Kenneth Bulmer: Demons' World

“I see. Well, we’d better make a report. When he comes around I’ll talk to him.” Wilkins had seen the empty sacks, of course, the moment the party marched in. “Empty, Thorbum? If you can’t do better than that we will have to think again about your leadership.”

“But, sir—”

“Enough of that. Dictate your report to a scribe.”

Wilkins turned away. A little cry from Honey brought his head around, ominously, a frown of annoyance beginning to cloud that aristocratic face.

“Look!” said Honey, quite forgetting herself. “The stranger! He’s coming to!”

Thorbum bent above the green clad figure. Blue lips moved feebly; the eyelids fluttered like curtains in a draft. The mouth opened, the throat jerked; words, a word, struggled garglingly to be born.

“Stead,” said the stranger and, again, with an agonized energy, a frightful toll of energy pouring out into the single, meaningless word. “Stead…”

They stood looking down on him as he lay, white, lax, no longer unconscious, but staring up with the utter helplessness of a baby.

“But he is a baby!”

“Amnesia, my dear,” said Simon, thin fingers cupping his chin. “Everything has gone. Everything. And that is strange. A man usually remembers language, habits, generalized information when he loses his memory. Usually all that is lost is personal history.”

“His brain just isn’t working.” Delia put one slender finger to her lips, mentally correcting that flat statement. “I mean, his upper conscious brain isn’t working. The thalamus, the automotive controls, they’re all right. He’s a husky brute, isn’t he? She turned under the lights of the austere, bare room with its single table and chair, stared down on the stranger who lay, naked and unsmiling, upon the table. The bandage around his head struck a hard blow of whiteness against the tawny flush of his skin. His eyes, wide open, a pale distant blue, regarded the ceiling without knowledge, without intelligence, without any flicker of self.

The stranger lay there on the table; a single glance told anyone that here lay a tough, competent, ruthless, dedicated man with yet a wide streak of sympathy and humor. The face, lax now and revealed, was hard and well-formed, the nose nobly beaked, the lips wide and thin, the chin stubborn yet pliant—a strong face, a face used to handling men and situations and forcing them to the will of the brain dominating that skull and body. Yet now that efficient human machine was informed and animated by no intelligence, no understanding, no pride of self.

“Just a baby,” said Delia, a tiny quirk pulling one corner of her soft mouth down in a smile she knew Simon would not altogether approve. “What did you call him?”

“Stead,” said Simon. He looked up at his assistant, the redoubtable and beautiful Delia, with her red curls cut barbarously short, her wide gray eyes that, as yet, no man had seen turn violet, her tall lissomness that shook a man’s guts with sudden savage power. Simon looked at her and sighed and, as he had done a thousand times, wished he were twenty years younger.

“Stead,” he said again. “That was the first word he spoke with he regained consciousness. The first and the only word.”

“Stead. Well, it means nothing in any language I know. It could be his name—” Delia stopped. Then she said, “The reports you handed me seemed rather confused. I’d like to see Forager Leader Thorbum myself, if you don’t mind. If we knew just what had happened to the stranger, to Stead, in the moments before he became unconscious, we might have a clue to the—”

“He most probably was in danger. So the word might be a cry for help, a warning to comrades.”

“I thought the report indicated he was alone.”

“So he was.” Simon turned as a low bubbly gasp came from the lax figure on the table. “But before you essay any further guesses, Delia, I’d like you to examine the artifacts found on his body. They form a most singular collection. Ah, he’s going to cry again.”

Going towards the door, Delia said with that dimpling smile, “All babies cry. At least, that’s what I’ve been told.”

Simon couldn’t bear to watch her as she left the room. His dead youth cried out in wrath that the merciless progress of time had irreparably separated them. Then, with a visible effort of his scrawny body and\ scraggy features, he banished Delia from his mind, turned to the oversize baby on the table.

Stead’s face creased. His eyes closed and the lids bulged. His mouth opened. “Baawwl!” said Stead.

“Flora,” called Simon. He felt suddenly alone, there with a crying baby. The quick sense of desperate urgency, that the baby’s crying should be investigated and stopped in the appropriate manner, filled him with alarm.

“All right, sir.” Flora bustled in, broad and smiling arid comforting, her stiff white apron rustling with every breath. “Don’t worry about him, Controller Simon, sir. I’ll soon give him his feed. Then he’ll be as right as a square meal.” She chuckled. “And I haven’t got to burp him. Fancy me trying to stroke his back!”

Simon left her to her ministrations with bottle and glass and feeding tube, ignoring the nurse’s joke. The problem of this stranger had been thrust onto him and while all his scientific ardor leaped at the challenge, his essential bachelor shyness cowered at these infant mysteries and filled him with a faint disgust. He’d never married because he had not found any woman he considered suitable, and now that Delia had come as his assistant, it was too late.

In the next room of the warren where the stranger’s clothes had been spread out on a workbench, Delia examined Stead’s strange one-piece outer garment.

“Practical,” she said, turning its greeny-gray, smoothly sliding material over in her hands. “No buttons, just this ingenious litde sliding thing that opens it from neck to ankle. Somebody had to think twice before they invented that one.”

The man’s underclothes lay in a neat pile to one side: white, hygienically clean, again woven of some material with which she was not familiar; they were recognizably a man’s undergarments. She dropped them back quickly. She had touched them only with the tips of her slender, delicate fingers.

He had apparently worn no helmet. At least, none had been brought in. He didn’t seem to have worn any armor at all. Delia thought that strange. Her work had brought her into contact with Foragers, rough uncouth men and women with athletic bodies and ferocious instincts and brains of unsuspected resilience, and she knew that no human being ventured outside without all the safeguards he could command. Even here, home inside the warren, the safeguards were sometimes necessary.

The electric light shone steadily upon the hand weapon. Someone had wired up the trigger so that it could not be pulled. A label had been tied on: Dangerous. Not to be operated without permission.

Characteristically of one class of secretary, no indication of what authority was needed to give permission was indicated. Delia touched her lips again with a finger, stirred the gun gently with the other.

It did not seem heavy. A ridged butt, a trigger and guard, a barrel, slender at the muzzle, heavily masked around the square magazine section. She assumed that must be the magazine although no sign of hopper or ejector met her interested gaze. Well, Tony or somebody like htm over at Physics would have to sort that one out.

For the rest, there were a writing implement, a pad of blank paper, a wrist watch that had no winding knob, a box of extraordinarily thin and tough tissue paper, a leather wallet that wasn’t leather, containing papers and small books filled with line after line of impossibly neat printing in a language that meant nothing to Delia. In a little transparent sheath was a photograph of Stead.