Space Race

by Sylvia Waugh

As he gazed, he began remembering where the story began, six long years before….

  We sat together in the darkness, awaiting the fresh energy that would come when the orbit of Ormingat was left behind. Tonitheen held my hand tightly, fearful and not really understanding. He was afraid of the dark, especially the enclosed dark in this new, unknown space.

  “We'll get used to it,” I said. “In a while we'll have more light. There are pictures to watch of Earth, words to learn, all sorts of things to do. But for now, all the spaceship's energy is concentrated on gathering speed.”

  Tonitheen shivered, though the ship was warm enough. I put my arm around him and held him tight. Already the texture of his clothes had changed and the feel of his body was subtly different. As was mine. We were both undergoing the most awesome metamorphosis. Each thing that would leave the ship with us was becoming an Earth thing, obeying the same formula that was turning us into Earth beings. Hard for me to grasp, impossible for my child.

  “We'll play,” I said. “That'll pass the time. We'll play at being Earth people. You will be Thomas Derwent and I shall be your father, Patrick Derwent. We live in a village called Belthorp, in the north of England. When the power lights the screen, I'll show you where it is and what it looks like.”

  * * *

  It was his father's turn to feel lost and lonely. For that moment hope drained away from Vateelin and he wondered if it would ever come right. There was still the business of being Patrick and somehow getting through another day. Argule, he prayed, Argule essoond midayl.

  He walked into the gateway and sat down with the statue of Livingstone behind him and the portrait panel of Kemp in front. They had a presence there, and Patrick, Patrick Vateelin felt more than ever an intrusive alien. And perhaps a guilty alien, visiting destruction on this beautiful city.

  “Bit parrrky, isn't it?” said a voice beside him. Patrick started and looked round to see that he had company. An elderly man, dressed in a thick tweed jacket and wearing a tartan cap, had sat down beside him.

  “Still,” he went on, “no worrrse than you can expect this time o' yearrr.”

  Patrick smiled at him bleakly.

  “Go home and tell her you're sorry,” said the man. “It's the best way. Shame to miss your Sunday dinner just for a bit of a tiff.”

  Patrick smiled again.

  “Maybe you're right,” he said, and got up to go.

  “I am rrright,” said the man. “Make no mistake about it!”

  With such an admonition, Patrick decided that it would be inadvisable to stay within range of the helpful stranger. He got up, saluted briskly, and walked across the road to the shops. Safety, he thought, in numbers. Better to be part of a crowd.

  So till the day was over, he walked around the shops, climbed the hill to the castle, ate lunch and high tea in different restaurants, and finally settled for the evening in a public bar to watch television.

  And all the time he was thinking furiously.

  The spaceship could be retrieved only at dead of night. The time between now and then was precious time inevitably wasted. Once inside the vessel Patrick would have six days—only six days to save his son and prepare to leave Earth. It was not, he told himself, impossible; but there he could not hope for an extension. At midnight on Saturday, he had been told at the start, the ship would detonate and scream off into space, with or without its passengers.

  When Patrick returned to the hotel, he went to the desk and told the clerk he would be leaving at three in the morning.

  “Will you be needing a taxi, sir?” said the clerk, a much more helpful young man than the night porter had been.

  Patrick was about to say no when it occurred to him that yes would be a more sensible answer.

  “Thank you,” he said. “A taxi for three A.M. would be fine.”

  It was Sunday evening before any mention was made in the Martin household of the boy with the very strange voice.

  Jamie's homecoming on the previous day had been as riotous and as noisy as everything else in Jamie's life.

  There were two quiet beings in the household: Mrs. Martin, who would have liked them all to be quiet but couldn't manage it; and the dog, Calypso, than which, her owner maintained, a more cunning beast never walked the earth!

  The drive home had been noisy enough: Six-year-old Carla and three-year-old Rodney sat jabbering in the back of the car with their mother. Jamie had the front seat next to his father. Determined to vie with the noises from behind him, Jamie reached into his bag and pulled out his musical keyboard. Once more the saints went marching in, putting up a good fight but not quite winning the battle of the decibels.

  Once home, things got worse, not better.

  Calypso had managed to invade the fridge and steal a pound of steak and a string of sausages.

  “Get out of here, you horrible cur,” yelled Mr. Martin when he saw the evidence strewn on the floor. “I'll skin you alive, I will.”

  The little white mongrel cringed and showed the whites of her eyes in melodramatic terror.

  “Don't, Dad, please don't,” said Carla at the top of her voice.

  “I should have put the hook on the fridge door,” said Mrs. Martin with a sigh. “It's not the dog's fault. She's only doing what's natural to her.”

  “And I am doing what comes naturally to me,” said her husband. “That hound has nicked my dinner and I want revenge!”

  He put on a look of extreme wickedness and now Rodney began to howl.

  It was all an act, of course. Calypso was Dad's own dog, his best friend. No way would he really have hurt her.

  Jamie stood beside the table, looking at them all, not feeling quite at home yet in a room with carpets: over the last three weeks antiseptic hospital floors had become the norm. Then the noise his family was making spurred him to action.

  He banged on the table and said loudly, “I've just had the worst 'pendix in the country, prob'ly in the world. I've just come home. And you're all ignoring me. I think I'll go back to the hospital!”

  The rest of them stopped in their tracks.

  Mrs. Martin bent down to her son and put her arm round him. His shoulders felt narrower somehow and his fair-skinned face was very pale. Mrs. Martin felt tears coming to her eyes as she thought of the operation that had gone so frighteningly wrong.

  “You're right, my love,” she said. “Absolutely right. This should be your day. We are all so glad to have you home safe and well.”

  She frowned at her husband and added, “And nobody cares about a few crummy sausages and a chunk of mad cow! There's a special coming-home cake in the pantry. The cupboard's not what you'd call bare. I am going to make us all a party!”

  So it was no wonder that no mention was made on that first day of the boy in the next bed with that voice.

  On Sunday evening Mrs. Martin at last had time to recall her encounter with the boy in the next bed to Jamie. The younger children were both in bed. Jamie was allowed to stay up later, to sit with his parents and watch television. It was a quiet, civilized time, not without conversation; the television was often just something chuntering on in the background.

  “I've never heard anything like that boy's voice,” said Mrs. Martin as she told the tale to her husband. “They said he'd had a shock—an electric shock, to my way of thinking! It was … well, you tell him, Jamie.”

  “I yem Jameth Marriteen int I comf rom Cass-elltónn!” yelled Jamie in a voice that was not spot on but as near an imitation as any human could hope to make.

  Calypso had been snoozing with her chin on the hearth. At Jamie's words she jumped up and looked round, silent but startled, then collapsed back again and curled herself up into a ball.

  “Jamie!” said Mrs. Martin. “Stop that dreadful noise.”

  Then she turned to her husband and said, “That's nearly what it was like, though. He sounded like the Thing from Outer Space! Jamie says he's lost his memory.”

  Mr. Martin rummaged down the side of his chair and brou
ght up a newspaper.

  “Sounds as if he might be the lad they were on about in yesterday's Journal.”

  He straightened out the newspaper. There on the bottom left-hand side of the front page was a short item with the headline “Little Boy Lost.”

  “‘Police are trying to trace the parents of a young boy who was severely traumatized after witnessing the crash on Walgate Hill yesterday lunchtime.”'

  “It seems,” said Mr. Martin, summarizing the account in his own words, “that the lad's lost his memory. No mention here of a strange voice, though. No photo either. Probably too early for them to know much.”

  “We'll hear more about it,” said his wife. “You'll see if we don't. I know you'll think it's fanciful, but he sounded to me like an alien, an undesirable one at that!”

  Jamie heard her condemnation and was silently indignant. Whatever his mother said, the boy in the hospital was good fun, and definitely a friend. Then as the words outer space and alien hovered in his consciousness, Jamie was visited by another idea, a true Jamesian inspiration.

  What if Sammy was an alien?

  What if the voice did belong to another planet?

  Organbat, or wherever it was, was not in Africa after all! It could easily be somewhere in outer space! And the boy could be stranded, stranded on the wrong planet, a prisoner of Earth! Jamie's flight of fancy ended with a decision to offer his new friend help.

  “I want to send a card to Sammy. I want to give him a present,” he said suddenly.

  “Sammy?” said his mother.

  “The boy in the hospital,” said Jamie, “the one who's lost his memory. That was what the nurses called him. He'll be having a rotten Christmas in there by himself.”

  “Why should you?” said his mother. “You hardly knew him for two minutes.”

  “I knew him Friday and Saturday,” said Jamie vehemently. “I knew him as long as I knew Cousin Josie and you always make me send her a Christmas card. I like him better than I like Cousin Josie. I don't care if I never see Cousin Josie again!”

  “All right, all right,” said his dad. “Simmer down. If you want to send the lad a card, you can. I'll pop it in the post myself tomorrow morning. How about that?”

  “I want to send him a card, and a letter, and a present,” said Jamie, looking absolutely stubborn.

  “You can't get a present at this time of night,” said his dad, which was exactly the wrong thing to say. By explaining that it would not be possible to buy a present there and then, Mr. Martin was conceding that, if only it had been possible, a present might have been bought.

  “He can have the model airplane I won at the Mariners' Christmas party. It's still in its wrapper.”

  “But you like it,” said his dad. “You were pleased as punch when you won it.”

  “Yes, I like it,” said Jamie aggressively. “I wouldn't give a friend a present I didn't like, would I?”

  With this sort of argument, and playing on his recent scary operation, Jamie got his father to agree to hand the parcel in at the hospital on his way to work next day. It would not be much out of his way, after all. Mr. Martin worked in the Customs House on the quayside.

  “Don't put our address on the note,” said Jamie's mother as he sat down at the desk to compose his letter. “We don't want him knowing where we live. You can feel sorry for him, but you don't know anything about him—that voice was far from normal and well you know it.”

  Jamie said nothing. He wrote his letter on a piece of notepaper from a sheaf his Granny Armstrong had given him “for fun.” He tucked it inside a Christmas card; then he made up a parcel with the airplane and the card sealed up inside.

  “You didn't put our address on it?” Mrs. Martin insisted as he handed over the package to his dad.

  “No, I didn't,” said Jamie. “You said I couldn't.”

  And she knew he hadn't. There was no need to check up on him. He was that sort of boy. They were that sort of family.

  “Waverley station?” said the taxi driver, confirming the order he'd been given.

  “That's right,” said Patrick. He put the holdall on the backseat beside him and fastened his seat belt. The journey was short, but at that hour of the night it made more sense to travel by car.

  The taxi turned right when it left the square and headed up the back streets, the driver muttering something about “these ruddy one-way streets,” though he knew well enough that taxis were not barred from Princes Street at that hour of the morning.

  “Didn't know there was a train from Waverley soon as this,” he said over his shoulder to his passenger.

  “Penzance train,” said Patrick, not caring now whether his glib lie would be detected at some later date. “Might not always run, but there's one on tonight, maybe to get people home for Christmas.”

  “Mmm,” said the driver. At that point they came to the road leading into the station. Patrick got out and paid the fare, then walked as if into the station itself. This was purely to convince the driver.

  After waiting awhile in the shadows, Patrick prepared for the next part of his journey. His document case was safe in the poacher's pocket. The trowel in the outer pocket was ready to hand. Only the holdall was an unnecessary encumbrance. He had needed it for the taxi and the hotel, but now it, and everything in it, was totally superfluous. Patrick guiltily tucked it under a bench seat, then hurried out into the street again.

  There, across the road, was the monument.

  Patrick walked toward it, watching carefully to left and right to make sure that no one was likely to see his next endeavors. He would definitely appear to be acting suspiciously!

  Fortunately, the whole of Edinburgh seemed to have gone to sleep. There really is, in any town, something one can call the dead of night. On Princes Street there was hardly a movement; the odd stray car passed by in loneliness, seeking no doubt a warm destination.

  Patrick crossed to the gate that led into the park. There he came to a setback he might have foreseen. The gate was locked. A gate almost at shoulder height and surmounted with wicked spikes.

  Patrick walked round the corner to the side gate. Being on a slope, it was a little less high, though still a considerable obstacle to anyone wishing to enter the area stealthily.

  Still, what had to be done had to be done. Patrick removed his coat and threw it over the gate so that it landed in a heap on the other side. Then he gripped the spikes and pulled himself up near the gate hinge, where there was just a fraction more room for a foothold. Carefully and slowly he got to the point where, crouching over the spikes, he managed to leap forward onto the coat. It was not a perfect landing. His left hand missed the coat altogether and was badly grazed; his knees felt the jolt even through the sheepskin.

  He got up gingerly, put on his coat, and hurried across to the beech tree, where he sat on the ground for a few minutes, his back against the tree trunk, recovering.

  Then, lying flat on the ground, he approached with all the stealth of a commando the patch of soil where the spaceship was buried. He must not be seen from the street. Fortunately, the place where he needed to dig was well overshadowed by the fence around the monument. Livingstone's statue was another source of protection, not perfect, but better than nothing.

  Once he had reached the spot, however, Patrick had no choice but to raise himself up into a near-sitting position in order to use the trowel. Leaning heavily on his left elbow, with his right hand he thrust the trowel's blade as deep as he could diagonally into the earth. Some soil moved. Patrick raked and scraped away at it.

  Then he was suddenly aware of light somewhere behind his shoulder. A car passing. Patrick sank to the ground and stayed still.

  Darkness.

  Try again.

  The trowel was sharp, but the soil was difficult. Patrick found he had to use both hands for the task. He dug with the trowel and scraped with his fingers, scratching crumbled soil aside like a dog digging for a bone. And all the time he felt exposed, sitting too high from the g
round.

  Gradually he got through to damper soil that was more workable. He flung handfuls to either side and used the trowel and both arms to make a wider tunnel into the earth. It was going well. He was getting there. His work took on a rhythm.

  Then—

  “Wha' ya a-doin' ower theerr?” called a voice from the pavement.

  Patrick froze.

  “Wha' ya doin, mister?”

  Looking toward the road, Patrick saw a little tramp in a bunched-up overcoat peering through the railings. In one hand he held a bottle that bumped with a clatter against the iron rails.

  Patrick took the measure of the man, then turned round and went on digging. Any second now he should touch the spaceship and would disappear. Once he was gone, no one would believe the word of a drunken tramp.

  “Can ya no' hear, mon?” yelled the tramp.

  Now, drunks can have very odd thoughts—and this particular drunk was suddenly visited by the memory of his old granny in wartime warning him against turning a lever in the wall of the air-raid shelter. “If ye di tha', ye'll hae the whole place doon atop of us.”

  The thought made him hysterical. He had an instant vision of the mighty monument scattering itself all over Princes Street and burying all around in its debris.

  “Ye'll hae to stobbit!” he yelled. “I'm tellin' ye, mister, ye'll hae to stobbit.”

  At that moment the tunnel Patrick was making began to cave in, as if whatever was inside could take no more of the noise. Patrick stopped digging. After a split second's thought, he ran to the gate that before had defeated him. Then, with superhuman strength born of desperation, he grabbed the gatepost, took a mammoth leap, and landed on his feet in front of the intruder. He looked down at him and again took his measure. This was another Canty, a distinctly unfortunate mortal, but probably more witless than Patrick's old friend.

  Patrick glared at him and said sternly, “I am an alien from outer space and I am digging in the soil over there to find my spaceship. It is buried just beside that fence. And I will thank you to let me work in peace.”

  The tramp gulped and looked up at him, saying anxiously, “No offense, sir. No harrrm done, I'm sure.”