Collected Short Fiction, page 183
“Evening, Ry!” Rinehart said pleasantly.
“Evening, sir,” Davison said. He smiled at the rest of them, and took a seat.
“All unpacked?” Ma Rinehart asked. “You like your room?”
“It’s fine, Mrs. Rinehart.”
“Ma, if you don’t mind.”
“All right—Ma. I like the room just fine. I’m going to be very happy here.”
“Sure you are,” Rinehart said. “Maybe it’s not as fancy a place as some, but you’ll like it here. We’re good people on this world—sound, sane, feet-on-the-ground people. I can’t think of any planet I’d rather live on.”
“At the moment, neither can I,” Davison lied. “After Dariak III, anything would be an improvement.”
“It’s a damned rainy world there,” Rinehart muttered. “You’ll get some good sun on your face here. Two weeks out in my fields and you’ll lose that fishbelly paleness of yours, Ry.”
Janey appeared in the doorway and glanced indolently at Davison. “Supper’s on,” she said.
Rinehart scooped himself out of his big chair and they followed him to the kitchen, ranging themselves around the table. “That seat down there’s yours,” Rinehart said.
Davison sat down. Rinehart, at the head of the table, uttered a brief but devout blessing, finishing up with a word of prayer for the new hired hand who had come among them. Then Janey appeared from the back with a tray of steaming soup.
“Hot stuff,” she said, and Bo and Buster moved apart to let her serve it. She brought the tray down—and then it happened. Davison saw it starting, and bit his lip in anguish.
One of the scalding bowls of soup began to slide off the end of the tray. He watched, almost in slow motion, as it curled over the lip of the tray, dipped, and poured its steaming contents on his bare right arm.
Tears of pain came to his eyes—and he didn’t know which hurt more, the pain of the soup on his arm or the real shock he had received when he had forced himself to keep from teeking the falling soup halfway across the room.
He bit hard into his lip, and sat there, shivering from the mental effort the restraint had cost him.
Janey put down the tray and fussed embarrassedly over him. “Gee, Ry, I didn’t mean that! Gosh, did I bum you?”
“I’ll live,” he said. “Don’t trouble yourself about it.”
He mopped the soup away from his corner of the table, feeling the pain slowly subside.
Kechnie, Kechnie, you didn’t send me on any picnic!
Rinehart gave him a job, working in the fields.
The staple crop of Mondarran IV was something called Long Beans, a leguminous vegetable that everyone ate in great quantities, pounded down into wheat, and used for a dozen other purposes. It was a tough, almost indestructible plant that yielded three crops a year in the constant warmth of Mondarran IV.
Rinehart had a small farm, ten acres or so, spreading out over a rolling hill that overlooked a muddy swimming-hole. It was almost time for the year’s second crop, and that meant a laborious process of stripping the stalks of the twisted pods that contained beans.
There were, of course, machines that whisked down the rows of plants, ripping loose the pods and depositing them in a hopper in which the beans were extracted, the pods baled, and the leaves stripped away, all in a moment. Davison had seen them in operation on Earth one summer, when he’d paid a visit to the farmlands of middlewestern America.
They had such machines on Mondarran IV, too. Lord Gabrielson had one—he was the wealthy landowner who farmed a thousand acres on the other side of the river. Lord Darnley, back the other way, had one too. But Dirk Rinehart and the other small farmers stripped their pods by hand, without complaining.
“You bend down like this and rip,” Rinehart said, demonstrating for Davison. “Then you swivel around and drop the pod in the basket behind you.”
“Doesn’t look like fun,” Davison said.
“It isn’t.” Rinehart straightened up and extended a thick, powerful, corded forearm. “This is what happens to you after a while. But hard work’s its own reward, son. Don’t ever forget it.”
Davison grinned. “Don’t worry about me, sir. I’m here to work.”
“I wasn’t accusing you, boy. Come on—take a furrow through with me, just to get the feel of it.” Rinehart strapped the harness around Davison’s shoulders, then donned his own, and together they started through the field. Overhead, the sun was high. It always seems to be noon on this planet, Davison thought, as he began to sweat.
Purple-winged flies buzzed noisily around the thick stalks of the bean-plants. Dragging the basket behind him, Davison advanced through the field, struggling to keep up with Rinehart. The older man was already ten feet ahead of him in the next furrow, ducking, bobbing, yanking, and depositing the pod in the basket, all in a smooth series of motions.
It was hard work. Davison felt his hands beginning to redden from the contact with the rough sandpaper surfaces of the plants’ leaves, and his back started to ache from the constant repetition of the unaccustomed pattern of motion. Down, up, reach around. Down, up, reach around.
He ground his teeth together and forced himself to keep going. His arm was throbbing from the exertion of using muscles that had lain unbothered for years. Sweat rolled down his forehead, crept into his collar, fell beadily into his eyebrows. His clothes seemed to be soaked through and through.
He reached the end of the furrow at last, and looked up. Rinehart was waiting there for him, arms akimbo, looking almost as cool and fresh as he had when he had begun. He was grinning.
“Tough sled, eh, Ry?”
Too winded to say anything, Davison simply nodded.
“Don’t let it get you. A couple of weeks out here, and it’ll toughen you up. I know how you city fellows are at the start.”
Davison mopped his forehead. “You wouldn’t think just pulling pods off a plant could be so rough,” he said.
“It’s tough work, and I’m not denying it,” Rinehart said. He pounded Davison affectionately on the back. “You’ll get used to it. Come on back to the house, and I’ll get you some beer.”
DAVISON STARTED in as a full-time picker the next day. It was, like all the other days promised to be, hot.
The whole family was out with him—the two elder Rineharts, Janey, Bo, and Buster. Each had his own harness strapped on, with the basket behind for dropping in the pods.
“We’ll start down at the east end,” Rinehart said, and without further discussion the entire crew followed him down. Each took a furrow. Davison found himself with Janey on his left, Bo Rinehart on his right. Further down the field, he could see Dirk Rinehart already fearsomely making his way through the close-packed rows of plants, a two-legged picking machine and nothing more. He watched the older man’s effortless motions for a moment, and then, conscious that Janey and Bo were already a few steps ahead of him, he set to work.
He was wearing an open shirt and a pair of ragged trousers that he’d had since his college days. It was his most comfortable outfit. Bo was wearing a pair of jeans, no shirt; the upper part of his body, sunbronzed and heavy-muscled, gleamed brightly. Buster, the younger brother, whose body still retained some youthful chubbiness, was clad in the swim trunks that seemed to be the customary boys’ garb. Janey wore briefs and a sort of wraparound halter; Davison eyed her lean brown legs approvingly. It was an efficient farming machine, this family. He plunged into his work with a will, happy to be part of their unit.
The morning sun was still climbing in the sky, and the day had not yet reached its peak of heat, but Davison began to perspire after only a few moments of bending and yanking. He stopped to rub his sleeve over his forehead and heard light, derisive laughter come from up ahead.
Flushing hotly, he glanced up and saw Janey pausing in her furrow, hands on her hips, grinning back at him. It was much the same pose her father had taken the day before, and it irritated him. Without saying anything, he bent his head and returned to the job of picking.
A muscle at the base of his right arm began to complain. It was the business of reaching back and thrusting the picked pod into the basket that was doing it, straining the arm-socket muscles in a way they had never been used before.
Kechnie’s mocking words drifted back to him. “You don’t want your muscles to atrophy, son.” They had been words spoken lightly, in jest—but, Davison now realized, they carried with themselves a certain measure of truth.
He had relied on his psi for the ordinary tasks of life, had gloried in his mastery of the power to relieve himself of a portion of everyday drudgery. Little things—things like opening doors, pulling up hassocks, moving furniture. It was simpler to teek an object than to drag it, Davison had always felt. Why not use a power, if you have it to perfection?
The answer was that he didn’t have it to perfection—yet. Perfection implied something more than utter control of objects; it meant, also, learning moderation, knowing when to use the psi and when not to.
On Earth, where it didn’t matter, he had used his power almost promiscuously. Here he didn’t dare to—and his aching muscles were paying the price of his earlier indulgence. Kechnie had known what he was doing, all right.
They reached the end of the furrow finally. Davison and Buster Rinehart came in in a dead heat for last place, and Buster didn’t even seem winded. Davison thought he caught a shred of disapproval on Rinehart’s face, as if he were disappointed at his hired hand’s performance, but he wasn’t sure. There was a definite expression of scorn on Janey’s face; her eyes, under their heavy lids, sparkled at him almost insultingly.
He glanced away, over to Rinehart, who was emptying his basket into the truck that stood in the middle of the field. “Let’s dump here before we start the next row,” he said.
The field seemed to stretch out endlessly. Davison lifted his basket with nerveless fingers and watched the gray-green pods tumble into the back of the truck. He replaced it in his harness, feeling oddly light now that the dragging weight no longer pulled down on him.
He had a fleeting thought as they moved on to the next batch of furrows: How simple it would be to teek the pods into the baskets! No more bending, no swivelling, no arms that felt like they were ready to fall off.
Simple. Sure, simple—but if Janey or Bo or any of the others should happen to turn around and see the beanpods floating mysteriously into Davison’s basket, he’d be roasting by nightfall.
Damn Kechnie, he thought savagely, and wiped a glistening bead of sweat from his face.
What had seemed like a wry joke half an hour before now hung temptingly before Davison’s eyes as as very real possibility.
He was almost an entire furrow behind the rest of them. He was disgracing himself. And his poor, unused, unathletic body was aching mercilessly.
He had the power, and he wasn’t using it. He was penning it up within himself, and it hurt. It was the scalding soup all over again; he didn’t know if it hurt more to keep bending and dragging his numb arm back up again in the blistering heat, or to pen the psi up within him until it seemed almost to be brimming out over the edges of his mind.
Davison forced himself to concentrate on what he was doing, forced himself to forget the power. This is the learning process, he told himself grimly. This is growing up. Kechnie knows what he’s doing.
They reached the end of the furrow, and through a dim haze of fatigue he heard Rinehart say, “Okay, let’s knock off for a while. It’s getting too hot to work, anyway.”
He shucked off his harness and dropped it where he was, and began to walk back toward the farmhouse. With an unvoiced sigh of relief, Davison wriggled out of the leather straps and stood up straight.
He made his way across the field, noticing Janey fall in at his side.
“You look pretty bushed, Ry,” she said.
“I am. Takes a while to get used to this sort of work, I guess.”
“Guess so,” the girl said. She reached out and kicked a clump of dirt. “You’ll toughen up,” she said. “Either that or you’ll fall apart. Last hired man we had fell apart. But you look like better stuff.”
“Hope you’re right,” he said, wondering who the last hired man was and what power it was that he had cooped up within himself. For some, it wouldn’t be so bad. A precog wouldn’t need a training session like this—but precogs were one in a quadrillion. Telepaths might not, either, since anyone who had to already had such a high-voltage mind that this sort of kindergarten toilet-training was unnecessary.
It was only the garden-variety espers who needed trips to the psi-less worlds, Davison thought. Telekinetics and pyrotics, and others whose simple, unspecialized powers lulled them into false security.
A new thought was entering Davison’s mind as he crossed the field, with Janey’s distracting legs flashing at his side. A normal man needed some sort of sexual release; long-enforced continence required a special kind of mind, and most men simply folded from the sustained tension.
How about a normal esper? Could he keep his power bottled up like this for five years? He was feeling the strain already, and it was just a couple of days.
Just a couple of days, Davison thought. He’d been hiding his psi only that long. Then he stopped to think how many days there were in five years, and he began to perspire afresh.
Two more days in the field toughened him to the point where each picking-session was no longer a nightmare. His body was a healthy one, and his muscles adapted without too much protest to their new regime. He could hold his own in the field now, and he felt a gratifying broadening of muscle and increase of vigor, a development of mere physical power which somehow pleased him mightily.
“Look at him eat,” Ma Rinehart commented one night at supper. “He puts it away like it’s the last meal he’s ever going to see.”
Davison grinned and shovelled down another mouthful of food. It was true; he was eating as he had never eaten before. His entire life on Earth seemed peculiarly pale and cloistered, next to this ground-hugging job on Mondarran IV. He was rounding into fine shape, physically.
But what was happening to his mind was starting to worry him.
He had the tk well under control, he thought, despite the fairly constant temptation to use it. It hurt, but he went right on living without making use of his paranormal powers. But there was a drawback developing.
Early on the fifth morning of his stay on Mondarran IV, he came awake in an instant, sitting up in bed and staring around. His brain seemed to be on fire; he blinked, driving the spots away, and climbed out of bed.
He stood there uneasily for a moment or two, wondering what had happened to him, listening to the pounding of his heart. Then he reached out, found the trousers draped over a chair, and slipped into them. He walked to the window and looked out.
It was still long before dawn. The sun was not yet gleaming on the horizon, and, high above, the twin moons moved in stately procession through the sky. They cast a glittering, icy light on the fields. Outside, it was terribly quiet.
Davison knew what had happened. It was the reaction of his tortured, repressed mind, jolting him out of sleep to scream its protest at the treatment it was receiving. You couldn’t just stop teeking, just like that. You had to taper off. That was it, thought Davison. Taper off.
He made his way down the stairs, sucking in his breath in fear every time they creaked, and left the farmhouse by the side door. He trotted lightly over the ground to the small barn that stood at the edge of the field, brimming over with picked bean pods.
Quickly, in the pre-dawn silence, he hoisted himself up the ladder and into the bam. The warm, slightly musty odor of masses of pods drifted up at him. He dropped from the ladder, landed hip-deep in pods.
Then, cautiously, he brought his tk into use. A flood of relief came over him as he teeked. He reached out, lifted a solitary pod, flipped it a few feet in the air, and let it fall back. Then another; then, two at a time. It continued for almost fifteen minutes. He revelled in the use of his power, throwing the pods merrily about.
One thing alarmed him, though. He didn’t seem to have his old facility. There was a definite effort involved in the telekinesis now, and he sensed a faint fatigue after a few moments of activity. This had never happened to him before.
The ominous thought struck him: suppose abstinence hurt his ability? Suppose five solid years of abstinence—assuming he could hold out that long—were to rob him of his power forever?
It didn’t seem likely. After all, others had gone on these five-year exiles and returned with their powers unimpaired. They had abstained—or had they? Had they been forced into some expedient such as this, forced to rise in the small hours and go behind someone’s barn to teek or to set fires?
Davison had no answers. Grimly, he teeked a few more pods into the air, and then, feeling refreshed, he climbed back out the window and down the long ladder.
Buster Rinehart was standing on the ground, looking up curiously at him.
He caught his breath sharply and continued descending.
“Hey there,” Buster said. “What you doin’ in there, Ry? Why ain’t you asleep?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” Davison said, determined to bluff it out. His hands were shaking. What if Buster had spied on him, watched him using his power? Would they take a small boy’s word on so serious a charge? Probably they would, on a psiless, witch-hysterical world like this. “What are you doing out of bed, Buster? Your mother would whale you if she knew you were up and around at this hour.”
“She don’t mind,” the boy said. He held out a bucket that slopped over with greasy-looking pale worms. “I was out gettin’ fishbait. It’s the only time you can dig it, in the middle of the night with the moons shining.” He grinned confidentially up at Davison. “Now what’s your story?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I just went for a walk,” Davison said nervously, hating the necessity of defending himself in front of this boy. “That’s all.”
“That’s what I thought. Having sleepin’ troubles, eh?” Buster asked. “I know what’s the matter with you, Ry. You’re out mooning after my sister. She’s got you so crazy for her you can’t sleep. Right?”
