Sci Fiction Classics Volume 3

by Vol 3 (v1. 2) (epub)

  Smith glanced at Toynbee and sighed. "I keep forgetting how parochial the natives of a single-planet culture can be. You have been told that we are from another world, and yet to you we are just slightly unusual Earth people. I don't suppose it has occurred to you that other races could have a stronger instinct toward honesty, that deviousness and lies would come less easily to them than to humans?"

  "That's where we are most vulnerable," Toynbee put in. "I see now that I was too inexperienced to be up front."

  "All right, then—be honest with me," Connor said. "You are planning to keep me quiet, aren't you?"

  "As a matter of fact, we do have a little device …"

  "You don't need it," Connor said. He thought back carefully over all he had been told, then stood up and handed his revolver to Smith.

  The good life was all that he had expected it to be, and—as he drove south to Avalon—Connor could feel it getting better by the minute.

  His business sense had always been sharp, but whereas he had once reckoned a month's profits in thousands, he now thought in terms of six figures. Introductions, opportunities, and deals came thick and fast, and always it was the P-brand artifacts which magically paved the way. During important first contacts he had only to use his gold lighter to ignite a pipeful of P-brand tobacco—the incredible leaf which fulfilled all the promise of its "nose," or glance at his P-brand watch, or write with the pen which produced any color at the touch of a spectrum ring, and all doors were opened wide. The various beautiful trinkets were individually styled, but he quickly learned to recognize them when they were displayed by others, and to make the appropriate responses.

  Within a few weeks, although he was scarcely aware of it, his outlook on life had undergone a profound change. At first he was merely uneasy or suspicious when approached by people who failed to show the talisman. Then he became hostile, preferring to associate only with those who could prove they were safe.

  Satisfying though his new life was, Connor had decided it would not be perfect until Angela and he were reunited. It was through her that he had achieved awareness, and only through her would he achieve completeness. He would have made the journey to Avalon much sooner but for the fact that there had been certain initial difficulties with Smith and Toynbee. Handing over the revolver had been a dangerous gambit which had almost resulted in his being bundled through their matter transmitter to an unknown fate on another world. Luckily, however, it had also convinced them that he had something important to say.

  He had talked quickly and well that evening in the basement of the undistinguished little store. Smith, who was the senior of the pair, had been hard to convince; but his interest had quickened as Connor enumerated all the weaknesses in the organization's procurement methods. And it had grown feverish when he heard how Connor's worldly knowhow would eliminate much of the wasteful financial competition of auctions, would streamline the system of purchasing through rich clients, would institute foolproof controls and effective new techniques for diverting art treasures into the organization's hands. It had been the best improvisation of his life, sketchy in places because of his unfamiliarity with the art world, but filled with an inspired professionalism which carried his audience along with it.

  Early results had been so good that Smith had become possessive, voicing objections to Connor's profitable side dealings. Connor smoothed things over by going on to a seven-day work schedule in which he also worked most evenings. This had made it difficult to find the time to visit Angela, but finally his need to see her had become so great that he had pushed everything else aside and made the time …

  The guard at the gate lodge was the same man as before, but he gave no sign of remembering his earlier brush with Connor. He waved the car on through with a minimum of delay, and a few minutes later Connor was walking up the broad front steps of the house. The place looked much less awesome to Connor, but while ringing for admission he decided that he and Angela would probably keep it, for sentimental reasons as much as anything else. The butler who answered the door was a new man, who looked rather like a retired seaman, and there was a certain lack of smoothness in his manner as he showed Connor to the large room where Angela was waiting. She was standing at the fireplace with her back to the door, just as he had last seen her.

  "Angie," he said, "it's good to see you again."

  She turned and ran to him. "I've missed you so much, Phil."

  As they clung together in the center of the green-and-silver room, Connor experienced a moment of exquisite happiness. He buried his face in her hair and began whispering the things he had been unable to say for what seemed a long, long time. Angela answered him feverishly all the while he spoke, responding to the emotion rather than the words.

  It was during the first kiss that he became aware of a disturbing fact. She was wearing expensive yet ordinary perfume—not one of the P-brand distillations of magic to which he had become accustomed on the golden creatures he had dated casually during the past few weeks. Still holding Angela close to him, he glanced around the big room. A leaden coldness began to spread through his body. Everything in the room was, like her perfume, excellent—but not Perfect.

  "Angela," he said quietly, "why did you ask me to come here?"

  "What kind of a question is that, darling?"

  "It's a perfectly normal question." Connor disengaged from her and stepped back suspiciously. "I merely asked what your motives were."

  "Motives!" Angela stared at him, color fleeing from her cheeks. Then her gaze darted to his wristwatch. "My God, Philip, you're in! You made it, just like you said you would."

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "Don't try that with me—remember, I was the one who told it all to you."

  "You should have learned not to talk by this time."

  "I know I should, but I didn't." Angela advanced on him. "I'm out now. I'm on the outside."

  "It isn't all that bad, is it? Where's Bobby Janke and the rest of his crowd?"

  "None of them come near me now. And you know why."

  "At least you're not broke." Small solace.

  She shook her head. "I've got plenty of money, but what good is it when I can't buy the things I want? I'm shut out, and it's all because I couldn't keep myself from blabbing to you, and because I didn't report the way you were getting on to them. But you didn't mind informing on me, did you?"

  Connor opened his mouth to protest his innocence, then realized it would make no difference. "It's been nice seeing you again, Angela," he said. "I'm sorry I can't stay longer, but things are stacking up on me back at the office. You know how it is."

  "I know exactly how it is. Go on, Philip—get out of here."

  Connor crossed to the door, but hesitated as Angela made a faint sound.

  She said, "Stay with me, Phil. Please stay."

  He stood with his back to her, experiencing a pain which slowly faded. Then he walked out.

  Late that afternoon, Connor was sitting in his new office when his secretary put through a call. It was Smith, anxious to discuss the acquisition of a collection of antique silver.

  "I called you earlier, but your girl told me you were out," he said with a hint of reproach.

  "It's true," Connor assured him. "I was out of town—Angela Lomond asked me down to her place."

  "Oh?"

  "You didn't tell me she was no longer a client."

  "You should have known without being told." Smith was silent for a few seconds. "Is she going to try making trouble?"

  "No."

  "What did she want?"

  Connor leaned back in his chair and gazed out through the window, toward the Atlantic. "Who knows? I didn't stay long enough to find out."

  "Very wise," Smith said complacently.

  When the call had ended, Connor brewed some P-brand coffee, using the supply he kept locked in the drinks cabinet. The Perfection of it soothed from his mind the last lingering traces of remorse.

  How on Earth, he wondered id
ly, do they manage to make it taste exactly the way it smells?

  The End

  © 1974 by UPD Publishing Corp. Originally published in Galaxy July 1974.

  David's Daddy

  Rosel George Brown

  Miss Fremen was a good teacher. Had been for twenty years. She taught fourth grade the year I started teaching. I had fifth grade. I came to her with my problems, which were many and unbearable, at least it seemed so to me.

  "What do you do," I asked her despairingly as we stood monitoring the dusty playground during recess, "about going to the bathroom? I mean, one starts and then they all want to go. I know they all don't have to go, but they say they do. And if I don't let anybody go, there's liable to be an accident. And they're all taking advantage of me. I know they are."

  Miss Fremen's wrinkles gathered into a smile for me. The faintly suspicious smile, the not altogether committal smile teachers cultivate.

  "The very first day of class I tell them," she said, drawing herself up to a state of forthright dignity to illustrate how she told them, "little people, I can tell when you really have to go to the bathroom and when you don't. So I warn you, I just warn you not to ask to be excused unless it's urgent." Miss Fremen stood there frozen for a moment, clad in what had every appearance of an armored corset under her thin summer voile, her face square and omniscient, her hair kinky, spatulate, and slightly burned from a recent permanent.

  "How marvelous!" I sighed. "But Miss Fremen, I wouldn't dare try it. I've got a weak face." I didn't say it, but I thought that the corset had a lot to do with it, too. And if I tried to wear a corset, I'd have to hold it on with scotch tape.

  "Oh, now, it's not weak," Miss Fremen said sympathetically, the words scratching grandly over the ancient grate in her throat. You have to talk loud on the playground to be heard at all. "You just haven't learned to frown right. When I was in Normal School we learned how to teach before we graduated. Nowadays they don't teach you anything practical. It's not your fault, Lillian," she went on, grating more gently, "they closed up all the Normal Schools. But you'll learn. Don't worry."

  The bell rang, as it always does in the middle of conversations, and we went on up. Paralyzed with admiration, I watched her fourth grade marching silently into the room next to mine. The cadence was perfect. No face was sullen. No face rebellious. Miss Fremen's wrinkles dropped into a wink for me, and she closed her door silently. My door creaked noisily as I herded in two thirteen-year-old stragglers, both a head taller than me. Then, practicing my Frown, I went about the room collecting the post-recess tribute of marbles, gum, rubber bands, paper clips, and an occasional frog. Miss Fremen, I thought enviously, had probably not had a problem in fifteen years. No one would think of chewing gum or clinking marbles or shooting paper clips in her class.

  But I was wrong about the problem. I noticed her going about with a worried frown after a few weeks. No one else noticed it, because a worried frown differs only in very subtle ways from a natural, authoritarian frown. But I had made a special study of Miss Fremen, particularly of her facial expressions, and I knew something was wrong.

  "Lillian," she told me one day when it was our turn to supervise the playground again. "I've been a teacher a long, long time." She was breathing in the dust like the purest mountain air, and her eyes darted around, from plain habit, so that no corner escaped her. She frowned. "I don't like that Sansoni boy talking to those third graders," she said. She collared a passing pupil. "Go tell Billy Sansoni I said to play by the big boys." She turned to me. "Billy's going to be just like his daddy." She shook her head fatalistically. "Bad blood in the family."

  "What were you going to say before?" I asked. I was anxious to know what sort of problem could possibly beset a teacher like Miss Fremen. It had to be a school problem. Miss Fremen didn't have any other life.

  "Oh," she said, the worried frown replacing the authoritarian frown, "a very funny thing. Peculiar. In all the years I've been teaching, there's never been anything like it. I really ought to tell Mr. Buras. But I don't know. He's a fine principal and a fine disciplinarian, even if he's not allowed to spank any more. But he's not a man to understand anything that's, you know, peculiar."

  "Yes?" My curiosity was becoming more vulgar all the time, but I tried to keep it out of my voice.

  "You remember that conversation we had back when the term opened? About how to keep the children from making a game out of asking to be excused?"

  "I remember it vividly," I answered.

  "Well, there's one little boy in my room. Jerome. He's from one of those migratory families. Oil fields or fruit picking. I'm not sure which. This Jerome. I can tell when he has to go to the bathroom."

  "Well," I said, feeling sort of let down, "that's not very surprising. After all, when you've been around children for so long, little things like their facial expression and their tone of voice …"

  "Um!" Miss Fremen said emphatically. "No. You don't understand. You see … Get off those bars, Emanuel. Those are for the swings. You'll kill yourself, and I'll get blamed." Emanuel slid down swiftly.

  "I know it before he says anything," Miss Fremen went on. "He'll be just sitting there, bent over his workbook. One day I told him, 'All right, Jerome, you may be excused.' And then the children called it to my attention that he hadn't asked to be excused."

  "But he went?"

  "Oh, yes. He had to."

  "Maybe your imagination," I said, coughing from the dusty air. "After all, they always welcome the chance to get out of the room."

  "I've been teaching for twenty years," Miss Fremen said indignantly. "I don't have any imagination."

  I didn't know whether to grin or not, so I didn't.

  "And it isn't only that. You know, they changed the workbooks last year, and there are a few things that have different answers now than they did when I was a girl, and several times Jerome has given my answers, and how would he know …"

  At that moment the bell rang, and I didn't think much more about it, being busy keeping my class in line and being annoyed with Jerry Dufossat, who was leering at me with gum in his mouth.

  It was that afternoon we had the bomb scare. It is also one of the few times in my life I've been left absolutely alone with a decision, and done the unobvious thing, because it was such a terrible chance to take.

  You know, teachers do a lot of things besides teach. And we have to worry about a lot of things besides whether Johnny can read.

  One of the things we have to worry about is the children's safety. And for that, one of the last things in the world we want to see is a strange man hanging around the school yard.

  Well, I saw one, that lunch hour, but he just walked around the block and watched the children and didn't try to talk to them or come into the school yard, so I just kept an eye on him. He was a slouched, dull-eyed man, and he looked so much like a degenerate character I decided he must be an actor practicing.

  The second time he came around the block, I went over and asked if he were the father of one of the children in the school yard.

  "Yeah," he said, pointing indeterminately, and slouched on.

  He smelled like liquor. But sometimes it's cough syrup and he did have a cough. A hack, now and then, like a comment on whatever dreary thoughts such a man must have.

  The more I thought about it, the more I thought I'd better call him back and tell him to take his postprandial strolls somewhere else, because teachers have to be very nervy, but just then the bell rang—and you can't imagine how many problems are solved, or never get solved, because bells ring.

  Well, I was thinking I'd better send a little note to Mr. Buras, but first I had to collect the impedimenta the kids had left on the playground—the latest thing was pornographic telescopes—and then we had arithmetic, which is always a strain on me because I've never really adjusted to the fact that ¼ + ¼ = ½.

  Anyway, by two o'clock I was just getting around to the note and had five fraction problems on the board for the children to do�
�when the door opened and in he walked.

  I didn't like the way he walked.

  Nor the way he looked.

  Cough medicine, to my knowledge, does not produce this effect.

  "He's drunk," someone whispered.

  "Nah, crazy," someone else whispered, and I gave them my Look, which, after several months, was really getting rather good.

  It's too bad fifth-grade children know what drunkenness is. But they do, you know. You have to resign yourself to all sorts of things about children.

  I gave the man my Look, too, and he appeared very ill at ease, because sometimes even grown people feel overawed when they walk into a school. Especially the kind of grown people who used to get called to the principal's office all the time.

  "I come," he began, and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. "Come for my son."

  I looked around the room. There was David Mines, a shy child strung too tall for his weight, sitting immobile. Only tears moved in his eyes. That would be the one.

  "School is not out until three o'clock," I said. "Unless there is some unusual reason, I cannot let David go." Normally, of course, I wouldn't even question a parent coming for a child early. But not with that expression on David's face.

  "Got a reason," Mr. Mines said. "My boy. David!" he called to the boy. But he was unsure of himself. He was a man used to being pushed around. It was obviously hard for him to stand on his own two feet.

  Literally and figuratively.

  "Sit down, David!" I said peremptorily. A thought was coming to me with cold horror. And it was such a bad thought I tried to hide from it. But I could not.

  "Sit down, please, Mr. Mines," I continued, in the same tone I used with David. "In the last desk on the row next to the windows." Because I recalled the recent case of the man who set off a bomb in a school yard. And although everybody did what they could and did what was expected and the school authorities were not to be blamed—well, perhaps it might be better in such a case not to do what was to be expected.