He raised his forearm to a horizontal position, pointed his index
finger in their direction.
"Who wants to die first?" he cried above the noise they made.
The onrush into the cell stopped abruptly, those in front pushing back
against those behind them. They followed his finger with fascinated
eyes as he fanned it across the group of them. He stopped, his finger
pointing to a fat, applecheeked grovemaster. The man shrieked, turned
about and began fighting his way back into the corridor.
One man was tripped up and fell. There was a wild shriek of terror. Men
shouted that he was killing the leaders by magic. To Henry it seemed
only an instant before the passageway was back in its usual silence. He
stepped out of his cell. He could see a mass of people about the street
door surrounding the panicked men. The passage in the other direction
seemed empty.
He turned that way, passed onto the rear of the stage, felt his way
across it in the darkness to the steps and down into the aisle. Calmly
and without haste he passed through the front doors into the next
street and walked, unrecognized in the half light and excitement, out
of town.
* * * * *
It was dark when he arrived in the upper valley.
Theta was sitting at a table. She sprang up and rushed into his arms
with a glad cry.
"It worked! They let you go?"
He looked about. "You turned the power back on?"
"No. The plant and these buildings have a separate power source of
their own. I wasn't going to touch it until I knew you were safe."
He drew an apple from a bin and munched it. "We'd better turn things on
again before the fruit spoils. Come on...."
The button, Henry knew, turned on as well as off. Henry pressed down
the button, stepped back to watch the large battery of lights flash
on, but nothing happened. Had Theta somehow wrecked--ah! The red
buttons all began to glow again. Then, a minute later, a bank of lights
switched to green, then another and another. But Henry noted that an
occasional light did not change.
Within the hour the board was lighted up completely.
Henry could barely stumble back to his quarters as the reaction set in
compounded with disappointment. He flung himself on his bed.
"I have failed," he kept muttering. "I have failed in everything. They
won't listen. No one will!"
Theta wisely kept silent and covered him up.
On the second day they heard the sound of a group breaking their way
through the forest. They slipped into the brush, ready to retire to a
hiding place they had ready. But the dozen people who appeared in the
clearing did not have the look of a vengeful mob. Several were almost
elderly, some were boys, two were young women.
Henry stepped into the open, but not too close to them. "What do you
want?" he demanded.
They looked at each other, waiting for the other to speak first.
"What do you want?" Henry directed his question to an elderly
grovemaster.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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