Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Rosel G Brown

  She kept the farm as well as any man. Better. She worked. How she worked! She kept herself numb with labor, her mind drunk with the liquors of fatigue.

  After five years, he came. He just appeared inside the door flap, looking a little nervous but grinning.

  “I’m Jack Hamstrong,” he said, his voice full and wholesome, like Iowa corn. “I—you weren’t at the spaceport so I figured, what the heck. I just walked.”

  “This is my farm,” Annie said. “My hands are on every inch of it.”

  Hamstrong’s ruddy face turned in on itself a little. “I know. I know the story. I didn’t come to take anything away. I came to—good Lord, didn’t you know you’d be sent a husband?”

  Annie’s eyes went queer, like a cat’s. “A husband?” If they’d told her, she hadn’t heard. “Go away,” she said. She looked around at her farm, the fruits of her travail—alone. The virgin birth.

  “No,” he said firmly. “It’s yours and mine. Legally. I’m not a mean man, Annie. You’ll find me patient. But stubborn. I can wait.”

  Annie sighed. Or was it a shudder? She looked up again at the puckering edges of the evening sky.

  She put down the knife she had been peeling a giant lichen with. She wiped her hands on her apron and lifted the door flap.

  “All right, then,” she said. “Wait.”

  “For what?”

  “The sandstorm,” she said.

  And she got into the storm cellar and pulled down the weighty lid, locking it behind her. END

  HAIR-RAISING ADVENTURE

  A young Louisiana housewife sat down to a typewriter one day last year to find the answer to a question: Was there anything hard about writing science-fiction stories? The answer, it turns out, is “no”—provided you have the wit, the talent and the grace of Mrs. Brown. Because of the idiosyncrasies of publishing schedules, this may not be the first of her stories to see print, but it’s the first she sold— and STAR is proud to present it to the world.

  Sam had been a bachelor for many years. He liked it. He might have remained so all his life, if it hadn’t been for a girl named Ruth. The study of paleolinguistics had kept him happy until then; but Ruth’s face and figure began interposing themselves between Sam’s eyes and his beloved microfilms. It was a research problem which had to be solved. He solved it by marrying the girl.

  Then he learned the facts of life.

  This occurred some weeks after their return from their honeymoon. Ruth was knitting, on no evidence, little pink things. Sam was, as usual, working on deciphering some ancient Scythian script, new examples of which had recently been unearthed in lower Russia.

  “Sam,” Ruth said, in the tone of a wife who has just given a man a good dinner and let him relax long enough. “Sam,why do you spend all your spare time fooling around with that silly old stuff? Who cares whether you can read it or not?”

  “My daddy always told me,” Sam replied without looking up, “that if a thing is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.”

  If a man’s wife won’t tell him things, who will? “Dear,” Ruth said gently. “Dear, did it ever occur to you that maybe it’s not worth doing at all?”

  This jolted Sam. He removed his glasses and put aside his microfilm viewer. “No, Ruth,” he replied, feeling vaguely around his person for cigarettes and matches. “No. I’ve never thought of that. Why isn’t it worth doing?” He never did locate a cigarette, but Ruth had so upset him he forgot about it and began chewing absently on the end of the pencil instead.

  “Dear,” Ruth said, removing the pencil and inserting a cigarette in his mouth, “you work hard all day at the Freight Depot and then you come home and work hard half the night deciphering some old script or other. And for all this your income is less than the milkman makes.”

  “But my work on epigraphy is for the sake of ... of scholarship. Of learning. My daddy always told me money wasn’t important.”

  “Sam,” Ruth said, taking his hand and patting it soothingly, “Sam, I wish I wasn’t the one to have to tell you this. But money is important.”

  “It is?”

  “Dear, you really shouldn’t have stayed a bachelor so long. You’ve been sort of, well, cut off from the practical aspects of life.”

  “But Ruth, you told me that money wasn’t. . . .”

  “Not for me, Sam, Though I wouldn’t mind...” Ruth’s voice trailed off as she looked meaningfully around the dingy little apartment. “It’s the Little Ones that may come along.”

  “Little Ones?” Sam echoed, frowning as he pictured an invasion of midgets.

  Ruth held up her knitting with a coy smile.

  “Oh, I see what you mean. You mean we might— well.” Sam turned pink and had a slight coughing fit. “Doesn’t it take longer than that? I mean, we’ve only been married three months. It really hadn’t occurred to me. About any progeny, I mean.”

  Ruth laughed reassuringly. “Oh, no. Not yet. I was just giving an example of why money is important.”

  “And epigraphy is not?” Sam was beginning to get his back up a little.

  “Not for children, no.”

  “I don’t know why epigraphy shouldn’t be important for children. I should think it would be of great benefit to the burgeoning intelligence.”

  Ruth burst into tears. “I almost hope we don’t have any children. What kind of father would you make, with your nose always in a microfilm machine and not caring if we all starve?”

  “Are you hungry, Ruth?” he asked anxiously. When she ran from the room and flung herself on the bed, Sam stood around frowning and trying to make some sense out of the whole conversation.

  A lesser man might, at this moment, have abandoned his hobby in the interests of domestic serenity. Had Sam been a lesser man, this hour of decision might have left the world balder. As it was, Sam, bent over his microfilm machine in all his spare time, was woven into that fantastic chain of events of which he was the last to be aware. . . .

  Sam’s evenings with ancient Scythian script were soon curtailed. Ruth, finding the direct approach a total failure, tried the subtle approach. There was company over almost every night. Ambitious young couples jockeying their way bravely through the traffic jams of life, their chins jutting into the wind.

  The husbands were only momentarily stunned by Sam’s occupation. “Great room for big thinking there,” they would say. “You take an office like that, streamline it, get rid of the deadwood. Boy, you’ll be appreciated. Take a place like you’re in, use a little efficiency, and it’ll show, all the way down the line. And when they ask who did it, boy, you just step up and say, ‘Me.’ ”

  “But I didn’t,” Sam would say with a confused frown. “I like my job the way it is. It leaves my mind free. What I’m really interested in is epigraphy.”

  “Taking a flier in the hog market?”

  “No, no. Reading ancient scripts. Writings. You know, trying to figure out writing that no one’s been able to translate.”

  Ruth had finally given up trying to be proud of her husband’s epigraphical accomplishments. She’d finally just switch on the TV when it became obvious that Sam was not going to get interested in vacuum cleaners or selling insurance or advertising or whatever the eager young husband of the invited couple was engaged in.

  “Sam,” she would sneer, “wouldn’t know a good idea if it hit him in the head.”

  Ruth heard of Sam’s Discovery the way most wives find out what their husbands are doing—by listening to them talk to someone else at a party.

  “New hair oil?” he was saying. “Nothing new about hair restorers. I’ve just translated a recipe that works very well. Doubt if you’d be able to stack yours up against it. And this one is almost twenty-four centuries old.”

  “Yeah?” the young man answered skeptically. He smoothed his well-oiled hair. “Of course, we’re careful not to come out with the blank statement that Full Head actually grows hair. But we do say that people who use Full Head have more hair, more luxurian
t hair, than people who do not. And more people with more hair use more Full Head than any other product. Furthermore, we’re prepared to back that statement with statistics.”

  “It is remarkable,” Sam said, “that anyone could think up a statement like that in the first place. I doubt if that could be written in an inflected language. But tell me, where did you get your statistics?”

  The young man looked a little sheepish and lowered his voice. “Well, don’t let this go any further. These statistics are a side line of a well known Educational Psychologist. It’s the same forty New York school children who learn to spell words written in red chalk three times faster than words written in white chalk.”

  “Well,” Sam said, “I don’t know how well my recipe would work on New York school children. But it grew hair on the ancient Scythians in 450 B.C. and it grew hair on me on June 22nd this year.”

  “You’re not really serious, are you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “That hair?”

  Sam looked uncomfortable. “Well, I didn’t say it grew pretty curls. It grows whatever kind of hair you had to start with. I imagine it’s a simple chemical that stimulates some hormonal activity or other.”

  Ruth backed around to observe the top of her husband’s pate.

  “Sam!” she cried. “It really isn’t bald any more. You’ve actually grown hair!”

  “Yes, yes,” Sam said impatiently. “What’s so fascinating about that? The night I broke the Scythian alphabet, all you did was yawn in my face.”

  “But you told me all there was written in Scythian were a few old laundry tickets.”

  “I meant they were mostly lists of supplies and epitaphs and things like that. This recipe just happened to be among them. Probably chiseled into the rock by some shipping clerk.”

  The young hair-oil man was by this time perspiring with eagerness. “Quick,” he said, “tell me. What was in this recipe?”

  “It’s taken internally,” Sam said. “A drink. You use mare’s milk, a plant which was probably the same one the ancient Greeks called moly, and white wine. Probably any wine would do.”

  The young man was clutching Sam’s arm and leading him off. Ruth was following, still dumfounded.

  “The plant,” the young man panted. He licked his lips. He could hardly go on. “What is it? I mean, what do we call it?”

  Sam frowned thoughtfully. “Afraid I don’t know. I’ve never had any botany.”

  Ruth let out a long breath. “Thank God. Sam, you fool. Don’t you know what you’ve got hold of?”

  “It’s that plant with the little white flower that opens just in the morning. You know, they use it on the Morning Joy ad. A very common herb.” Sam ignored his wife’s noises of admonition.

  “I know,” the young man said, beaming like a day-old chick, though his hands were still shaking.

  “Moly is a very interesting plant,” Sam said. “It was the ancient equivalent of Miltown, if you’re familiar with that drug.”

  “Familiar with it! That’s practically all I can eat.”

  But the conversation was interrupted by the thud of Ruth’s body on the floor.

  Sam picked her up apologetically. “Afraid this sort of kills our evening,” he said. “My wife has a tendency to nervousness. Especially about epigraphy. But this is the first time she’s ever fainted when I started discussing it.”

  The young man pocketed his hands, after popping a pill into his mouth. “Mind if I come along with you?”

  “No, indeed,” Sam answered. “So few people show any interest in my work. Would you like to hear how I broke the Scythian alphabet?”

  “It sounds absolutely fascinating,” the young man said. He hailed a taxi and held the door while Sam bundled in with his wife. “But first, a minor point. How many people know about this recipe for growing hair?”

  “At the moment, no one but you and me. And Ruth, if she was listening. You don’t know how refreshing it is to find someone else who is interested in ancient Scythian.”

  Ruth was sitting up, groaning. “You ten-karat jackass,” she told Sam disrespectfully. “He’s interested in your hair restorer. Don’t you know that’s worth a million dollars? And you’ve gone andgiven it away. Given it.”

  “Is that true?” Sam asked the young man, suspicious for the first time.

  “Well, I’m interested in the hair restorer and in epigraphy. Tell me, are there many people who can read ancient Scythian?”

  “You see,” Sam told his wife triumphantly, “he is interested.” He turned back to his new friend. “I am the only person in the world who can read ancient Scythian. But let me tell you how I broke the Scythian . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” the young man said. “I’m very anxious to hear all about it. But first—have you made up any samples of this hair restorer?”

  “Oh, I have half a milk bottle full,” Sam replied impatiently. “Why do you care? You don’t need it. Let me tell you how I broke ...”

  “Look!” the young man said desperately, as one who abandons the last vestige of his pride. He yanked off his toupee. It was apparent, in the dim light of the taxi, that he was not such a young man after all.

  “Oh, all right,” Sam said. He extricated Ruth from the taxi. She was in an actual paralysis of rage. “Come on up and I’ll give you a sip of this moly mix. Now, the first inkling I got that I might actually be on the trail was when I got the microfilm of a fragment with what appeared to be a picture of a Persian king carved into it and half a word underneath. Now this might have been many names. Darius, Xerxes, Artaxerxes . . .”

  “Sam,” Ruth said hoarsely, when he had arranged her in a chair, “don’t give it to him. There’s still a chance.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, my dear,” Sam said. “I’ve just had my article on the subject accepted. The king was Xerxes.”

  “No, no,” Ruth went on. “I mean the hair restorer.”

  “Oh, I’d forgotten that,” Sam said. He fetched a milk bottle. “Don’t know how clean this is,” he told the young man. “I don’t think Ruth really scrubs them. But I don’t have a cold.”

  “Germs don’t bother me,” the hair oil man replied. “If you’d just help me get it to my mouth.” He had a handkerchief wrapped around his hand, but it was still too unsteady to hold anything. “How long does it take to start working?”

  “Oh, I’d say about four hours. I mean, for the fuzz to just start showing. It takes much longer for the hair to grow to normal length.”

  The young man looked at his watch, sat down and sighed deeply. “Now tell me about how you broke the Scythian alphabet.”

  “Be glad to,” Sam said eagerly. “Now take a look at this fragment.” He handed the man a microfilm viewer. “Now, you would probably assume that the name incised under the picture is Persian transliterated into Scythian. Right?”

  “The first thing I thought of,” the young man agreed. He was running a trembling hand over the smooth skin of his head. “Persian, of course.”

  “Ha!” Sam cried. “Not at all. You can try it for yourself, if you like. It won’t work.”

  “Then I don’t think I’ll try it. What did you do then?” He was concentrating on his watch.

  “Isn’t it obvious? I transliterated the Persian into Aeolic Greek and then again transliterated it into Scythian script. And there it was! I was on the trail of the key to the Scythian script.”

  “Marvelous.” The hair oil man got up and began pacing the floor. “Sorry, but I just can’t sit still. My nerves are bad.”

  “I felt the same way,” Sam said enthusiastically, “the night I broke the Scythian alphabet. Couldn’t sleep all night. It is exciting, isn’t it?”

  “I think I feel a prickling on my scalp!”

  “It’s almost unearthly,” Sam agreed, “reading something that’s been buried all these centuries. I quite know how you feel.”

  Ruth, who had disappeared into the bedroom, returned with a suitcase in each hand and tears streaming down
her eyes.

  “Sam, I’m leaving you. I can’t stand to stay around and watch this.”

  “But Ruth,” Sam said. “You can’t do that. I love you. Honesty I do. If you like, I’ll give up epigraphy. Now that I’ve broken the Scythian alphabet I’ve finished the task I set myself fifteen years ago. No more epigraphy. Now, how’s that, dear?”

  “Sam, this skin-headed swindler is going to take your hair restorer and make five million dollars out of it, and we’re not going to get a damn thing. You don’t even know his name!”

  The hair-oil man faced her with an expression of bland honesty with an inescapable undercurrent of six ulcers. “Madam,” he said, “my name is Chuck Bradford. I have no intention of stealing your husband’s formula. I only want to help him. This sort of, thing calls for group thinking. Together we can work out—”

  “Together, bah! I know exactly what you’re going to do.”

  The door bell rang and Ruth jerked the door open angrily. She backed off, blanching like an almond.

  Into the room walked a lengthy, ferocious-looking African native, painted here and there and brandishing a wicked spear.

  “Um!” the native said, pointing the spear at everyone in turn. “Who Sam?”

  “I am,” Sam answered. “Surely you’re not from the Kenya International Epigraphical Review!”

  “Where proof sheets?” the native asked laconically.

  “Good Heavens, I had no idea the KIER had that sort of deadline. You can’t be the senior editor?”

  “Where proof sheets?” the native repeated in a menacing tone, shaking his spear and puffing out his painted cheeks.

  “Mau-mau infiltration into the KIER,” Sam concluded suddenly. “Spies must have sent you.”

  “Sam!” Chuck Bradford gasped. “You were about to publish this thing?”

  “On the whole,” Sam said complacently, “the article was rather well written. As a matter of fact, it was accepted the first place I sent it.”

  “Thank God I found out in time!” Chuck said. He popped another pill into his mouth, started toward the native and retreated fast.