Space Race

by Sylvia Waugh

  “All the modern conveniences,” said Patrick with a wry smile as they reached the landing. “Lavatory, washroom, kitchen—and my office, looking out onto the busiest, dirtiest street in Casselton.”

  Inside the office there was a large desk, totally bare and polished clean, an office chair, an old leather armchair, and not very much else.

  “It wasn't quite as empty as this when I worked here,” said Patrick. “I cleared everything out earlier this week. All I have to do now is pick up my case from the wall safe, do a final check, then lock up and put the keys in the post.”

  He didn't hurry to do all of this. There was time to spare and he wanted to make the picture clearer to his bewildered son. For five years he had avoided talking about his work in Casselton. Like many another father, when he came home he switched off that part of his life. Belthorp was a world away.

  “Here's where I converted your notebooks into microfilm,” he said. “I have every one of them ready to take home with us. Does that surprise you?”

  Thomas considered this. He had never known where his notebooks went. He had always filled one and then was given another. It was so much part of the system that it had never occurred to him to question it.

  “But where are the notebooks?” he said.

  “I had to destroy them,” said Patrick. “They were too bulky. You are quite a prolific writer!”

  Thomas was not quite sure what prolific meant, but he let that pass.

  “I have kept the very first one,” said Patrick, “but that is for what you might call sentimental reasons.”

  Thomas went to the window to look down on the street. Patrick followed him and raised the sash so that they could look out more easily, resting their arms on the sill. The day was cold but crisp. Somewhere in the distance a clock told the hour with eleven clear strokes.

  “This is something I have done many a time,” said Patrick, turning his head to look up and down the hill. “I've written my own descriptions of this sad bit of the city, though it was not the chief part of the mission. Your work was more important.”

  Thomas had given up on asking why it was important, but Patrick decided to explain a little further.

  “These Earth people are clever,” he said. “One day they may discover Ormingat, though it might take centuries. When they arrive on our planet, we want to know how to communicate with them from the start. We want to understand everything about them. We want to know what it is like to be human at all stages of life.”

  “And they'll know all that from what I've written?” said Thomas, baffled. “The people who come could be Chinese, Russian, or anything. Then what use would it be?”

  “Your accounts are just a very small piece in the jigsaw. But you are rather special,” said his father with a smile. “You are the youngest, the youngest ever. All over Earth, our spies—I suppose that's what we should call them—have for years and years been adding to our knowledge. There are Ormingatrig everywhere.”

  “So why have I never met any? Why do we not know any of them?”

  Even as he asked his question, Thomas was diverted by all of the life going on below. For him, this was a totally new experience. In five years on Earth his visits outside the village had been to places of great beauty, as holiday treats. No one would come to Walgate Hill for a holiday!

  Beneath the window someone ran down the pavement pushing an old hand-barrow and other pedestrians shouted at him indignantly to be more careful. At the top of the hill, on the other side of the road, a huge brewery tanker was feeding beer through thick concertina tubes into the cellar of a public house. Cars and buses went up and down. People of all ages, shapes, and sizes passed, English and Asian in about equal proportions. The area was poor but cosmopolitan.

  “One of our people could be down there,” said Patrick. “For all I know, I could have run into one at any time. We visitors to Earth are not permitted to know or communicate with one another. It is part of the Covenant.”

  “Why?” said Thomas. “And what's the Covenant?”

  “It's a sort of agreement,” said Patrick. “We are here to observe, not to conspire. We must never, ever pose a threat to Earth, or even seem to do so. You and I are here with a job to do. What others do is none of our business. We have no wish to colonize or to conquer. We are here simply to learn, and to be prepared in case Earth ever, God forbid, decides to invade us.”

  Thomas had learned in history about invasions. They were frightening.

  “Would they?” he said. “Would they ever try to conquer Ormingat?”

  “It's not something you or I need to worry about,” said Patrick. “So far, they lack the ability. By the time they possess it, we can only hope that they will have become less aggressive. We, in our turn, will be ready to greet them as friends, in whatever language they speak. They may see us as aliens, but we shall know them through and through.”

  Patrick leaned on the sill with his hands clasped in front of him. For him too, the human life surrounding them was a distraction.

  He looked at his hands pensively. Strong hands with short stubby fingers and square fingernails.

  “Sometimes I forget that this is just a spacesuit, this body I inhabit,” he said. “That's all it is, created from a culture of DNA to give me safe passage to, from, and about Earth. Yet now it feels like part of me. I shall be in some ways reluctant to shed it. It will be like losing an old friend.”

  He looked down at Thomas, who had adopted the same stance by his father's side. The boy's hands, tapering fingers, clasped together, looked fine and frail.

  “You too,” said Patrick. “That body of yours is for Earth only and for the journey home. A better genetic match would have made us resemble one another more closely! On Ormingat you and I are unmistakably parent and child.”

  But at that very moment the resemblance was there in the wistful longing each of them felt—not a simple yearning to be human, something much more impossible than that: to be Earthling and Ormingatriga both at once. Thomas was beginning to picture more clearly what it would be like to be Tonitheen. The words of the Ormingat tongue were foreign to him, but the music was part of his being. Come home, Tonitheen. Agmalish, Argule, Ergay—

  Patrick drew back from the window and closed it.

  “Now,” he said. “Time we were leaving. You sit in the armchair while I see to things.”

  Seeing to things meant first of all going to a little side cupboard with a long slim door. Inside was the wall safe. The case Patrick produced was in fact just a soft leather document case fastened by an all-round zip. Its sides bulged with knobbly contents, but the whole was not too big to go into the “poacher's pocket” in Patrick's sheepskin coat.

  “The microfilms are in here,” he explained to Thomas, “and one or two other things.”

  Next he took from a drawer in the desk a brand-new, sharp, and shiny garden trowel.

  Thomas looked at him, puzzled.

  “That's all right,” said Patrick as he wrapped the trowel in a plastic bag and put it in the side pocket of the coat. “You never know when it might come in handy.”

  Thomas smiled warily but said nothing.

  Finally Patrick sealed the keys up in a small padded envelope, already stamped. It was addressed to Morgan, Dace & Redford in accordance with some arrangement made before Patrick came to Casselton. He did not know who would receive the keys or what would happen to the office. That was none of his business.

  “We'll just pop these in the post box as we go,” he said.

  The brewery tanker at the top of the hill had finished its delivery to the Bay Horse. The driver and his mate climbed into the high cabin, their next port of call the Blue Bell, on the other side of the river.

  “Time d'you make it, Jack?” said the driver to his mate.

  “Just after quarter to twelve. I'll not be sorry when this shift's over, Andy. I've got a head like a stairhead!”

  Andy put the engine into gear and pressed lightly on the accelerator. Walgate
Hill had to be taken very gently. The driver was only too well aware that his juggernaut was traveling down a busy road with the steepest gradient in town.

  The tanker rolled away, the driver carefully grasping the steering wheel and soft-pedaling the brake. Suddenly the vehicle gathered speed and more speed. The driver pushed the brake down further, easily at first, properly, sensibly, but then with growing force as he realized that there was no response. Faster it went, faster and faster. Both men in the cab were in a state of panic as they realized that the brakes had failed completely.

  “Hell!” shouted the driver. “Bloody hell!”

  But before you think too badly of him, that was not what he was thinking. Thought moves fast, faster than sound, faster than light, faster than words, believe me… If the lights stay green, if I can get this monster across the junction, Lilly Street, Cromer Street, then steer a straight line into the old public lavatories in the middle of the road, no deaths, no serious damage, and maybe, dear God, we'll even live through it … this vehicle's tough as a tank … no, no, no, no, no, no…. Pelican Crossing! lights red, man and child, child running, envelope in hand, man walking, sheepskin coat, post office van far side of the lights … stopping … stopping! … move, move, move, ye beggar! move! … hazard lights, horn, horn, horn, damn these bloody brakes!

  Thoughts condensed, and even more of them than those listed, thoughts faster than words, faster than sound, faster than light, but totally, totally helpless.

  The tanker crazed over the crossing, missing the child, hitting the man, and careening into the post office van, half swallowing it beneath colossal wheels.

  Thomas ran and put the envelope in the letter box. And at that precise moment, behind him, came the loudest noise he had ever heard in his whole life. Sound and sound alone shook his body and threw him to the ground. Others on the pavement screamed. A woman with a stroller dived into the post office. Two girls huddled together beside the shop window. The first reaction of those nearest was to crouch and cower. Then, as the noise of the crash stopped, a wave of onlookers surged forward. Thomas would have been crushed had not one man noticed him, lifted him to his feet, and pushed him back out of the way.

  Two or three cars had time to pass on the other side, going uphill. Then traffic was halted on that side too as a siren screamed. Policemen in a squad car came speeding down the hill, frantically summoned by a bystander on his mobile telephone. They hurried in to clear the way and to help prepare for the emergency services that would very soon follow.

  One policeman moved people on while his colleague went first to the post office van, whose driver was slumped over the wheel. The back of the van was totally telescoped under the tanker. The policeman was able to reach into the front of the van, to ascertain that the driver was still alive, but heaven alone knew for how much longer.

  The tanker itself was less damaged. The policeman climbed up on the step of the cab, saw its two occupants lurched forward, but was relieved to hear them groan and to see movements that suggested more possibility of life than in the van below.

  “Can you manage to sit back?” said the policeman loudly. It seemed a sensible suggestion—it would help their breathing, show that that they were conscious. It was also something simple they could do, or not do, without thinking too much.

  The driver heaved himself back on his seat by pushing on the steering wheel. He looked at the policeman in a dazed fashion and then said brokenly, “The man, the man …”

  “He's trapped in his van,” said the policeman. “He's not dead. The ambulance and the fire brigade are on their way. We can hope.”

  “The man,” said the driver, “the man in the crossing.”

  His mate jerked back into his seat and gave a shriek of pain.

  “Hold still,” said the policeman, hoping that his earlier suggestion had been the right one. “Help'll be here any minute.”

  “But the man on the crossing, the man in the sheepskin coat,” said the driver again. It cost him an effort to speak; his face was ashen with pain; but it was something he had to say.

  This time the policeman realized what the driver must mean. He jumped down from the step and looked anxiously at the front of the cab, at the high wheels that in themselves were a colossal weight, the thick mudguards, and to the front of them the mangled rear end of the post office van all entangled so that only the brigade with cutting gear would be able to prize them apart. A man? In there ?

  There was no sign of anybody.

  The policeman jumped up on the step again.

  “There's nobody there,” he said.

  “There has to be,” said the driver as he became more coherent. “I ran him over, God help him. He must be under the wheels.”

  Other police cars arrived on the scene, a medic on a motorbike, then a fire engine. Watchers were herded further down the street, where a cluster of them waited outside the betting shop, determined to see everything.

  It was then that one of the firemen noticed the boy sitting on the pavement in front of the post office window, his knees drawn up to his chin.

  “Come on, young'un,” said the fireman. “We'll have to have you away from there. Are you all right?”

  Thomas did not even look at him. He was shivering convulsively.

  “Hey,” said the fireman, lifting him into his arms, “nasty shock you've had, but you'll be all right. Don't worry. We'll see to you, get you back to your mam. What's your name, old son? Mine's Steve.”

  Then he looked down the street toward the group of spectators.

  “Anyone know this bairn?”

  He walked with him toward the crowd.

  “It's Sammy,” said a voice. “It's Sammy Bentley.” Canty pushed his way to the front of the group. He had recognized the boy's clothing first, but now he saw clearly that there was no mistaking him—his dark, straight hair and fine features showed distinctively the face Canty had first seen earlier that day.

  “And how do you know him?” said the fireman, looking doubtfully at the scruffy little vagrant.

  “Know his dad,” said Canty. “Saw'm with his dad the smornin'. You ask 'im. 'E'll tell yis.”

  Thomas lay in the fireman's arms like a baby. He did not look at Canty. He looked at nobody. The fireman stood waiting, wondering what to do next.

  “Well, who's his dad, Canty?” said one of the policemen, recognizing him from previous encounters.

  “Mr. Bentley, sir,” said Canty respectfully. It always pays to respect the law.

  “And who's Mr. Bentley?” said the policeman patiently.

  “Mr. Bentley's … Mr. Bentley,” said Canty, not knowing what else to say. “You must have seen him. Comes up here most days. Well dressed. Canny fella. Allus a kind word.”

  “What was he wearing this morning?” asked the policeman who had been first on the scene. He had a sickening feeling that he knew what the answer would be.

  “One of them sheepskin coats,” said Canty.

  Just then the first ambulance arrived.

  The policeman turned urgently to the fireman who was holding Thomas.

  “Take the boy to the ambulance,” he said. “Sooner he's out of here the better.”

  After Thomas was safely in the ambulance, the policeman turned to the others and said quietly, “I hope I'm wrong, but from what the driver said, I think Mr. Bentley might be crushed in the wreckage.”

  But when the emergency services had done all they could, and a crane and a cutter had been brought to disentangle the wreckage, no body was found, not a sign anywhere of the man in the sheepskin coat.

  There was one strange bit of evidence. Embedded in the tire of the near-side front wheel was a torn strip of sheepskin, two inches wide and about eighteen inches long.

  There were four admissions to Casselton General Hospital as a result of the crash on Walgate Hill. Four beds were newly occupied just as the staff was trying to get as many patients as possible home for Christmas. That's the way it goes.

  Chris Patel, the
driver of the post office van, sustained the worst injuries. He was taken straight into intensive care and prepared for any surgery he might need, but it looked as if he would live through the horror of the crash. He would survive because he was slightly built and cantankerous. A bigger man might well have perished. A less volatile one might not have had such a will to live.

  Andy Brown, the tanker driver, and his mate, Jack Jordan, were in the men's ward on the top floor, being treated for shock, abrasions, and fractured limbs. And they still insisted, both of them, that the tanker had somehow crushed a man in a sheepskin coat. On that story police could not budge them, even though all the evidence was against it.

  In the nearly empty children's ward, Sammy Bentley, or whatever his real name might turn out to be, was put in a bed next to a very talkative boy about his own age who was due to go home next day.

  “Sammy hasn't uttered a word since he was picked up,” said the doctor, looking at the notes. “We've done all the usual tests. We can't find anything physically wrong with him. What's more, he has accepted food and drink when it's been put in front of him. He walks as far as he needs. But then there is that total silence. His eyes won't even look at you. Putting him beside Jamie might help. Kids react to kids.”

  “He might prefer peace and quiet,” said the male nurse, with an expression that was comically doubtful. “Jamie is a bit overpowering.”

  “Jamie's racket might just do the trick,” said the doctor, smiling. “It might bring the boy out of himself. And if it doesn't, it certainly won't do Jamie any harm! Besides, the Demon of the North goes home tomorrow. We'll all have peace and quiet after that!”

  “Won't we just!” said the nurse with a grin.

  It was after teatime when Thomas was finally put to bed in a pair of hospital pajamas. The curtain was drawn round his bed. The nurse folded his clothes and put them into his locker. Nothing was to be done that might make the boy feel more insecure.