Five-Odd by Anthology

Author:Anthology [Anthology]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

During the next few days we learned almost all there was to be known about Perryon. We visited the other cities. Nineteen towns, in addition to Benoit City and Sedgeware, had more than twenty thousand inhabitants. One of us visited each of them.

And Helen, after one such visit, came up with what might be the answer to the North-South problem.

Benoit City and Sedgeware were the clear leaders of the two sections of Perryon, and the people of these two cities were also the leaders of the North-South squabble. But Twendon, a hundreds miles to the north of Sedgeware, and Foresthill, two hundreds miles south of Benoit City, were only a little behind them in economic and political importance. And neither Twendon nor Foresthill had ever taken much part in the dispute. Being in the south of the northern hemisphere and in the north of the southern section, they could understand both points of view, steered a middle course, and didn’t think it mattered much anyway.

Now the Unit, once it was functioning again, could quite easily sway the balance of power and make Twendon the capital of the South and Foresthill the capital of the North. The influence and importance of Benoit City and Sedgeware would wane, and so would the importance of the issues they stood for.

We needn’t tell anyone, even the people of Twendon and Foresthill, what we were doing.

None of us saw any sign that Perryon was the Traders’ base, and none of our efforts to find out who had shot Lorraine bore any fruit.

Lorraine was going to be all right, eventually. She had been so seriously injured that there was no question of her leaving hospital for some weeks, and even Dick didn’t insist on a Unit session in the hospital for four or five days.

But at last we’d done all we could do without some guidance from the Unit as a whole, and since Lorraine herself insisted that she could take part in a brief Unit session we all went to the hospital and got busy.

I wasn’t present this time. I was fully occupied keeping doctors and nurses out of the way. Understandably, they were all against this. I had some sympathy with their point of view. Lorraine was still in anything but good shape, and though she was by now out of danger, her body was fully occupied with healing without having to cope with a strenuous Unit session as well.

And they are strenuous. The man who works with his brain while his body does nothing can be fully as tired at the end of a day’s work as a laborer. Fit Uniteers can work together all day—but a fit Uniteer could also walk upstairs, and it would be some time before Lorraine could do that.

I had made Dick promise to go easy on Lorraine. He kept his promise, after a fashion. They were with her for only half an hour. But I saw her afterwards, and she was dead beat.

“No more for another week at least, Lorraine,” I promised her.

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