.

  Bleys stepped onto the mat and faced him a little more than reaching distance away.

  "All right," said Howe, "see if you can throw me."

  Bleys took a step toward him, reaching out, and clutched empty air. A moment later he was caught in almost the same hip throw that Darrel McKae had tried on him, but from his left side, when he had been expecting contact on his right. He went down. Howe was already back on his feet, fists on hips and looking down at him.

  "Want to try again?" Howe asked. Bleys got to his feet, made a feint with his long, left arm to the little man's left and then caught him deftly behind the neck with his cupped right hand. The little man was obviously greased lightning, very much faster than Bleys. But Bleys' length of limb was something that almost everybody underestimated, and— probably just this one time—Howe had underestimated it too.

  He stepped forward to get away from Bleys' hand cupped on his neck and Bleys spun himself in toward the little man, who was now off-balance, and flung his now released left arm about the other's waist. Howe was forced to move to keep from falling; and Bleys began to rotate them both, with himself as the center of a pivot and Howe on the periphery of the circle around it.

  This was, in fact, one of Bleys' favorite throws. When it had first been demonstrated on him, he could not believe that simply a loose grasp and the continual circular movement could keep the other man captive and moving in the circular path, whether he wanted to or not. But the fact was it could. It was instinctive to try to keep from falling, and the result was to keep him running in a circle. Bleys spun Howe around a couple of times and suddenly reversed direction. Howe flew off at an angle from him like a stone off from a string that breaks as a boy swings it around his head.

  He skidded across the mat onto the floor, was back up on his feet in a moment and back on the mat facing Bleys; but he held up a hand as Bleys was about to move toward him again once more.

  "That's enough," said Howe. "You've had training. Want to tell me about it?"

  "Oh, there was a neighbor of ours, back when I was on the farm and growing up," said Bleys. "He'd never wrestle himself, but he had a reputation of being able to beat anyone around with no trouble at all. Some of us, if he took a liking to us, he'd show a few things to. I was one of the lucky ones."

  "I'll bet," said-Howe, and grinned unexpectedly. "Kind of a tall tale, that. But if it suits you it suits me."

  He turned to Boris.

  "I don't need to see any more," he said. "Take Bleys Ahrens here back to the Great Leader and tell him this is the best man he ever sent me. As far as wrestling goes."

  Boris nodded, a little sourly it seemed to Bleys, who was now sitting down on the mat and putting his shoes back on. He got to his feet and went off with Boris.

  "Drop by any time, Bleys MacLean!" Howe called from behind him. Bleys looked back and nodded.

  Boris took him back up to McKae's office, tapped on the door and said his name, as before. This time a voice that was not McKae's answered back, telling him to wait another ten minutes, then knock again. Boris led Bleys off to the lounge and picked two chairs facing each other. He pointed wordlessly to one that Bleys took, and sat down opposite him, still without saying anything.

  Ten minutes passed without Boris venturing on any conversation. At the end of that time he got to his feet, jerked his head to summon Bleys to follow him and went back to the door of McKae's office. This time when he rapped and gave his name it was opened to him. He and Bleys went inside. The room was empty except for McKae behind his desk. Boris went up to his desk and put down on it the unfolded form that Tremunde had filled out.

  "Jimmy Howe says to tell you that this man is the best you've ever sent him."

  "Does he indeed?" murmured McKae. He was busy running his eyes over the form. "I see he did well at the shooting, too."

  He looked up at Bleys.

  "Suppose we try something else. Boris, you can stand back." He handed Bleys a piece of paper from his desk, on which there was a list of numbers, totaled up at the bottom.

  "Run your eye over that," McKae said.

  Bleys did so.

  "Now, hand it back," said McKae. He received the paper, put it down in front of him and looked up at Bleys once more.

  "Now," said McKae, "repeat the numbers back to me in the order they are in the column and give me the total."

  Bleys had been able to scan the column and total it the moment he had had it and it was all firmly in his memory. But for his purposes this was one test he decided to fail.

  "The first number in the column," he said slowly, "is 49.20.

  The second number is 13.00, the next number is 87.84, the next number is—" He hesitated.

  "—The next number—" he hesitated again, "is 87.84—no, I just gave you that number, Great Leader. The one after that is—is—"

  He stopped and looked helplessly across the table at McKae.

  "I'm sorry, Great Leader," he said, "I just didn't have enough time to learn them all. I don't know what comes after 87.84."

  "That's all right," said McKae, almost absently. "I wonder what gave Samuel the idea that you have what he calls 'a perfect memory.'"

  "I th
ink," said Bleys diffidently, "it was because I remembered your words of fire on the floor of the Chamber that day. I was able to tell the congregation word-for-word what you said."

  "But you can't do it with numbers?" McKae said, looking back up at him.

  "I remember only what the Lord bids me to remember. It comes with no effort when it comes, being the Lord's doing rather than my own," said Bleys. "In all other things I am no more than most people as far as memory goes."

  "Is that so?" said McKae. He sat thinking for a second. "Have you read the Bible?"

  "Of course, Great Leader," said Bleys.

  "All of it?"

  "Oh yes. All of it," said Bleys.

  "And that's the sort of thing that the Lord would bid you remember, isn't it?" said McKae. "Oh yes. Absolutely," said Bleys.

  "Very well, then," said McKae, throwing himself back in his chair, "begin at the beginning of the First Book of Samuel and tell me what it says. Keep telling me until I tell you to stop."

  "Yes, Great Leader," said Bleys.

  He let enthusiasm flow into him and radiate from his face and the way he stood, the way an actor might, in the wings before stepping out onto the stage in the character he was playing.

  "Now there was a certain man of Ramathaim-zophim, of Mount Ephraim, and his name was Elkanah, the son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephrathite:

  "And he had two wives; the name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other Peninnah: and Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children.

  "And this man went up out of his city yearly to worship and to sacrifice unto the Lord of hosts in Shiloh. And the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, the priests of the Lord—"

  "All right," said McKae, holding up a finger to stop him, "that'll do. It's a useful gift of the Lord but I think we'll regard it as something to be called upon only if needed. Meanwhile, there are Soldiers of God who've joined the Arise! Church. They've formed a special body of Defenders to protect me, so that I can safely continue to preach—for there are those who'd stop me. Would you like to be one of my Defenders?"