Infinity One (7 page)

Who’s that?
a voice asked, high and quavering like an old lady’s.
Pa?
It couldn’t be too old a female, then.

Wizard barked sharply three times in the negative signal he’d been taught.

Hi, dog. Do you see my Pa?

Wiz got down from the steps, looked up and down the street, then barked again three times.

Pa’s so late, and I’m so hungry
, the voice said.

Pete, who had eaten well an hour earlier, was suddenly overwhelmed with hunger—the sullen kind of stomach cramp that he’d experienced in Korea when his unit was cut off for four days. The kind of griping pangs you get when you’re hungry all the time.

“Lady, I’m going down to the deli on the comer. I’ll he right back with something to tide you over till your Pa gets back.” Pete made the announcement before he realized it. He left Wizard on guard at the door.

He ordered a sub with no onions (somehow he knew ‘no onions’), two cokes and a banana.

I’m in the back room,
said the voice when he and Wizard entered the hall.

Pete had had the distinct impression the voice had come from the front of the building. The tone was too thin to have carried far.

The stench of the filthy hall sickened Pete. No matter how many years he might spend on the force, he’d never get used to the odor of poverty. Maybe it was the stink that brought a growl from Wizard.

Pete pushed open the back door and entered the pitifully furnished room. On an old armchair by the window was a wasted little figure, like a broken doll thrown down by a careless child, limbs askew. By now he expected a girl, a child, but this was such a
little
girl!

Wizard got down on his belly, licking his lips nervously. He crawled carefully across the dirty floor. He sniffed at the tiny hand on the shabby arm of the chair, whined softly. The little hand did not move away, nor toward him, either.

What kind of a father, Pete fumed to himself, would leave a kid, a mere baby, alone in a place like this?

I’m no baby, mister. I’m nine years old,
she informed him indignantly.

Pete apologized contritely, blaming his error on the glare from the single window. He wouldn’t have thought her more than five, six at the outside. She was so pitifully underdeveloped. She was clean as were her shred of a dress and the old blanket on which she lay, but the rest of the room was filthy. Her pinched face had a curious, calm beauty to it. When Pete knelt beside her, he saw her eyes were filmed and sightless. And when she spoke, her mouth did not move.

He found himself breaking off small pieces of the sub and feeding them to her. She sipped the Coke through the straw and a look of intense pleasure crossed her face.

I knew l remembered how wonderful it tasted,
she said. But not with her lips.

The truth dawned on Pete: this child was a telepath. Impossible?—he hadn’t actually believed any of that crap. But there was no other explanation.

“You aren’t talking,” he said. “You don’t make a sound.”

I am too talking,
answered the child soundlessly.
And you're answering.

Pete gulped, hastily trying to mend matters. “You just don’t speak the usual way.”

I do everything kind of different. At least my Pa’s always complaining I do.
Her head turned slowly towards him.
You don’t suppose something’s happened to Pa, do you? I can’t hear very far away when I’m hungry.

Pete fed her another bite guiltily. “When did you eat last?”

Pa was home this morning. But all we had was bread.

Pete vowed to himself passionately that he was going to see Welfare immediately.

Oh, you mustn't!
pleaded the soundless voice. Wizard, ears flattened, growling menacingly at Pete. She was clearly frightened of Welfare.
They’d take me away, like they took my sister, and put me in a barred place and I'd neve hear any birds or see Pa. They might cut me up 'cause my body doesn’t work right.
She still spoke without sound.

“Aw, honey...”

My name’s Maria, not honey.

“Maria, you’ve got it all wrong. Wizard, you tell her. Welfare helps people. You’d have a clean bed and birds right outside the window.”

It’d be a hospital. My Ma died m a hospital because no one cared. Pa said so. They just let her die.

Wizard whimpered. Pete was frightened himself. He soothed Maria as best he could with promises of no hospitals, no cutting, plenty of birds. What she didn’t finish of the sandwich, he wrapped it up and put beside her. He started to peel the banana for her but she refused it.

It’s a treat for Wiz for bringing you here.
She laughed.
He listens to people.

Pete grinned.

“How on earth did you know that fool dog loves bananas?”

Nothing could have been funnier to Maria and her laughter was so contagious Pete grinned foolishly. Even Wizard laughed in his canine way, his tongue lolling out of one side of his mouth. Suddenly the atmosphere changed.

I hear Pa coming. You’d better leave. He wouldn’t like having the fuzz in here.

“Then why did you let me in?”

Wizard. Dogs always know. I talk to dogs all the time. But I’ve never talked to one as smart as Wizard before. You get out now. Quick.

Pete felt a violent compulsion to take to his heels. Once they were around the corner the impulse vanished, so he waited a few moments and then peered around the building. He saw a shambling figure go into the house where they had found Maria.

Pete was shaken by his encounter with the girl: shaken, confused and frightened. She had taken him over, used him to suit her needs and then cut him off in fear when all he wanted to do was help her. He worried about her all the way round to the hospital: her pitiful life in those awful surroundings . . . and that Strange talent.

He had a friend, a drinking buddy, who was interning at Delaware Hospital. Pete came in that night and found

Joe Lavelle on duty in the emergency ward, so he told Joe a little about the girl. “And what’s going to become of her, living like that?”

“I’d say she was dead already and didn’t know it,” Joe snorted.

The thought of Maria dead choked Pete up. Her fragile laugh, her curious calm beauty gone? No!

“Hey, Pete!” The interne watched the cop’s gut reaction with amazement. “I was only kidding. Why, I couldn’t even guess what was wrong with her without an examination. She could have had polio, meningitis, m. s., any variety of paralysis. But I’d say she needed treatment, fast. And I’d certainly like to see this kid who can make any stalwart defender of this one-horse town quake in his boots like that.”

Pete growled and Wizard seconded it.

Joe warded off an imaginary attack with his arm, laughing, just as the phone rang for him. Pete resumed his patrol.

The next morning, resolved to help Maria in spite of herself, he bought a frilly dress, bundled it and food and Wizard into his car and went back to the house. He ‘called’ to let her know he was coming.

There was no answer. The back room was deserted. Except for the de-stuffed armchair by the window and two Coke bottles on the floor under it, Pete could have sworn no one had been in the house for months.

“Find Maria, Wiz,” Pete ordered.

Wizard hunted around, sniffing, and with a yelp raced out the door. He sniffed around outside and seemed to find a trace. Pete followed him in the car. Wizard acted just as if he knew exactly where he was going. He got half way down the next block then stopped as though he had run into an invisible wall. He lay down on the sidewalk, put his head on his paws and whined. Then he slunk back to Pete at the curb.

“Find her, Wizard!” Pete commanded. The dog crouched down and laid his ears back. It was the first time he had ever disobeyed that tone of voice.

“Maria! We’re your friends! We want to help!” Pete shouted, oblivious to stares. He was sure she could hear him. He waited, apprehensive, unsure.

No!
came the one disembodied word, filling his skull til his head rang. There was no arguing it.

“At least tell Wiz if you’re hungry, Maria. He can bring you food. I promise I won’t follow.”

Twice in the next three weeks, Wizard darted into a deli, whining pathetically. It took Pete a minute or so the first time to grasp what the big dog wanted. Then he’d get a sandwich and a Coke-to-go, put it in a bag, roll the top into a handle for Wiz to carry. Then he’d wait til the dog returned. He was determined to prove to Maria he’d keep his promise. He didn’t want to lose contact with her.

In the meantime he did a little judicious research on telepathy at the library, but the textbooks were too much for him. When he asked the librarian for something a guy could understand, he was shown the science fiction shelves.

Maria didn’t act like fictional telepaths. According to the stories she should be able to get food when she wanted it, commit robberies undetected, start fires, transport herself and anyone else anywhere, aid society and perform minor miracles. Like heal herself, even. The prospects were magnificently endless. Yet she was stuck in some hideous, hot, horrible back room, half-starved and slowly dying of neglect.

The one thing Pete had to accept was the fact that Maria kept in touch with Wizard but excluded him. Since Pete considered Wizard every bit as smart as most men, he wasn’t offended; but he felt powerless to help her as only a human could.

The next set of inexplicable incidents began about four weeks after Pete and Wizard first encountered the girl. They were pacing the beat on the hotel side of Rodney Square when the dog got restless. He strained against the leash until Pete let him go to see where he’d head. At a dead run, Wizard streaked down Eleventh Street, right over into Harry West’s beat.

Harry walked with Pirate, the biggest dog on the force. Pete couldn’t figure Harry in trouble. He was wrong.

He heard the sullen rumble of an angry crowd by the time he reached French. Wiz was already around that comer and in the middle of a fight. Pete whistled for squad cars as he broke into the edge of the crowd, swinging his nightstick. He could hear Wizard growling angrily. He heard a yelp and then the growling of a second dog. He stumbled over Harry, bleeding from a head wound. Pete got Harry clear of the stampede just as the squad cars arrived.

Both dogs were at work, snapping, snarling, darting around and the crowd thinned rapidly. In a matter of minutes, all but the bitten, bruised and brained had evaporated into the hot night.

“How’d you get here so fast?” Harry demanded as he came to. “I heard Wiz just as some kook pelted me with a bottle.”

“Well, Wizard just took off,” was Pete’s unenlightening reply.

“Glad he did. We came down on a Code One call but when Pirate and I got to the edge of the mob to get them moving, they closed in like we was Christmas in July. Somebody got Pirate in the head and I couldn’t turn anywhere without getting it.” Harry dabbed at the cuts on his hands. “I’d sure like to know what set them off.”

Wizard and the bigger dog were wandering around the street, nervously sniffing. The paddy wagon arrived and Wiz and Pirate assisted in rounding up the incidentals, just begging for one legal bite. Then they started whiffling around again.

“What’s with the dogs?” Harry asked as Pete helped him into a car. “Look at old Wiz pumping.”

Wizard’s tail was wagging like he was on the way to his best girl.

“Maria!” Pete gasped and called Wizard to heel. The dog came bounding over, wriggling with delight. “Find Maria!” but Wizard barked three times, sneezed and shook his head. Pirate came up, nuzzled Harry, sniffed Wizard and then
he
barked three times.

“I got a girl that only talks to dogs yet,” Pete said in bitter disgust.

Back on their own beat, Pete tried to figure out why Maria would have called Wizard. Harry and Pirate weren’t in trouble at the time Wiz took off. Maria must have been worried . . . yeah, that was it! Worried about her old man! She’d called Wizard because her old man had been in that crowd.

And that explained why Wizard was so happy-acting. He’d found Maria’s father’s trail leading away from the rumble.

Pete left a note for Harry to keep an ear and an eye open for any crippled kids on his beat and to let him know if Pirate ever acted . . . strange. She might keep in touch with Pirate, too, since the big dog had been involved in getting her father out of a tough scrape.

Two of the men picked up that day were known numbers runners. They stuck to their story that the cop had come busting in where he wasn’t needed and his damn dog had spooked the crowd into the rumble. They just ‘happened’ to be there.

For the next few weeks Pete got no signs from Wizard that Maria was in distress. This bothered him almost as much as hearing from her when she
was
hungry. At headquarters they were hearing nasty rumors about a new numbers racket. Certain hoods were being seen in new cars, in new quarters, acting raunchy. Two runners were picked up on suspicion, in the hope of cracking them. They had to be released twenty-four hours later, clean, but one of them had bragged a little. Pete heard one of the detective lieutenants complaining bitterly about it.

“Yeah, the punk says ‘you gotta have evidence, looten-ant, and this time there ain’t any, lootenant. Not unless ya can read minds.’ That’s what he says, s’help me.”

Maria!
Pete thought with a sense of shock.

What was it Maria had said? When she was hungry, she didn’t have the strength to hear far away. If she were well-fed, how far could she hear? All the way to Chicago?

The conclusion just couldn’t be dodged. Maria and her Pa were involved. But how would she know she was doing something wrong? Whoever had latched onto her would be jubilant that they were putting something over on the cops. To Maria, cops were just the fuzz. Cops spelt trouble for her father. Cops meant the Welfare, and hospitals, and she didn’t know which one scared her the most.