Orbit 2

“I command you by the power of Kruger!” Kinross shouted in sudden anger. “Come over here!”

Reluctantly the man came to the clearing’s edge. He looked down, but did not seem afraid. The Bantu and the Kanaka continued pounding.

“White, you were a man once,” Kinross said. “How would you like to be a man again?”

“I am a man, Mr. Kinross,” White said soberly.

“A man needs a wife. Do you have a wife, White?”

“Soon the Herr Kruger will give me one.”

“I mean back home. Do you have a wife there?”

“There is no woman in my hut, but soon the Herr Kruger—”

“Damn your hut. I mean where you came from, in Rhodesia.”

“I have always been here.”

“No, you have not. You came from another world and if you try you can remember it. Can’t you, now?”

The man looked up. “Yes, but I was a lot of different me’s then. It was not a good world.”

“Remember it. I command you to remember it by the power of Kruger. Remember your wife and your children.”

The man twisted his body and his face darkened. “There were many wives and children. It was an underground world. Everyone lived in tunnels that ran in straight lines. They were tumbled together like straws and sometimes they crossed, but none ran side by side. One of my tunnels came through into Krugerworld. I crawled up out of the ground and here I am. That is all I can remember.”

“Okay, go back to your work,” Kinross said.

White did not move. “First you must lift the name of the Herr Kruger from me,” he said.

“All right, I remove the name,” Kinross said.

“Once more. Twice you placed it on me.”

“Okay, once more I remove it,” Kinross snapped. “Go on, now.”

He walked away. Behind him a third club took up the pounding and the rhythm steadied.

Alone in his hut he raged instead of sleeping. A magic world. . what magic, then? Kruger’s teachings. . before the word, before the thought. . what act would serve him now? What blind, wordless, unthinking act?

He decided he would refuse to place his usual token of fruit on the cairn in the morning and suddenly he could sleep.

Kinross rose early and walked through the various fruit groves, eating as he walked, until his hunger was stayed. His aimless walking had led him to the edge of the dark timber grove screening the cave mouth. On impulse he walked through the grove into the clearing and on the way discovered with surprise that he had a small guava in his pocket. He threw it away. Two villagers, a man and a woman, were placing fruit on the cairn. Kinross wondered whether they were mated.

Silva, as always, sat beside the cairn. Kinross tried to talk to the old man, patting him on the shoulder, but Silva repulsed him with an incoherent wailing about devils. Kinross shrugged and went back down the valley.

It was beautiful early in the day with birds and flowers color-spotting the green through which the cleanlimbed, scantily clad villagers moved in twos and threes. Smoke rose above clean, red flame before Mary’s hut. The air was perfumed with flowers, musical with birdcalls and spiced with woodsmoke. Kinross tried to feel good, but a restlessness drove him.

He walked back and forth, jerkily, sat down and got up again, driven to random action that he would not shape into the action demanded of him. He picked fruit and threw it away, drifted toward the dark grove and walked resolutely away from it. At last he decided to make the fight in his hut. He went inside and wove burrawang fronds into a barrier across the door.

For hours, pacing or lying prone with clenched fists in the gloom, Kinross strove with his rebellious muscles and reproachful viscera. Finally the familiar silvery voice, long unheard, spoke to him out of the air.

“Kinross, I am hungry and thirsty. Bring me fruit.” “No. You have it from a hundred others.”

“I need it from you, Kinross. We have a relation. I gave you back a lost life. You dragged my body here with your own strength. You owe me a duty.”

“I deny it. If I ever did, I repudiate it.”

“I have power, Kinross. Silva and Kerbeck bring no fruit. Would you be as they?”

“You lie, Kruger. You have not even the lesser power to command my muscles.”

“I don’t wish to command them directly. I wish to command you, with your consent, in this one small thing.”

“No. I have tested your power before now.”

“Not to the full, Kinross. Not to the full. I have been reluctant to hurt you.”

Silence extended itself into Kinross’ abrupt awareness that the tension was gone. He felt as tired as he had on the days he had fought the reentry barrier. He lay back to rest.

“Round one is mine,” he thought comfortably.

Distant thunder rumbled. “Round two?” he thought uneasily and unbarred his door. Black clouds were.boiling up over the great ridge above the cave mouth.,Black storm devils sifted down from the hillsides and gray women danced singly and in groups on the tops of things. Kinross brought wood into his hut, also stones to bank a fire and a brand to kindle it, working rapidly.

The storm built up fast, with tremendous thunder and jagged bolts of lightning. Kinross shielded and tended his fire, unheeding. The drumming rain changed into a drizzle and set in cold. The day became night without a perceptible sunset. Kinross shivered through the long night, burrowed under sweet grass and with his belly pressed against the warm rocks that banked his fire.

Morning was cold and clear. Frost rimed the grass, flower petals drooped and tree leaves twinkled with silver. Kinross was standing in his hut door, shivering and stamping his feet, when he heard the frosty crunch of footsteps. It was von Lankenau, not yet shaven for the day.

“Good morning, Mr. Kinross,” von Lankenau greeted him. “Please pardon my more or less forced intrusion on your privacy.”

“That’s all right. It’s not an intrusion.”

“Oh? I had thought that you were deliberately keeping to yourself these last weeks. But I would like to discuss this cold.

“If you can’t take it, grow a beard like me.”

“I am inured to cold, Mr. Kinross. At the moment I entered this world I had been stopped on a ledge at sixteen thousand feet for about thirty hours. My arms and my legs were frozen. The Seeings had begun. . you touch my pride, Mr. Kinross, excuse me.”

Kinross said nothing.

“How long are you prepared to go on with this defiance of the Herr Kruger?” von Lankenau asked.

“Maybe till hell freezes over.” Kinross laughed harshly, adding, “No. Until Kruger agrees to let me through the reentry barrier. Me and Mary Chadwick.”

“He will never let you go, Mr. Kinross. And Miss Chadwick does not wish to go.”

“The thing this damned Krugerworld has made of her may not so wish. But if Kruger would give her back to herself—”

“She has never ceased to be herself, Mr. Kinross. We talk increasingly of late and I know her well, in time will know her better still. But I do know what you mean..

“Skip what I mean. Did Kruger send you here?”

“Oh no. It is my curiosity, I am afraid. You interest me, Mr. Kinross, and in studying you I learn much about the Herr Kruger. Tell me: you know the villagers are suffering from cold and will soon be hungry: do you feel any responsibility for their sufferings?”

“No. Kruger’s responsible. Let him ease off.”

“He will not, I am sure. What then?”

“Then we shiver and we starve. When those lobotomies of yours in the village get desperate enough maybe they’ll help me break through the reentry barrier and get their minds and their own world back.”

“They will not. That I know. But let me congratulate you on your efforts to break the barrier, Mr. Kinross. Did you know that you had pushed it outward a good way and permanently distorted that corner of Kruger-world? You are a strong and resolute man, sir. I wish you would consent to take your rightful position among us.”