Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  “Oh, Teacher! Teacher!”

  A quick look out the window showed me that all the students were down in the creek bed building sand forts. Eight-year-old pride is easily bruised. I led Vincent up to my desk and took him onto my lap. For a while we sat there, my cheek pressed to his head as I rocked silently. His hair was spiky against my face and smelled a little like a baby chick’s feathers.

  “He’s afraid! He’s afraid!” he finally whispered, his eyes tight shut. “The other one is dead. It’s broken so it can’t come back. He’s afraid! And the dead one keeps looking at him with blood on his mouth! And he can’t come down! His hands are bleeding! He hit the walls wanting to get out. But there’s no air outside!”

  “Vincent,” I went on rocking, “have you been telling yourself stories until you believe them?”

  “No!” He buried his face against my shoulder, his body tense. “I know! I know! I can hear him! He screamed at first, but now he’s too scared. Now he—” Vincent stilled on my lap. He lifted his face—listening. The anguish slowly smoothed away. “It’s gone again! He must go to sleep. Or unconscious. I don’t hear him all the time.”

  “What was he saying?” I asked, caught up in his—well, whatever it was.

  “I don’t know.” Vincent slid from my lap, his face still wary. “I don’t know his language.”

  “But you said—I protested. “How do you know what he’s feeling if you don’t even know—”

  He smiled his little lip-lift. “When you look at one of us kids without a word and your left eyebrow goes up—what do you mean?”

  “Well, that depends on what who’s doing,” I flushed.

  “If it’s for me, I know what you mean. And I stop it. So do the other kids about themselves. That’s the way I know this.” He started back to his desk. “I’d better get my spelling done.”

  “Is that the one that’s orbiting?” I asked hopefully, wanting to tie something to something.

  “Orbiting?” Vincent was busily writing. “That’s the sixth word. I’m only on the fourth.”

  That afternoon I finally put aside the unit tests I’d been checking and looked at the clock. Five o’clock. And at my hands. Filthy. And assessed the ache across my shoulders, the hollow in my stomach, and decided to spend the night right where I was. I didn’t even straighten my desk, but turned my weary back on it and unlocked the door to the teacherage.

  I kicked off my shoes, flipped on the floor lamp, and turned up the thermostat to take the dank chill out of the small apartment. The cupboards yielded enough supplies to make an entirely satisfying meal. Afterwards, I turned the lights low and sat curled up at one end of the couch listening to one of my Acker Bilke records while I drank my coffee. I flexed my toes in blissful comfort as I let the clear, concise, tidy notes of the clarinet clear away my cobwebs of fatigue. Instead of purring, I composed another strophe to my Praise Song:

  Praise God for Fedness—and Warmness—and Shelteredness—and Darkness—and Lightness—and Cleanness—and Quietness—and Unhar-riedness—

  I dozed then for a while and woke to stillness. The stereo had turned itself off, and it was so still I could hear the wind in the oak trees and the far, unmusical blat of a diesel train. And I also could hear a repetition of the sound that had wakened me.

  Someone was in the schoolroom.

  I felt a throb of fright and wondered if I had locked the teacherage door. But I knew I had locked the school door just after four o’clock. Of course, a bent bobby pin and your tongue in the correct corner of your mouth and you could open the old lock. But what—who would want to? What was in there? The stealthy noises went on. I heard the creak of the loose board in the back of the room. I heard the yaaaawn of the double front door hinges and a thud and clatter on the front porch.

  Half paralyzed with fright, I crept to the little window that looked out onto the porch. Cautiously I separated two of the slats of the blind and peered out into the thin slice of moonlight. I gasped and let the slats fall.

  A flying saucer! With purple lights! On the porch!

  Then I gave a half grunt of laughter. Flying saucers, indeed! There was something familiar about that row of purple lights—unglowing— around its middle. I knew they were purple—even by the dim light— because that was our space capsule! Who was trying to steal our cardboard-tincan-poster-painted capsule?

  Then I hastily shoved the blind aside and pressed my nose to the dusty screen. The blind retaliated by swinging back and whacking me heavily on the ear, but that wasn’t what was dizzying me.

  Our capsule was taking off!

  “It can’t!” I gasped as it slid up past the edge of the porch roof. “Not that storage barrel and all those tin cans! It can’t!” And, sure enough, it couldn’t. It crash-landed just beyond the flagpole. But it staggered up again, spilling several cans noisily, and skimmed over the swings, only to smash against the boulder at the base of the wall.

  I was out of the teacherage, through the dark schoolroom, and down the porch steps before the echo of the smash stopped bouncing from surface to surface around the canyon. I was halfway to the capsule before my toes curled and made me conscious of the fact that I was barefooted. Rather delicately I walked the rest of the way to the crumpled wreckage. What on earth had possessed it—?

  In the shadows I found what had possessed it. It was Vincent, his arms wrapped tightly over his ears and across his head. He was writhing silently, his face distorted and gasping.

  “Good Lord!” I gasped and fell to my knees beside him. “Vincent! What on earth!” I gathered him up as best I could with his body twisting and his legs flailing, and moved him out into the moonlight.

  “I have to! I have to! I have to!” he moaned, struggling away from me. “I hear him! I hear him!”

  “Hear whom?” I asked. “Vincent!” I shook him. “Make sense! What are you doing here?”

  Vincent stilled in my arms for a frozen second. Then his eyes opened and he blinked in astonishment. “Teacher! What are you doing here?”

  “I asked first,” I said. “What are you doing here, and what is this capsule bit?”

  “The capsule?” He peered at the pile of wreckage and tears flooded down his cheeks. “Now I can’t go and I have to! I have to!”

  “Come on inside,” I said. “Let’s get this thing straightened out once and for all.” He dragged behind me, his feet scuffling, his sobs and sniffles jerking to the jolting movement of his steps. But he dug in at the porch and pulled me to a halt.

  “Not inside!” he said. “Oh, not inside!”

  “Well, okay,” I said. “We’ll sit here for now.”

  He sat on the step below me and looked up, his face wet and shining in the moonlight. I fished in the pocket of my robe for a tissue and swabbed his eyes. Then I gave him another. “Blow,” I said. He did. “Now, from the beginning.”

  “I—” He had recourse to the tissue again. “I came to get the capsule. It was the only way I could think of to get the man.”

  Silence crept around his flat statement until I said, “That’s the beginning?”

  Tears started again. I handed him another tissue. “Now look, Vincent, something’s been bothering you for several days. Have you talked it over with your parents?”

  “No,” he hiccoughed. “I’m not supp-upposed to listen in on people. It isn’t fair. But I didn’t really. He came in first and I can’t shut him out now because I know he’s in trouble, and you can’t not help if you know about someone’s need—”

  Maybe, I thought hopefully, maybe this is still my nap that I’ll soon wake from—but I sighed. “Who is this man? The one that’s orbiting?”

  “Yes,” he said, and cut the last hope for good solid sense from under my feet. “He’s up in a capsule and its retro-rockets won’t fire. Even if he could live until the orbital decay dropped him back into the atmosphere, the re-entry would burn him up. And he’s so afraid! He’s trapped! He can’t get out!”

  I took hold of both of his sha
king shoulders. “Calm down,” I said. “You can’t help him like this.” He buried his face against the skirt of my robe. I slid one of my hands over to his neck and patted him for a moment.

  “How did you make the capsule move?” I asked. “It did move, didn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I lifted it. We can, you know—lift things. My People can. But I’m not big enough. I’m not supposed to anyway, and I can’t sustain the lift. And if I can’t even get it out of this canyon, how can I lift clear out of the atmosphere? And he’ll die—scared!”

  “You can make things fly?” I asked.

  “Yes, all of us can. And ourselves, too. See?”

  And there he was, floating! His knees level with my head! His shoe laces drooped forlornly down, and one used tissue tumbled to the steps below him.

  “Come down,” I said, swallowing a vast lump of some kind. He did. “But you know there’s no air in space, and our capsule—Good Lord! Our capsule? In space?—wasn’t airtight. How did you expect to breathe?”

  “We have a shield,” he said. “See?” And there he sat, a glint of something about him. I reached out a hand and drew back my stubbed fingers. The glint was gone. “It keeps out the cold and keeps in the air,” he said.

  “Let’s—let’s analyze this a little,” I suggested weakly, nursing my fingers unnecessarily. “You say there’s a man orbiting in a disabled capsule, and you planned to go up in our capsule with only the air you could take with you and rescue him?” He nodded wordlessly. “Oh, child! Child!” I cried. “You couldn’t possibly!”

  “Then he’ll die.” Desolation flattened his voice and he sagged forlornly.

  Well, what comfort could I offer him? I sagged, too. Lucky, I thought then, that it’s moonlight tonight. People traditionally believe all kinds of arrant nonsense by moonlight. So. I straightened. Let’s believe a little— or at least act as if.

  “Vincent?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” His face was shadowed by his hunched shoulders.

  “If you can lift our capsule this far, how far could your daddy lift it?”

  “Oh, lots farther!” he cried. “My daddy was studying to be a regular Motiver when he went to the New Home, but he stopped when he came back across space to Earth again because Outsiders don’t accept—oh!” His eyes rounded and he pressed his hands to his mouth. “Oh, I forgot!” His voice came muffled. “I forgot! You’re an Outsider! We’re forbidden to tell—to show—Outsiders don’t—”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “I’m not an Outsider. I’m a teacher. Can you call your mother tonight the way you did the day you and Gene had that fight?”

  “A fight? Me and Gene?” The fight was obviously an event of the neolithic period for Vincent. “Oh, yes, I remember. Yes, I guess I could, but she’ll be mad because I left—and I told—and—and—” Weeping was close again.

  “You’ll have to choose,” I pointed out, glad to the bones that it wasn’t my choice to make, “between letting the man die or having her mad at you. You should have told them when you first knew about him.”

  “I didn’t want to tell that I’d listened to the man—”

  “Is he Russian?” I asked, just for curiosity’s sake.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “His words are strange. Now he keeps saying something like Hospodi pomelui. I think he’s talking to God.”

  “Call your mother,” I said, no linguist I. “She’s probably worried to death by now.”

  Obediently, he closed his eyes and sat silent for a while on the step below me. Then he opened his eyes. “She’d just found out I wasn’t in bed,” he said. “They’re coming.” He shivered a little. “Daddy gets so mad sometimes. He hasn’t the most equitable of temperaments?”

  “Oh, Vincent!” I laughed. “What an odd mixture you are!”

  “No, I’m not,” he said. “Both my mother and daddy are of the People. Remy is a mixture ‘cause his grampa was of the Earth, but mine came from the Home. You know—when it was destroyed. I wish I could have seen the ship our People came to Earth in. Daddy says when he was little, they used to dig up pieces of it from the walls and floors of the canyon where it crashed. But they still had a life ship in a shed behind their house and they’d play they were escaping again from the big ship.” Vincent shivered. “But some didn’t escape. Some died in the sky and some died because Earth people were scared of them.”

  I shivered too and rubbed my cold ankles with both hands. I wondered wistfully if this wasn’t asking just a trifle too much of my ability to believe, even in the name of moonlight.

  Vincent brought me back abruptly to my particular Earth. “Look! Here they are already! Gollee! That was fast. They sure must be mad!” And he trailed out onto the playground.

  I looked expectantly toward the road and only whirled the other way when I heard the thud of feet. And there they stood, both Mr. and Mrs. Kroginold. And he did look mad! His—well—rough-hewn is about the kindest description—face frowning in the moonlight. Mrs. Kroginold surged toward Vincent and Mr. Kroginold swelled preliminary to a vocal blast—or so I feared—so I stepped quickly into the silence.

  “There’s our school capsule,” I said, motioning towards the crushed clutter at the base of the boulder. “That’s what he was planning to go up in to rescue a man in a disabled sputnik. He thought the air inside that shiny whatever he put around himself would suffice for the trip. He says a man is dying up there, and he’s been carrying that agony around with him, all alone, because he was afraid to tell you.”

  I stopped for a breath and Mr. Kroginold deflated and—amazingly— grinned a wide, attractive grin, half silver, half shadow.

  “Why the gutsy little devil!” he said admiringly. “And I’ve been fearing the stock was running out! When I was a boy in the canyon—” But he sobered suddenly and turned to Vincent. “Vince! If there’s need, let’s get with it. What’s the deal?” He gathered Vincent into the curve of his arm, and we all went back to the porch. “Now. Details.” We all sat.

  Vincent, his eyes intent on his father’s face and his hand firmly holding his mother’s, detailed.

  “There are two men orbiting up there. The capsule won’t function properly. One man is dead. I never did hear him. The other one is crying for help.” Vincent’s face tightened anxiously. “He—he feels so bad that it nearly kills me. Only sometimes I guess he passes out because the feeling goes away—like now. Then it comes back worse—”

  “He’s orbiting,” said Mr. Kroginold, his eyes intent on Vincent’s face.

  “Oh,” said Vincent weakly, “of course! I didn’t think of that! Oh, Dad! I’m so stupid!” And he flung himself on Mr. Kroginold.

  “No,” said Mr. Kroginold, wrapping him around with the dark strength of his arms. “Just young. You’ll learn. But first learn to bring your problems to your mother and me. That’s what we’re for!”

  “But,” said Vincent, “I’m not supposed to listen in—”

  “Did you seek him out?” asked Mr. Kroginold. “Did you know about the capsule?”

  “No,” said Vincent. “He just came in to me—”

  “See?” Mr. Kroginold set Vincent back on the step. “You weren’t listening in. You were invaded. You just happened to be the right receptivity. Now, what were your plans?”

  “They were probably stupid, too,” admitted Vincent. “But I was going to lift our capsule—I had to have something to put him in—and try to intercept the orbit of the other one. Then I was going to get the man out—I don’t know how—and bring him back to Earth and put him down at the FBI building in Washington. They’d know how to get him home again.”

  “Well.” Mr. Kroginold smiled faintly. “Your plan has the virtue of simplicity, anyway. Just nit-picking, though, I can see one slight problem. How would the FBI ever convince the authorities in his country that we hadn’t impounded the capsule for our own nefarious purposes?” Then he became very business-like.

  “Lizbeth, will you get in touch with Ron? I think he’s in Kerry
tonight. Lucky our best Motiver is This End right now. I’ll see if Jemmy is up-canyon. We’ll get his okay on Remy’s craft at the Selkirk. If this has been going on for very long, time is what we’ve got little of.”

  It was rather anti-climactic after all those efficient rattlings-out of directions to see the three of them just sit quietly there on the step, hands clasped, their faces lifted a little in the moonlight, their eyes closed. My left foot was beginning to go to sleep when Vincent’s chin finally dropped, and he pulled one hand free from his mother’s grasp to curl his arm up over his head. Mrs. Kroginold’s eyes flipped open. “Vincent?” Her voice was anxious.

  “It’s coming again,” I said. “That distress—whatever it is.”

  “Ron’s heading for the Selkirk now,” she said, gathering Vincent to her. “Jake, Vincent’s receiving again.”