"Games" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

Games
KATHERINE MacLEAN

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RONNY WAS PLAYING by himself, which meant he was two tribes of Indians having a war.

“Bang,” he muttered, firing an imaginary rifle. He decided that it was a time in history before the white people had sold the Indians any guns, and changed the rifle into a bow. “Wizzthunk,” he substituted, mimicking from an Indian film on TV the graphic sound of an arrow striking flesh.

“Oof.” He folded down onto the grass, moaning, “Uhhooh…” relaxing into defeat and death.

“Want some chocolate milk, Ronny?” asked his mother from the kitchen.

“No thanks,” he called back, climbing to his feet to be another man. “Wizzthunk, wizzthunk,” —he added to the flights of arrows as the best archer in the tribe. “Last arrow. Wizzzzz,” he said, missing one enemy for realism. The best archer in the tribe spoke to other battling braves. “Who has more arrows? They are advancing. No time, I’ll have to use my knife.” He drew the imaginary knife, ducking an arrow as it wizzed past his head.



Then he was the tribal chief standing nearby on a slight hill, and he saw that too many of his warriors were dead, too few left alive. “We must retreat. We must not all die and leave our tribe without warriors to protect the women and children. Retreat, we are outnumbered.”

Ronny decided that the chief was heroically wounded, his voice wavering from weakness. He had been propping himself against a tree to appear unharmed, but now he moved so that his braves could see he was pinned to the trunk by an arrow and could not walk. They cried out.

He said, “Leave me and escape. But remember…” No words came, just the feeling of being what he was, a dying old eagle, a chief of warriors, speaking to young warriors who would need the advice of seasoned humor and moderation to carry them through their young battles. He had to finish his speech, tell them something wise.

Ronny tried harder, pulling the feeling around him like a cloak of resignation and pride, leaning indifferently against the tree where the arrow had pinned him, hearing dimly in anticipation the sound of his aged voice conquering weakness to speak wisely what needed to be said. They had many battles ahead of them, and the battles would be against odds, with so many dead already.

They must watch and wait, be flexible and tenacious, determined and persistent—but not too rash; subtle and indirect—but not cowardly; and above all, be patient with the triumph of the enemy, and not maddened into suicidal attack.

His stomach hurt with the arrow wound, and his braves waited to hear his words. He had to sum a part of his life’s experience in words. Ronny tried harder to make it real.

Then suddenly it was real.

He was an old man, guide and adviser in an oblique battle against great odds. He was dying of something, and his stomach hurt with a knotted ache, like hunger, and he was thirsty. He had refused to let the young men make the sacrifice of trying to rescue him. He was trapped in a steel cage, and dying, because he would not surrender to the enemy, nor cease to fight them. He smiled and said, “Do not be fanatical. Remember to live like other men, but remember to live like yourself…”

And then he was saying things that could not be put into words, attitudes that were ways of taking bad situations that made them easier to smile at, complex feelings…

He was an old man, trying to teach young men, and the old man did not know about Ronny. He thought sadly, how little he would be able to convey to the young men. He began to think sentences that were not sentences, but single alphabet letters pushing each other with signs, with a feeling of being connected like two halves of a swing, one side moving up when the other moved down, and like cogs and wheels interlaced inside a clock, only without the cogs, just the push.

It wasn’t adding, and it used letters instead of numbers, but Ronny knew it was some kind of arithmetic.

And he wasn’t Ronny.

He was an old man, in an oblique battle against great odds. His stomach hurt, and he was dying. Ronny was the old man and himself, both at once.



It was too intense. Part of Ronny wanted to escape and be alone, and that part withdrew and wanted to play something. Ronny sat on the grass and played with his toes like a much younger child.

Part of Ronny that was Doctor Revert Purcell sat on the edge of a prison cot, concentrating on secret, unpublished equations of biogenic stability which he wanted to pass on to the responsible hands of young researchers in the concealed—research chain. He was thinking, using the technique of holding ideas in the mind which they had told him was the telepathic sending of ideas to anyone ready to receive. It was difficult, and made more difficult by the uncertainty, for he could never tell if anyone was receiving. It was odd that he himself could never tell when he was sending successfully. Probably a matter of age. They had started to teach him new tricks when his mind had stiffened and lost the old limber ability to jump through hoops.

The water tap, four feet away, was dripping steadily, and it was hard for Purcell to concentrate, so intense was his thirst. He wondered if he could gather strength to walk that far. He was sitting up, and that was already success, but the effort to raise himself that far had left him dizzy and trembling. If he tried to stand, the effort would surely interrupt his transmitting of equations. All the data was not sent yet.