He shuddered and bent his head to Karen’s ear. “We do have to get out as soon as we can,” he muttered. “If we can. They’re disciplined now, and wholly merciless. Once we’re completely rounded up, the discipline will break but the ruthlessness stay in such an orgy of looting and drinking, burning and rape and murder, as has always followed barbarian conquests.”

  “They can’t stay long,” she answered desperately. “The government…this is on the air route—”

  “That’s what I can’t figure out. They must know they can’t remain, so why did they come here in the first place? Why not raid the lands closer to home? Well—we’ll have to see, that’s all.”

  The—herd—of citizens entered the square and walked toward the little memorial in its center with the queer blind shuffle that cattle in a stockyard chute have. There were other outlaw guards posted around the square and on the memorial, weapons ready. The monument was a granite shaft with a stone bench on each side, and seated there—

  Wayne did not remember the bearded giant, but Karen caught a sudden gasp of recognition. “It…it…Rod, it’s Hammer. Richard Hammer!”

  “Eh?”

  “Don’t you recall—the mechanic at the service station—we always used to get our gas there, and once when I smashed a fender on the car he fixed it so you wouldn’t notice—”

  The chief heard them. There weren’t many people in the square yet, and the early sun struck dazzling off Karen’s hair. “Why, it’s Miz’ Wayne.” he said. “Howdy Miz’ Wayne.”

  “H-h-hello,” faltered Karen.

  “Lookin’ purtier ’n ever, too. Wayne, you had all the luck.”

  The mathematician shouldered his way forward, suddenly weak with a dreadful clawing fear. “Hammer—what is this?” he got out.

  ‘‘I’m takin’ over Southvale. Meet y’r new boss.”

  “You—” Wayne swallowed. He choked down the panic rising in him and said in a level, toneless voice: “I gather you’ve become chief of this band and led it back here for a raid. But—you must know you can’t get away with it. We’re on an airline route. The government will know.”

  Hammer smiled wearily. “I’ve figgered all that out. I intend to stay here. I’m gatherin’ all the folks t’ tell ’em t’ be good, because we don’t mind killin’. But if y’re really interested—” He sketched his further plans.

  “You’re crazy—it’s not possible.”

  “A lot o’ less possible things have happened. If you all, not too far no’th, felt safe, what about the gov’ment ’way out in Oregon? We’ll do it!”

  “But even if you can—Hammer, do you realize the government is the only link left with our past, our civilization? You’d throw man back a thousand years.”

  “So what? Wayne, don’t you nor anybody else hand me none o’ that crap ’bout law an’ order an’ humanity. You’re fifteen years too late. You an’ your kind made us outlaws, drivin’ us away when we came starvin’ to you, houndin’ us south an’ then in your fat smugness forgettin’ about us. It’s been hard, Wayne, battle an’ death an’ hunger all those years. We had t’ get hard ourselves, t’ stay alive.”

  “You could have stuck it out in the north as we did, and raised your own food free from most bandits.”

  “Free only because so many people like us went south. Nor were most o’ us farmers, with land an’ equipment an’ experience. Anyway you did drive us out when you were strong. I ain’t blamin’ you. You had t’ live. But it’s our turn now, so shut up.” Hammer’s eaglesque eyes swung to Karen, he smiled. It was a winter-cold smile, warmth and humor had died long ago in him. “You, I’ll be seein’ more of,” he said. “It’s been so long—”

  The square was well filled with people now, and more were arriving and being herded into side streets and buildings. Some were still numb. Some wept or prayed or implored or tried to ingratiate themselves, some cursed and threatened, some retreated into impassive silence. But—prisoners all. Captured, impotent, legitimate prey.

  Hammer turned as an outlaw galloped up, thrusting his horse through the crowd without regard for their safety. “What is it?” asked the chief, not anxiously. His victory was too tremendously evident.

  “I dunno—some trouble down by the river,” said the gangman. “About half Joe’s detail ain’t showed up yet.”

  “Hm-m-m? Musta found some likker.”

  “Yeah—Hey—What’s that?”

  Hammer turned. He couldn’t see much sitting down. Huge and shaggy and ablaze with the arrogance of his triumph, he sprang lithely onto the bench and looked north along the street. He grinned, then laughed, then shouted with humorless mirth. “Lamp that, boys. Some crazy mutie—look at him!”

  Wayne was so placed that he could also see down that street. His heart staggered, for a black instant he couldn’t believe, refused to comprehend, then—

  “Alaric.”

  The boy was coming down the street, walking slowly and carrying an object, a fantastic wire-tangled grotesquerie of electronic surrealism, thrown together in the wildest haste and with no recognizable design. A wire led from it to a reel of cable mounted on a mule’s back, and the cable snaked behind, along the road—it must go clear to the powerhouse!

  How had Al done it? That cable was sacrosanct, reserved for electrifying the airport. That apparatus, the invaluable parts in it—how had he gotten them? How—why? Why? What mad vagary of a reasonless brain had prompted him to go thus on this darkest of mornings? What—

  “Come on, kid,” shouted Hammer boisterously. “Whatcha got?”

  Alaric came closer. His delicately cast features were set in concentration, his strange light eyes flashing like glacial ice, not a human gleam. He lifted his device and twirled a pair of dials.

  “May be a weapon,” said a bandit uneasily and raised his rifle.

  “Not…Alaric—” It was a hoarse cry from Wayne’s throat, and he made a clumsy lunge for the outlaw. Hammer swept one long arm in a careless blow and sent him crashing to the ground.

  The gang-man squeezed the trigger on his rifle but never completed the motion. He was dead before that. Wayne, sprawled on his back, looking up through a whirling fog of grief and horror and hopeless defeat, saw the man’s body explode.

  It went up in a white burst of steam, a crash of rending bone and tissue and a brief glare of incandescence. The rifle flying from him glowed cherry red, blowing up as its cartridges detonated. Before the fragments had fallen, something had swept the outer edges of the square, and where the guards had stood were steam-clouded heaps of charred bone and shredded flesh.

  The crowd yelled, a single beast cry half of terror, half of surging death-lusting triumph, and swept down on the remaining gangmen. Most were too demoralized to resist. Others struggled, and got a few townspeople before they were trampled under.

  Hammer roared, the bellow of a pain-crazed bull, as the mob raged toward him. A horse reared as its outlaw rider was yanked from the saddle. Two slugging blows, and Hammer had cleared a way to the mount. He sprang upon its back, howling, and the attackers fell away from his insane charge.

  Almost, he made it. He was on the edge of the square when a man whose brother had been killed made a long jump and grabbed the horse’s bridle—grabbed it, and hung on till a dozen men held the gang boss secured.

  Only one or two outlaws escaped. The rest, with the town in no mood for trials, were hanged that afternoon. Hammer asked not to be blindfolded, and they granted him that much. To the end, he stood looking out over the sun-glittering river, the rolling tree-clad hills, and the fair broad land green to harvest.

  Wayne took no part in the executions. He had other things to think about.

  * * *

  After the celebrations, the unending parades and parties and speeches, the reorganization and the defense tightening, there was a rather grim conference in Wayne’s house. He and Karen were there, seated together before the fire, and Alaric sat opposite them, nervous and bewildered. A government representative was present, a lean man who looked older than he was, Robert Boyd by name and roving presidential agent by profession. In the corner, shadow-cloaked and unnoticed, squatted the shaggy troll-shape of the dog, his sullen eyes brooding redly on the others.

  “You’ve heard the official account,” said Wayne, “Alaric, a mutant idiot savant, invented and built a weapon to defeat the outlaws. He’s been much made of, and nobody pays any attention to Pop Hanson—he’s the powerhouse watchman, and was rather rudely treated. One must make allowance for the eccentricity of genius, or so they say.”

  “Well, one must,” nodded Boyd.

  “Hardly. If so many of our people hadn’t died, I’d say this was a good thing. It taught us not to be complacent and careless. More important, it at least indicated that mutants can serve society as talented members.” Wayne’s eyes were haggard. “Only, you see, Al didn’t behave like a genius. He acted like a low-grade moron.”

  “Inventing that—”

  “Yes, going all around Robin Hood’s barn, committing violence and theft, working like a slave, risking his neck, all to build that weapon and use it. But he told me his dog warned him hours ahead of time. Certainly he was at the powerhouse early. Don’t you see, we could have been ready for the outlaws, we could have stood them off, driven their ill-armed force away with no loss to us if Alaric had merely gone to the police with that warning.”

  Thunderstruck, Boyd swung his, eyes to meet the blue vacancy of Alaric’s. “Why …why didn’t you?”

  The boy stared, slowly focusing his vision and mind, face twisted with effort. He…his father had told him the day before…what was it now? Yes—“I … didn’t …think of it,” he fumbled.

  “You didn’t think of it. It just never occurred to you.” Dazed, Boyd turned to Wayne. “As long as you said it yourself, I agree—idiot savant.”

  “No.” Karen spoke very quietly. “No, not in any ordinary sense. Such a person is feeble-minded in all but one respect, where he is brilliant. I used to teach school and know a little psychology. Yesterday I gave Al some special tests I’d worked out. Science, mechanical skill, comprehension—in too many respects he’s a genius,”

  “I give up. What is he, then?”

  “A mutant,” said Karen.

  “And…this weapon—?”

  “Alaric tried to tell me, but we couldn’t understand each other,” said Wayne. “And the thing itself burned out very quickly in use. It’s just fused junk now. From what I could gather, though, and by deduction on that basis, I think it projected an intense beam of an inconceivably complex wave form to which one or more important organic compounds in the body resonate. They disintegrated, releasing their binding forces. Or perhaps it was body colloids that were destroyed, releasing terrific surface energies, I’m just as glad I don’t know. There are too many weapons in the world.”

  “Mm-m-m—officially I can’t agree with you, but privately I do. Anyway, the inventor is still here—the genius.”

  “It takes more than genius,” said Wayne. “It just isn’t possible for any human being to sit down and figure such a thing out in detail. All the facts are available, in handbooks and texts and papers—quantum mechanics, circuit characteristics, physical constants. But even if he knew exactly what he was after, the greatest genius in the world would have to spend months or years in analytical thought, then more time in putting all those facts together into the pattern he was after. And even then he wouldn’t know it all. There’d be a near infinitude of small factors interacting on each other, that he couldn’t allow for. He’d have to build a model and experiment with it, the empirical process known to engineers as getting the bugs out.

  “In his incoherent way, Alaric told me his only difficulty was to figure out what to do to meet the danger. All he could think of was to make some kind of weapon. But he hardly spent a second working out the details of that devil’s engine, and his first model was as nearly perfect as his inadequate tools and materials permitted. He knew how to make it.”

  With a shuddering effort, Boyd relaxed. He couldn’t look at that small, big-headed figure in the armchair. The ancient human dread of the unknown was too strong in him. He asked slowly:

  “What’s the answer, then?”

  “Karen and I think we’ve figured it out, and what little Al can tell us seems to confirm our idea. But I’ll have to explain it in a roundabout way. Tell me, how does a person think?”

  “Think? Why…well…by logic. He follows a logical track—”

  “Exactly! A track. He thinks in chains of logic, if under that we include everything from math to emotional experience. Premise to conclusion. One thing leads to another, one at a time.

  “Physics and math have been able to make their great strides because they deal, actually, with the simplest concepts, which are artificially simplified still further. Newton’s three laws of motion, for instance, assume that no force beyond the one set being considered is acting on a body in question; and the members of this set can be considered one at a time. We never really observe that. There is always friction, gravitation, or some other disturbing influence. Even in space there are externals. What saves physics is that these externals are usually negligibly small.

  “Take a particular case. You know the two-body problem in astronomy? Given two bodies of known mass and distance from each other, and the laws of motion and gravitation, to find their position at any past or future time. Well, it’s mathematically simple. It was solved a long time ago, because there are only two interacting bodies, But the three-body problem is quite another story. Right away, with three interactions, it becomes so complex that as far as I know there’s never been any general solution, and only a few special ones. As for the n-body problem—!

  “Now in the biological sciences, including psychology and sociology, you can’t simplify. You have to consider the whole. A living organism is an incredibly complex set of interactions, beginning, probably, on the subatomic level and going on up to the universal environment, from which the organism cannot be separated either, acting on and being acted on by that all the time. You can’t apply our single-track analysis methods to such a case. The result is, of course, that those sciences are almost purely empirical, sociology hardly deserving the name. If, to use an illustration that’s been used before, I want to tackle the three-body problem, I can and will start with the special case where one of them has zero mass. But suppose I were making an analysis of the influence of Pan-Asiatic policies on American domestic affairs before the war. I could certainly not ignore the converse case, or the existence of other countries, I’d have to consider them all at once—which no existing math can do. Any results I got would be qualitative, nonmathematical, inexact.”

  “I think I see,” nodded Boyd. “Of course, people can think of two or more things at once.”

  “That’s different,” said Karen. “That’s a case of divided attention, each branch of the mind following its single track. It’s normal enough, though carried to extremes it becomes schizophrenia.”

  “You get what I’m driving at,” went on Wayne. “Our subhuman and human ancestors didn’t need to see the world as a whole. They were only concerned with their immediate surroundings and events. So we never evolved the ability to consider an entire entity. Alaric is a mutant—”

  “Some different brain structure,” said Karen quietly. “The reversed internal organs may or may not be a linked characteristic. The X-rays showed no brain difference. They hardly would, as it’s probably a very subtle matter of cellular or colloidal integration.”

  “Al didn’t have to think, in our ordinary sense of the word, of how to make a weapon,” added Wayne. “His extensive knowledge of scientific principles and data co-ordinated in his mind to show him that …well, if my guess is right, that the colloids of human bodies are resonant to a particular wave form. And at once he knew all the factors he’d need to generate that wave. It wasn’t reason, as we reason, though it was thought—to him, thought on a very elementary, almost intuitive level. Yet he wasn’t able to think of telling anybody.”

  “I see,” answered Boyd. “Humans think in chains. He thinks in networks.”

  “Yes, that’s about the size of it.”

  “Do you think…we…can ever do that?”

  “Hm-m-m—I don’t know. Since intelligence seems to depend on upbringing among normal humans, whereas genius and feeble-mindedness seem more independent of environment, and are hereditary, one might argue that they are both mutations, in the individual or an ancestor. Some people, such as Nikola Tesla, seem to have had a degree of network-thought ability, and the fact that Al is the son of a mathematician, who does deal with complexities, is suggestive. After all, no observed mutation has ever created a totally new characteristic. It would have to create a whole new set of genes for that. A mutation is a greater or less modification of an existing characteristic.

  “The point I’m making is that humans naturally think in straight lines, but some sort of network, total-considering logic has been developed. The semanticists have their nonelementalistic principle. In math, we only add in special cases, the rest of the time we integrate, and we have our generalized calculi of vectors and tensors and the like. But—it doesn’t come naturally. It’s been worked out slowly and painfully, through many centuries. To Al, it’s the natural way to think; but, as like most mutations it involves a loss elsewhere, the simple straightforward logic of humans is unnatural to him and since he is just a kid, and probably not a genius anyway—merely an ordinary network thinker—he hasn’t seen the principles of that logic, any more than a human his age sees the principle of nonelementalism. I’d say, offhand, that both types of mind can learn the other type of thought, but not comprehend or apply it on its higher levels.”

  “There’s another thing,” put in Karen. Her eyes held a light which hadn’t been there for a long time. “Rod just said it. Al should be able, with the proper training, to learn logic, at least enough to understand and communicate. His kind of thought is not adapted to the simple problems of life, but he can be taught to handle those, as we teach human children to think in terms of abstractions. Maybe…maybe, then, he can teach us something.”