Margaret St. Clair (32 page)

She cut them up neatl y with a paring knife and dropped t hem into the teapot. She put the mistletoe berries in on top of the mescal buttons. Then she filled the teapot with boiling water. When the Reverend got back from his washing, the teapot was steaming domestically on the table beside the string beans.

He said grace and poured himself a cup of the tea.

“Goodness, but it’s bitter,” he observed, sipping. “Not at all like it was the first time. What a difference putting in more mistletoe has made!”

Mazda looked down. She passed him the sugar bowl. He sweet ened the tea lavishly. “You haven’t set a cup for yourself, dear,” he said, suddenly solicitous.

“… There isn’t much tea. You said to make it strong.”

“Yes, honey, but if there’s any good in the tea, I want you to share it. Get another cup.”

He looked across the table at her, brightly and affectionately. There was a faint flush in Mazda’s cheeks as she obeyed.

Supper was over and Mazda was washing the dishes when the Reverend Clem said suddenly, “How fast you’re moving, Mazda! I never saw anything like the way you’re getting through those dishes. I can hardly see your hands, they’re moving so fast.”

“Fast?” Mazda echoed. She sounded bewildered. She held up a spoon and polished its bowl languidly in the light of the oil lamp. “Why, I’m not moving fast. I’ve been standing here by the sink for hours and hours, washing one dish. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I wish I could move fast.”

There was a silence. Mazda had finished the dishes. She took off her apron and sat down on the floor, her feet out straight in front of her. Almost immediately the Reverend Adelburg slid off the chair where he had been sitting, and flopped down on the floor parallel to her. Both their legs were stretched out.

“What lovely hands you have, Mazda,” he said. He picked up one of those members from her lap, where it was languidly lying, and turned it about admiringly. “Your fingers remind me of the verse in the Canticles —‘Fair are my love’s palms as an eel that feedeth among lilies. And the coals thereof hath a most vehement flame.’ They’re even colored like eels, purple and gold and silver. Your nails are little dark rainbows.

“The Lord bless you, Mazda. I love you very much.” He put his arm around her. She let her head decline on his shou lder, and they both leaned back against the wall. “Are you happy, dear?” he asked her anxiously. “As happy as I am? Do you have a dim sweet sense of blessings hovering over you?”

“Um-hum,” Mazda answered. It was obviously difficult for her to talk. “Neve r felt better.” A grin zig-zagged across her face. “Mus’ be the mistletoe.”

The effects of peyote —mescal button —intoxication are predictable. They run a definite course. None the less, the response to a drug is always somewhat idiosyncratic. Thus it was that the Reverend Clem Adelburg, who had drunk enough peyote infusion to keep a cart horse seeing beatific visions for twenty-four hours, reached, about six o’clock in the morning, the state of intense wakefulness that succeeds to the drug trance. By t he time the copter came from Los Angeles to take him to the Temple, a little after eight, he had bathed, shaved, and dressed, and was reading over his sermon notes.

He went into the bedroom where Mazda was lying to bid her good-bye. Sometime during the n ight they had managed to get to bed. He bent over and kissed her tenderly on her loosened mouth. “Good-bye, dear. Our little experiment certainly had results, didn’t it? But I feel no ill after-effect, and I trust that you will not, either. I’ll be back a b out eleven tonight.”

Once more he kissed her. Mazda made a desperate effort to rouse herself from the rose a nd opal-hued heaven she was cur rently floating in. She licked her lips. “Clem …” she said. “Yes, dear?”

“
Be careful.”

“Certainly, dear. I always am. Yes.”

He patted her on the shoulder. He went out. Even in her paradise, which was at the moment blue and silver, she could hear the noise of the copter as it bore him away.

Mazda’s drug dreams came to an end with a bump about twelve o’clock. She sprang out of bed and ran to the window. The Reverend Adelburg was gone, of course. And there wasn’t a raven in sight.

Over in Los Angeles, the Reverend’s sermon was going swimmingly. From his first words, which had been the arre sting sentence, “The lights are going out again all over the world,” he had riveted the attention of his listeners as if with stainless steel rivets. Even the two troops of Archer Eagle Scouts in the front rows, who, with their scoutmaster Joe Buell, were today’s Honor Guests, had been so fascinated that they had stopped twanging their bowstrings. The Reverend had swung thunderously from climax to climax; by now at least half his audience had resolved to disconnect its radio when it got home, and throw awa y the electric lights on its Christmas tree. Now the Reverend was approaching the climax of climaxes.

“In the sweet night of the spirit —bless us, O Lord! Yes, Lord, it’s good to be dark —in the sweet silence of the stable let the little flame of —bles s us, Lord! —let the little flame —My Gosh ! Good Lord!”

Forthright Temple is ventilated, and partly lighted, by a clerestory in the middle part of the building. Through this clerestory eight large black birds flew rapidly.

Two of them headed straight for the Reverend Adelburg’s eyes. Four of them attacked the Temple’s not very bright electric lights. The other two made dive after dive on the helpless congregation’s head.

Women were screaming. Handkerchiefs waved. Hymnbooks rocked and fluttered through the air. The organist burst into a Bach chorale. The bewildered choir began singing two different songs.

When the ravens had first swooped down upon him, the Reverend Adelburg had dived under the lectern. From thence —he was a man who was used to authority —he began shouting orders to the troops of Archer Eagle Scouts in a clarion, stentorian voice.

“Young men! Listen! Shoot at the birds! Shoot … at … the … birds!”

There was a very slight hiatus. Then bowstrings began to twang and arr ows to thud.

Eight pagan ravens are no match at all for the legitimate weapons of two troops of Archer Eagle Scouts. The ravens dived valian tl y, they cawed and shrieked. In vain. Inside five minutes after the shooting started, there remained no trace of the birds’ incursus except a black tail feather floating in an up-draft, eight or ten hymnbooks with ruffled pages, and some arrows on the floor.

For a few moments the scouts scurried about collecting arrows. Then the Reverend Adelburg summoned them up t o the lectern, where he was standing. He finished his sermon with a troop of Archer Scouts drawn up on either side of him, like a body guard.

“That was a wonderful sermon, wasn’t it,” said the lady from Iowa as she and her husband walked toward their par ked car. “I never heard anything like it before. He really spoke better after the birds came in than he did earlier … I think tomorrow I’ll go downtown and see if I can get some little oil lamps to burn in the patio.”

“Wonder what sort of birds those were,” her husband said idly. “They were mighty big for crows.”

“Crows! Why, they were ravens; haven’t you ever seen pictures of ravens? I wonder what made them go in the Temple. Ravens always seem such old-fashioned bird s.”

-

“I betrayed my Company for you,” Mazda said. She hi c coughed with emotion. “I’m a rat. As far as that goes, you’re a rat too. We’re both rats.”

“What company is that?” the Reverend asked with innocent curiosity. He yawned. They had been sitting in the tiny living room, arguing for hours, ever since he got back from the Temple, and by now it was nearly two o’clock in the morning.

“The PE&G. Why? Did you ever suspect?”

“I thought perhaps the Retail Merchants Association sent you. I never understood how you happened to be sitting under that Joshua tree.”

Mazda laughed scornfully. “The Retail Merchants? Those boffs? Why, I don’t suppose they have more than three secret agents in the whole Los Angeles metropolitan area. They couldn’t stop a baby from crossing a street on a kiddy car. Their idea of hot tactics is to hire a big newspaper ad.

“No, I’m a PE&G girl. I’ve been one of their top people f or years. That’s why I know what you’re up against.”

She took an earnest step toward him. “Clem, I don’t think you have any idea of how serious this is,” she said. “But they’ll stop at nothing. They can’t possibly let you get away with it. Why, last Dece mber after your old-fashioned Christmas sermons, power consumption was off 27% all along the whole Pacific slope, and it didn’t get back to normal until late February. People just didn’t use much electricity. The Company didn’t pay any dividends at all on its common stock, and if the same thing happens this year, they’ll have to skip payments on the preferred. That’s why I was sent to stop you at all costs.”

“How were you supposed to stop me?” the Reverend inquired. He put the tips of his outstretched fin gers together thoughtfully.

“I was supposed to seduce you, and then call the broadcasters in. You know, moral turpitude. But I convinced them that it wouldn’t work. Congregations aren’t so touchy about things like that nowadays. It wouldn’t have worked.”

“Mazda, how
could you?”

“I don’t know how I could,” Mazda replied with spirit. “I could have had a nice clean-cut electronics engineer … or one of those cute linemen up on a pole … and then I had to fall for a Reverend with his collar on backwards . Somebody ought to examine my head.”

The Reverend Adelburg let this pass without comment. “What was the alternate plan?” he asked.

“I promised them I’d keep you from delivering any more old-fashioned Christmas sermons. That’s what the peyote was for.”

“Peyote? When?” She told him.

“Oh. Then it wasn’t the mistletoe,” he said when she had finished. He sounded rather annoyed.

“No, it wasn’t the mistletoe. But I guess I didn’t give you enough peyote. You delivered the sermon anyway.

“Clem, you think that because the ravens made that silly attack on you in the Temple that that’s the sort of thing the Company has up its sleeve. It’s not. The ravens were acting on their own responsibility, and they’re not awfully bright birds. The Compa n y can do lots better than that.”

“What do you think they’ll try next?” the Reverend inquired. His jaw had begun to jut out.

“Well, they might try to get you for moral turpitude after all, or stick an income tax evasion charge on you or accuse you of do pe smuggling. I don’t think they will. They don’t want to give you any more publicity. I think they’ll just quietly try to wipe you out.”

For a moment Mazda’s self command deserted her. She wrung her hands. “What’m I to do ?
”
she whimpered. “I’ve got to save you, and you’re as stubborn as a mule. I don’t know any magic —or at least not nearly enough magic. The whole Company will be against me as soon as the ravens are sure I ratted on them. And there’s just no place in the wo r ld today for anybody who’s in conflict with the PE&G.

“I wish I hadn’t been such a dope as to fall in love with you.”

The Reverend Clem Adelburg got up from the chair where he had been sitting and put his arm around her. “Cheer up, my dear,” he told he r solemnly. “We will defeat the company. Right is on our side.”

Mazda gave a heroic smile. She smiled at him mistily. “It’s not just the PE&G, of course,” she said. “Sometimes I think they have agents everywhere.”

“The PE&G?” the Reverend cried. He let his arm fall from around her. He had a sudden nightmare vision of a whole world united against him —a world in which the clouds semaphored secrets about him to the dolphins in the Pacific waves. “What is it, then?”

“Why, it’s
Nous.”

“I never heard of it.”

“Very few people have. But
Nous, Infinite is the company from which the PE&G gets its power.

“Nous
is a very strange outfit. It operates on the far side of 3,000
A.D ., AND SELLING POWER IS ONL Y ONE OF THE THINGS IT DOES.
W
HEN YOU’RE A TOP AGENT FOR THE
C
OMPANY LIKE
I
WAS, YOU HEAR ALL SORTS OF STORIES ABOUT IT —FOR INSTANCE, THAT IT’S RESPONSIBLE FOR MAINTAINING THE DIFFERENCE IN POTENTIAL BETWEEN THE EARTH AND THE IONOSPHERE, OR THAT THE WEA T HER ON
V
ENUS IS A MINOR
N
OUS PROJECT —STUFF LIKE THAT.
I
’VE EVEN HEARD AGENTS SAY THAT
N
OUS IS
G
—but I don’t believe that. I know about Mithras, myself.”

“I thought the PE&G made its own power,” said the Reverend. He was still struggling with the firs t part of Mazda’s remarks .

Mazda laughed. “I don’t mean any disrespect to the Company, but what makes you think that? The Company’s a bad opponent, but outside of that, witchcraft, or sorcery, or ravens, is all they’re capable of.

“All the really hot developments in power, the electronic stuff, comes from after 3,000
A.D .
N
OBODY IN THE PRESENT HAS BRAINS ENOUGH TO WORK OUT A GERMANIUM TRANSISTER, FOR EXAMPLE.
Nous helps them. People nowadays are dopes. They can’t work buttons on pants, or open a packag e of chewing gum unless there’s a paper ribbon to help them.

“That’s beside the point, really. The thing I’m trying to make clear, Clem, is that Nous is a bad outfit to come up against.

“I was supposed to go outside at one-thirty this morning and have the ravens pick me up under the Joshua tree. They were going to take me back to headquarters by air raft. If it —”

“Is that how you got here in the first place?” the Reverend inquired. “By air raft?”

“Yes, As I was saying, if I’d done that, the Company would have accepted that my failure with the peyote was just a mistake. But I didn’t do it. I couldn’t bear to leave a chump like you all alone to face the Company, and by now they must be beginning to realize that I’ve ratted on them. It won’t be very l o ng before the real trouble begins.

“Now, listen. There are two things you can do. The best one would be for you to go outside and talk to the ravens. If you promise them on your word of honor as a Christian gentleman that you won’t deliver any more anti—light sermons —I can’t see why you don’t like light, anyhow; light’s wonderful —if you promise them that, they’ll let you go.” She paused hopefully.