Short Fiction · The Return (3/4)

“Yes, sir. We were originally a platoon of soldiers, two hundred years ago, at the time when the Wars ended. The Old Toon, and the First Tenant, were guarding pows, whatever they were. The pows were all killed by a big bomb, and the First Tenant, Lieutenant Gilbert Dunbar, took his⁠ ⁠… his platoon and started to march to Deecee, where the Government was, but there was no Government, any more. They fought with the people along the way. When they needed food, or ammunition, or animals to pull their wagons, they took them, and killed those who tried to prevent them. Other people joined the Toon, and when they found women whom they wanted, they took them. They did all sorts of things that would have been crimes if there had been any law, but since there was no law any longer, it was obvious that there could be no crime. The First Ten⁠—Lieutenant⁠—kept his men together, because he had The Books. Each evening, at the end of each day’s march, he read to his men out of them.

“Finally, they came here. There had been a town here, but it had been burned and destroyed, and there were people camping in the ruins. Some of them fought and were killed; others came in and joined the platoon. At first, they built shelters around this building, and made this their fort. Then they cleared away the ruins, and built new houses. When the cartridges for the rifles began to get scarce, they began to make gunpowder, and new rifles, like these we are using now, to shoot without cartridges. Lieutenant Dunbar did this out of his own knowledge, because there is nothing in The Books about making gunpowder; the guns in The Books are rifles and shotguns and revolvers and airguns; except for the airguns, which we haven’t been able to make, these all shot cartridges. As with your people, we did not die out, because we had women. Neither did we increase greatly⁠—too many died or were killed young. But several times we’ve had to tear down the wall and rebuild it, to make room inside it for more houses, and we’ve been clearing a little more land for fields each year. We still read and follow the teachings of The Books; we have made laws for ourselves out of them.”

“And we are waiting here, for the Slain and Risen One,” Tenant Jones added, looking at Altamont intently. “It is impossible that He will not, sooner or later, deduce the existence of this community. If He has not done so already.”

“Well, sir,” the Toon Leader changed the subject abruptly, “enough of this talk about the past. If I understand rightly, it is the future in which you gentlemen are interested.” He pushed back the cuff of his hunting shirt and looked at an old and worn wrist watch. “Eleven-hundred; we’ll have lunch shortly. This afternoon, you will meet the other people of the Toon, and this evening, at eighteen-hundred, we’ll have a mess together outdoors. Then, when we have everybody together, we can talk over your offer to help us, and decide what it is that you can give us that we can use.”

“You spoke, a while ago, of what you could do for us, in return,” Altamont said. “There’s one thing you can do, no further away than tomorrow, if you’re willing.”

“And that is⁠—?”

“In Pittsburgh, somewhere, there is an underground crypt, full of books. Not bound and printed books; spools of microfilm. You know what that is?”

The others shook their heads. Altamont continued:

“They are spools on which strips are wound, on which pictures have been taken of books, page by page. We can make other, larger pictures from them, big enough to be read⁠—”

“Oh, photographs, which you enlarge. I understand that. You mean, you can make many copies of them?”

“That’s right. And you shall have copies, as soon as we can take the originals back to Fort Ridgeway, where we have equipment for enlarging them. But while we have information which will help us to find the crypt where the books are, we will need help in getting it open.”

“Of course! This is wonderful. Copies of The Books!” the Reader exclaimed. “We thought we had the only one left in the world!”

“Not just The Books, Stamford; other books,” the Toon Leader told him. “The books which are mentioned in The Books. But of course we will help you. You have a map to show where they are?”

“Not a map; just some information. But we can work out the location of the crypt.”

“A ritual,” Stamford Rawson said happily. “Of course.”

They lunched together at the house of Toon Sarge Hughes with the Toon Leader and the Reader and five or six of the leaders of the community. The food was plentiful, but Altamont found himself wishing that the first book they found in the Carnegie Library crypt would be a cook book.

In the afternoon, he and Loudons separated. The latter attached himself to the Tenant, the Reader, and an old woman, Irene Klein, who was almost a hundred years old and was the repository and arbiter of most of the community’s oral legends. Altamont, on the other hand, started, with Alex Barrett, the gunsmith, and Mordecai Ricci, the miller, to inspect the gunshop and grist mill. Joined by half a dozen more of the village craftsmen, they visited the forge and foundry, the sawmill, the wagon shop. Altamont looked at the flume, a rough structure of logs lined with sheet aluminum, and at the nitriary, a shed-roofed pit in which potassium nitrate was extracted from the community’s animal refuse. Then, loading his guides into the helicopter, they took off for a visit to the powder mill on the island and a trip up the river.

They were a badly scared lot, for the first few minutes, as they watched the ground receding under them through the transparent plastic nose. Then, when nothing disastrous seemed to be happening, exhilaration took the place of fear, and by the time they set down on the tip of the island, the eight men were confirmed aviation enthusiasts. The trip upriver was an even bigger success; the high point came when Altamont set his controls for “Hover,” pointed out a snarl of driftwood in the stream, and allowed his passengers to fire one of the machine guns at it. The lead balls of their own black-powder rifles would have plunked into the waterlogged wood without visible effect; the copper-jacketed machine-gun bullets ripped it to splinters. They returned for a final visit to the distillery awed by what they had seen.

“Monty, I don’t know what the devil to make of this crowd,” Loudons said, that evening, after the feast, when they had entered the helicopter and prepared to retire. “We’ve run into some weird communities⁠—that lot down in Old Mexico who live in the church and claim they have a divine mission to redeem the world by prayer, fasting and flagellation, or those yogis in Los Angeles⁠—”

“Or the Blackout Boys in Detroit,” Altamont added.

“That’s understandable,” Loudons said, “after what their ancestors went through in the Last War. But this crowd, here! The descendants of an old United States Army infantry platoon, with a fully developed religion centered on a slain and resurrected god⁠—Normally, it would take thousands of years for a slain-god religion to develop, and then only from the field-fertility magic of primitive agriculturists. Well, you saw these people’s fields from the air. Some of the members of that old platoon were men who knew the latest methods of scientific farming; they didn’t need naive fairy tales about the planting and germination of seed.”

“Sure this religion isn’t just a variant of Christianity?”

“Absolutely not. In the first place, these Sacred Books can’t be the Bible⁠—you heard Tenant Jones say that they mentioned firearms that used cartridges. That means that they can’t be older than 1860 at the very earliest. And in the second place, this slain god wasn’t crucified or put to death by any form of execution; he perished, together with his enemy, in combat, and both god and devil were later resurrected. The Enemy is supposed to be the master mind back of these cannibal savages in the woods and also in the ruins.”

“Did you get a look at these Sacred Books, or find out what they might be?”

Loudons shook his head disgustedly. “Every time I brought up the question, they evaded. The Tenant sent the Reader out to bring in this old lady, Irene Klein⁠—she was a perfect gold mine of information about the history and traditions of the Toon, by the way⁠—and then he sent him out on some other errand, undoubtedly to pass the word not to talk to us about their religion.”

“I don’t get that,” Altamont said. “They showed me everything they had⁠—their gunshop, their powder mill, their defenses, everything.” He smoked in silence for a moment. “Say, this slain god couldn’t be the original platoon commander, could he?”

“No. They have the greatest respect for his memory⁠—decorate his grave regularly, drink toasts to him⁠—but he hasn’t been deified. They got the idea for this deity of theirs out of the Sacred Books.” Loudons gnawed the end of his cigar and frowned. “Monty, this has me worried like the devil, because I believe that they suspect that you are the Slain and Risen One.”

“Could be, at that. I know the Tenant came up to me, very respectfully, and said, ‘I hope you don’t think, sir, that I was presumptuous in trying to display my humble deductive abilities to you.’ ”

“What did you say?” Loudons demanded rather sharply.

“Told him certainly not; that he’d used a good quick method of demonstrating that he and his people weren’t like those mindless subhumans in the woods.”

“That was all right. I don’t know how we’re going to handle this. They only suspect that you are their deity. As it stands, now, we’re on trial, here. And I get the impression that logic, not faith, seems to be their supreme religious virtue; that skepticism is a religious obligation instead of a sin. That’s something else that’s practically unheard of. I wish I knew⁠—”

Tenant Mycroft Jones, and Reader Stamford Rawson and Toon Sarge Verner Hughes, and his son Murray Hughes, sat around the bare-topped table in the room, on the second floor of the Aitch-Cue House. A lighted candle flickered in the cool breeze that came in through the open window throwing their shadows back and forth on the walls.

“Pass the tantalus, Murray,” the Tenant said, and the youngest of the four handed the corncob-corked bottle to the eldest. Tenant Jones filled his cup, and then sat staring at it, while Verner Hughes thrust his pipe into the toe of the moccasin and filled it. Finally, he drank about half of the clear wild-plum brandy.

“Gentlemen, I am baffled,” he confessed. “We have three alternate possibilities here, and we dare not disregard any of them. Either this man who calls himself Altamont is truly He, or he is merely what we are asked to believe, one of a community like ours, with more of the old knowledge than we possess.”

“You know my views,” Verner Hughes said. “I cannot believe that He was more than a man, as we are. A great, a good, a wise man, but a man and mortal.”

“Let’s not go into that, now.” The Reader emptied his cup and took the bottle, filling it again. “You know my views, too. I hold that He is no longer upon earth in the flesh, but lives in the spirit and is only with us in the spirit. There are three possibilities, too, none of which can be eliminated. But what was your third possibility, Tenant?”

“That they are creatures of the Enemy. Perhaps that one or the other of them is the Enemy.”

Reader Rawson, lifting his cup to his lips, almost strangled. The Hugheses, father and son, stared at Tenant Jones in horror.

“The Enemy⁠—with such weapons and resources!” Murray Hughes gasped. Then he emptied his cup and refilled it. “No! I can’t believe that; he’d have struck before this and wiped us all out!”

“Not necessarily, Murray,” the Tenant replied. “Until he became convinced that his agents, the Scowrers, could do nothing against us, he would bide his time. He sits motionless, like a spider, at the center of the web; he does little himself; his agents are numerous. Or, perhaps, he wishes to recruit us into his hellish organization.”

“It is a possibility,” Reader Rawson admitted. “One which we can neither accept nor reject safely. And we must learn the truth as soon as possible. If this man is really He, we must not spurn Him on mere suspicion. If he is a man, come to help us, we must accept his help; if he is speaking the truth, the people who sent him could do wonders for us, and the greatest wonder would be to make us, again, a part of a civilized community. And if he is the Enemy⁠—”

“If it is really He,” Murray said, “I think we are on trial.”

“What do you mean, son? Oh, I see. Of course, I don’t believe he is, but that’s mere doubt, not negative certainty. But if I’m wrong, if this man is truly He, we are being tested. He has come among us incognito; if we are worthy of Him, we will penetrate His disguise.”

“A very pretty problem, gentlemen,” the Tenant said, smacking his lips over his brandy. “For all that it may be a deadly serious one for us. There is, of course, nothing that we can do tonight. But tomorrow, we have promised to help our visitors, whoever they may be, in searching for this crypt in the city. Murray, you were to be in charge of the detail that was to accompany them. Carry on as arranged, and say nothing of our suspicions, but advise your men to keep a sharp watch on the strangers, that they may learn all they can from them. Stamford, you and Verner and I will go along. We should, if we have any wits at all, observe something.”

“Listen to this infernal thing!” Altamont raged. “Wielding a gold-plated spade handled with oak from an original rafter of the Congressional Library, at three-fifteen one afternoon last week⁠— One afternoon last week!” He cursed luridly. “Why couldn’t that blasted magazine say what afternoon? I’ve gone over a lot of twentieth century copies of that magazine; that expression was a regular cliché with them.”

Loudons looked over his shoulder at the photostated magazine page.

“Well, we know it was between June thirteen and nineteen, inclusive,” he said. “And there’s a picture of the university president, complete with gold-plated spade, breaking ground. Call it Wednesday, the sixteenth. Over there’s the tip of the shadow of the old Cathedral of Learning, about a hundred yards away. There are so many inexactitudes that one’ll probably cancel out another.”

“That’s so, and it’s also pretty futile getting angry at somebody who’s been dead two hundred years, but why couldn’t they say Wednesday, or Monday, or Saturday, or whatever?” He checked back in the astronomical handbook, and the photostated pages of the old almanac, and looked over his calculations. “All right, here’s the angle of the shadow, and the compass-bearing. I had a look, yesterday, when I was taking the local citizenry on that junket. The old baseball diamond at Forbes Field is plainly visible, and I located the ruins of the Cathedral of Learning from that. Here’s the above-sea-level altitude of the top of the tower. After you’ve landed us, go up to this altitude⁠—use the barometric altimeter, not the radar⁠—and hold position.”

Loudons leaned forward from the desk to the contraption Altamont had rigged in the nose of the helicopter⁠—one of the telescope-sighted hunting rifles clamped in a vise, with a compass and a spirit-level under it.

“Rifle’s pointing downward at the correct angle now?” he asked. “Good. Then all I have to do is hold the helicopter steady, keep it at the right altitude, level, and pointed in the right direction, and watch through the sight while you move the flag around, and direct you by radio. Why wasn’t I born quintuplets?”

“Mr. Altamont! Dr. Loudons!” a voice outside the helicopter called. “Are you ready for us, now?”

Altamont went to the open door and looked out. The old Toon Leader, the Reader, Toon Sarge Hughes, his son, and four young men in buckskins with slung rifles, were standing outside.