"Henry Kuttner - The Lion and the Unicorn UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

"I'm not offended," Callahan said. "I've always contended
that your group was a failure of the mutation. We are the true supermen-unafraid to take our place in the universe, whereas you're content to live on the crumbs the humans drop from then- table."
"Callahan," McNey said suddenly, "this is suicidal. We
can't-"
Barton sprang out of his chair and stood straddle-legged, glowering furiously. "Darryl! Don't beg the swine! There's a limit to what I'll stand!"
"Please," McNey said, feeling very helpless and impotent. "We've got to remember that we're not supermen, either."
"No compromise," Barton snapped. "There can't be any appeasement with those wolves. Wolves-hyenas!"
"There'll be no compromise," Callahan said. He rose, his leonine head a dark silhouette against the purple sky. "I came to see you, McNey, for just one reason. You know as well as I that the humans musn't suspect our plan. Leave us alone, and they won't suspect. But if you keep trying to hinder us, you'll just increase the danger of discovery. An underground war can't stay underground forever."
"So you see the danger, after all," McNey said.
"You fool," Callahan said, almost tolerantly. "Don't you see we're fighting for you, too? Leave us alone. When the humans are wiped out, this will be a Baldy world. You can find your place in it. Don't tell me you've never thought about a Baldy civilization, complete and perfect."
"I've thought about it," McNey assented. "But it won't come about through your methods. Gradual assimilation is
the answer."
"So we'll be assimilated back into the human strain? So our children will be degraded into hairy men? No, McNey. You don't recognize your strength, but you don't seem to recognize your weakness, either. Leave us alone. If you don't, you'll be responsible for any pogrom that may come."
McNey looked at Barton. His shoulders slumped. He sank lower in his relaxer.
"You're right, after all, Dave," he whispered. "There can't be any compromise. They're paranoids."
Barton's sneer deepened. "Get out," he said. "I won't kill you now. But I know who you are. Keep thinking about that. You won't live long-my word on it."
"You may die first," Callahan said softly.
"Get out."
The paranoid turned and stepped into the dropper. Presently his figure could be seen below, striding along the path. Barton poured a stiff shot and drank it straight.
"I feel dirty," he said. "Maybe this'll take the taste out of my mouth."
In his relaxer McNey didn't move. Barton looked at the shadowy form sharply.
He thought: What's eating you?
1 wish . . .1 wish we had a Baldy world now. It- wouldn't have to be on earth. Venus or even Mars. Callisto-anywhere. A place where we could have peace. Telepaths aren't made for war, Dave.
Maybe it's good for them, though.
You think 'I'm soft. Well, I am. I'm no hero. No crusader. It's the microcosm that's important, after all. How much loyalty can we have for the race if the family unit, the individual, has to sacrifice all that means home to him?
The vermin must be destroyed. Our children will live in a better world.
Our fathers said that. Where are we?
Not yet lynched, at any rate. Barton laid his hand on Mc-Ney's shoulder. Keep working. Find the answer. The paranoid code must be cracked. Then I can wipe them out-all of them!
McNey's thought darkened. / feel there will be a pogrom. I don't know when. But our race hasn't faced its greatest crisis yet. It will come. It will come.
An answer will come too, Barton thought. I'm going now. I've got to locate that Baldy with the Hedgehounds.
Good-bye, Dave.
He watched Barton disappear. The path lay empty thereafter. He waited, now, for Marian and Alexa to return from the town, and for the first time in his life he was not certain that they would return.
They were among enemies now, potential enemies who at a word might turn to noose and fire. The security the Baldies had fought for peacefully for generations was slipping away from underfoot. Before long Baldies might find themselves as homeless and friendless as Hedgehounds-
A too-elastic civilization leads to anarchy, while a too-rigid one will fall before the hurricane winds of change. The human norm is arbitrary; so there are arbitrary lines of demarcation. In the decentralized culture, the social animal was better able to find his rightful place than he had been in thousands of years. The monetary system was founded on barter, which
in turn was founded on skill, genius, and man-hours. One individual enjoyed the casual life of a fisherman on the California coast; his catch could bring him a televisor set designed by a Galileo man who enjoyed electronics-and who also
liked fish.
It was an elastic culture, but it had its rigidities. There were misfits. After the Blowup, those antisocials had fled the growing pattern of towns spreading over America and taken to the woods, where individualism could be indulged. Many types gathered. There were bindle stiffs and hobos, Cajuns and crackers, paisanos and Bowery bums-malcontents, anti-socials, and those who simply could not be assimilated by any sort of urban life, not even the semirural conditions of the towns. Some had ridden the rods, some had walked the highways of a world that still depended on surface travel, and some were trappers and hunters-for even at the time of the Blowup there had been vast forest tracts on the North American continent.
They took to the woods. Those who had originally been woodsmen knew well enough how to survive, how to set birdsnares and lay traps for deer and rabbit. They knew what berries to pick and what roots to dig. The others-
In the end they learned, or they died. But at first they sought what they thought to be an easier way. They became brigands, swooping down in raids on the unifying towns and carrying off booty-food, liquor and women. They mistook the rebirth of civilization for its collapse. They grouped together in bands, and the atomic bombs found targets, and they died.
After a while there were no large groups of Hedgehounds. Unity became unsafe. A few score at most might integrate, following the seasons in the north temperate zones, staying in the backland country in more tropical areas.
Their life became a combination of the American pioneer's and the American Indian's. They migrated constantly. They re-learned the use of bow and javelin, for they kept no contact with the towns, and could not easily secure firearms. They drifted in the shallows of the stream of progress, hardy, brown woodmen and their squaws, proud of their independ-' ence and their ability to wrest a living from the wild.
They wrote little. But they talked much, and by night, around campfires, they sang old songs-"Barbara Alien," "The Twa Corbies," "Oh Susanna," and the folk ballads that last longer than Senates and Parliaments. Had they ridden horse-
back, they would have known the songs based on the rhythm-patterns of equine gait; as it was, they walked, and knew marching songs.
Jesse James Hartwell, leader of his little band of Hedge-hounds, was superintending the cooking of bear steaks over the campfire, and his bass voice rolled out now, muffled and softened by the pines that screened camp from brook. His squaw, Mary, was singing too, and presently others joined in, hunters and their wives-for squaw no longer carried the derogatory shade of meaning it once had. The attitude the Hedgehounds had toward their wives was a more realistic version of the attitudes of medieval chivalry.
"Bring the good old bugle, boys, we'll sing another song-"
It was dark by the stream. They had been late in finding a camping place tonight; the hunt for the bear had delayed them, and after that it had been difficult to find fresh water. As always when the tribe was irritable, there had been half-serious raillery at Lincoln Cody's expense. It was, perhaps, natural for any group to sense the mental difference-or superiority-of a Baldy, and compensate by jeering at his obvious physical difference.
Yet they had never connected Line with the town Baldies. For generations now telepaths had worn wigs. And not even Line himself knew that he was a telepath. He knew that he was different, that was all. He had no memory of the helicopter wreck from which his infant body had been taken by Jesse James Hartwell's mother; adopted into the tribe, he had grown up as a Hedgehound, and had been accepted as one. But though they considered him one of theirs, they were too ready to call him "skinhead"-not quite in jest.
"Sing it as we used to sing it, fifty thousand strong, While we were marching through Georgia ..."
There were twenty-three in Hartwell's band. A good many generations ago, one of his ancestors had fought with the Grand Army of the Republic, and had been with Sherman on his march. And a contemporary of that soldier, whose blood also ran in Hartwell's veins, had worn Confederate gray and died on the Potomac. Now twenty-three outcast Hedgehounds,
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