I hobbled the horses while Rosalind unrolled the blankets, and presently we were eating hungrily. It was pleasantly peaceful until Petra put one of her blinding communications so abruptly that I bit my tongue.
Rosalind screwed up her eyes, and put a hand to her head.
‘ For heaven’s sake, child!’ she protested.
‘ Sorry. I forgot,’ said Petra perfunctorily.
She sat with her head a little on one side for a minute, then she told us:
‘ She wants to talk to one of you. She says will you all try to hear her while she thinks her loudest.’
‘All right,’ we agreed, ‘but you keep quiet, or you’ll blind us.’
I tried my very hardest, straining sensitivity to its utmost, but there was nothing – or as near nothing as the shimmer of a heat-haze.
We relaxed again.
‘No good,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to tell her we can’t reach her, Petra. Look out, everyone.’
We did our best to damp out the exchange that followed, then Petra brought down the force of her thoughts below the dazzle level, and started to relay those she was receiving. They had to be in very simple form so that she could copy them even when she did not understand them; in consequence, they reached us rather like baby-talk, and with many repeats to make sure that we grasped them. It is scarcely possible to give any idea in words of the way it came across, but it was the overall impression that mattered, and that reached us clearly enough.
The urgent emphasis was on importance – the importance not of us, but of Petra. At all costs she must be protected. Such a power of projection as she had was unheard of without special training – she was a discovery of the utmost importance. Help was already on the way, but until it could reach us we must play for time and safety – Petra’s safety, it seemed, not our own – at all costs.
There was quite a lot more that was less clear, muddled up with it, but that main point was quite unmistakable.
‘Did you get it?’ I asked of the others, when it had finished.
They had. Michael responded: ‘This is very confusing. There is no doubt that Petra’s power of projection is remarkable compared with ours, anyway – but what she seemed to me to be putting across was that she was particularly surprised to find it among primitive people, did you notice that? It looked almost as if she were meaning us.’
‘She was,’ confirmed Rosalind. ‘Not a shadow of doubt about it.’
‘There must be some misunderstanding,’ I put in. ‘Probably Petra somehow gave her the impression we were Fringes people. As for – ‘ I was suddenly blotted out for a moment by Petra’s indignant denial. I did my best to disregard it, and went on: ‘As for help, there must be a misunderstanding there, too. She’s somewhere south-west, and everybody knows that there are miles and miles of Badlands that way. Even if they do come to an end and she’s on the other side of them, how can she possibly help?’
Rosalind refused to argue about that.
‘Let’s wait and find out,’ she suggested. ‘Just now all I want is sleep.’
I felt the same way, and since Petra had slept most of the time in the pannier, we told her to keep a sharp look-out and wake us at once if she heard or saw anything suspicious. Both Rosalind and I fell asleep almost before we laid our heads down.
I awoke with Petra shaking my shoulder, and saw that the sun was not far off setting.
‘ Michael,’ she explained.
I cleared my mind for him.
‘They’ve picked up your trail again. A small farm on the edge of Wild Country. You galloped through it. Remember?’
I did. He went on:
‘There’s a party converging there now. They’ll start to follow your tracks as soon as it’s light. Better get moving soon. I don’t know how it is in front of you, but there may be some men cutting across from the west to head you off. If there are, my bet is that they’ll keep in smallish groups for the night. They can’t risk a cordon of single sentries because there are known to be Fringes people scouting around. So, with luck, you should be able to sneak through.’
‘All right,’ I agreed wearily. Then a question I had meant to ask before occurred to me. ‘What’s happened to Sally and Katherine?’
‘ I don’t know. No answer. The range is getting rather long now. Does any one know?’
Rachel came in, made faint by the distance.
‘Katherine was unconscious. There’s been nothing understandable since then. Mark and I are afraid -‘ She faded, in a foggy reluctance to continue.
‘ Go on,’ Michael told her.
‘Well, Katherine’s been unconscious so long we’re wondering if she’s – dead.’
‘And Sally -?’
This time there was even more reluctance.
‘We think – we’re afraid something queer must have happened to her mind… . There’ve been just one or two little jumbles from her. Very weak, not sensible at all, so we’re afraid . . .’ She faded away, in great unhappiness.
There was a pause before Michael started with hard, harsh shapes.
‘You understand what that means, David? They are scared of us. Ready to break us down in the attempt to find out more about us – once they can catch us. You mustn’t let them get hold of Rosalind or Petra – far better to kill them yourself than let that happen to them. You understand?’
I looked at Rosalind lying asleep beside me, the red of the sunset glistening on her hair, and I thought of the anguish we had felt from Katherine. The possibility of her and Petra suffering that made me shudder.
‘Yes,’ I told him, and the others. ‘Yes – I understand.’
I felt their sympathy and encouragement for a while, then there was nothing.
Petra was looking at me, more puzzled than alarmed. She asked earnestly, in words:
‘Why did he say you must kill Rosalind and me?’
I pulled myself together.
‘That was only if they catch us,’ I told her, trying to make it sound as if it were the sensible and usual course in such circumstances. She considered the prospect judicially, then:
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Well,’ I tried, ‘you see we’re different from them because they can’t make thought-shapes, and when people are different, ordinary people are afraid of them -‘
‘Why should they be afraid of us? We aren’t hurting them,’ she broke in.
‘I’m not sure that I know why,’ I told her. ‘But they are. It’s a feel-thing not a think-thing. And the more stupid they are, the more like everyone else they think everyone ought to be. And once they get afraid they become cruel and want to hurt people who are different -‘
‘Why?’ inquired Petra.
‘They just do. And they’d hurt us very much if they could catch us.’
‘I don’t see why,’ Petra persisted.
‘ It’s the way things work. It’s complicated and rather nasty,’ I told her. ‘You’ll understand better when you’re older. But the thing is, we don’t want you and Rosalind to be hurt. You remember when you spilt the boiling water on your foot? Well, it’d be much worse than that. Being dead’s a lot better – it’s sort of like being so much asleep that they can’t get at you to hurt you at all.’
I looked down at Rosalind, at the gentle rise and fall of her breasts as she slept. There was a vagrant wisp of hair on her cheek; I brushed it away gently and kissed her without waking her.
Presently Petra began:
‘ David, when you kill me and Rosalind -‘
I put my arm round her. ‘Hush, darling. It isn’t going to happen, because we aren’t going to let them catch us. Now, let’s wake her up, but we won’t tell her about this. She might be worried, so we’ll just keep it to ourselves for a secret, shall we?’
‘All right,’ Petra agreed.
She tugged gently at Rosalind’s hair.
We decided to eat again, and then push on when it was a little darker so that there would be stars to steer by. Petra was unwontedly silent over the meal. At first I thought she was brooding upon our recent conversation, but I was wrong, it appeared: after a time she emerged from her contemplations to say, conversationally:
‘ Sealand must be a funny place. Everybody there can make think-pictures – well, nearly everybody – and nobody wants to hurt anybody for doing it.’
‘ Oh, you’ve been chatting while we were asleep, have you?’ remarked Rosalind. ‘ I must say that makes it a lot more comfortable for us.’
Petra ignored that. She went on:
‘ They aren’t all of them very good at it, though – most of them are more like you and David,’ she told us kindly. ‘ But she’s much better at it than most of them, and she’s got two babies and she thinks they will be good at it, only they’re too little yet. But she doesn’t think they’ll be as good at it as me. She says I can make stronger think-pictures than anybody at all,’ she concluded complacently.