Sci Fiction Classics Volume 3

by Vol 3 (v1. 2) (epub)

  Like … like what?

  Of course, I had no real reason to think Mr. Mines had set a bomb anywhere. Maybe he'd just come to take David for a dental appointment and, what with the cough medicine and my authoritative attitude, he was too confused to say so.

  On the other hand, I could feel there was something odd about the whole thing.

  The proper thing to do was send the man to Mr. Buras.

  In which case Mr. Buras would see only two choices. Put the man out, by force if necessary, if he seemed dangerously drunk, or take David out of school and make him go with his daddy. And why not, except for my intuition?

  Mr. Mines sat there, overflowing the little desk, his feet shifty, some internal discomfort making a line between his brows.

  "Please wait a few moments, Mr. Mines. We have our spelling lesson now, and it's very important that David should not miss it. Children, get out your spellers."

  We had had our spelling lesson, of course, at eleven o'clock in the morning.

  Not a child betrayed me. The room was silent as the grave.

  "Page thirty-four," I said. And the monotonous chant began. "Desert, D-E-S-E-R-T." What was I going to do? What was Mr. Mines thinking, sitting there? If only I could read his … Jerome!

  SEND ME JEROME, I wrote on a slip of paper.

  "Who's the messenger for today?" I asked, as casually as possible, between Government and Guide.

  Joyce stood up, her lightboned face a little pink with excitement, but shoulders square and fully up to whatever responsibility I was going to put on her.

  Mr. Mines was looking suspiciously at the note.

  "It's for Miss Fremen in the fourth grade," I told Joyce, loud enough for all to hear. "Tell her it's for the book lists."

  Miss Fremen might well wonder what Jerome had to do with the book lists. But Miss Fremen was not one to waste time satisfying idle curiosity on a busy school day.

  "L-A-U-G-H, laugh!"

  Mr. Mines didn't have anything with him that looked like a bomb. But it would have been easy enough for him to sneak a suitcase in when classes were going on after lunch and hide it somewhere. In a lavatory or a broom closet.

  I could just let him take David out and have the school searched. But suppose it was where no one could find it?

  Or I could ask Mr. Buras to clear the school. On what grounds? That David's daddy looked like a bum? In this neighborhood, a good third of the daddies looked like bums. Hell, they are bums. Mr. Buras couldn't clear the school every time one of them came around—not that this kind of daddies make a habit of coming around.

  Mr. Mines was watching the clock, his face silvery with perspiration where the sun caught it. Every time the clock hand jumped another minute, Mr. Mines passed his hand over his forehead.

  "Spelling lesson's over," he said, when we got to "yule." He stood up uncertainly. "C'mon, David."

  "David may not be excused yet," I said firmly. "We have to make a sentence with each of the words."

  Mr. Mines stood there, awkward, by the little desk. "Then I'll have to leave without him."

  Why not?

  The room was so quiet you would have thought all the children had stopped breathing at once.

  "Thunk!" went the minute hand of the clock.

  "You may not be excused," I snapped, sure this would not work, wondering where I got that kind of nerve.

  Mr. Mines sat back down, his eyes dull. "Yes, ma'am," he said. Then he looked at the clock and stood up again. "How long?" he asked, and he wiped at the edge of his mouth.

  "Half an hour," I said. I gripped the end of a ruler tightly in my right hand and stood in front of the class, tapping the ruler into the palm of my left hand. "Delia," I said, "make a sentence with 'automatic' showing you know what the word means."

  "Thunk!" went the minute hand of the clock as Delia stood up and the class waited for her somewhat ponderous mind to get into action.

  Where was Jerome?

  "Half an hour's too long," Mr. Mines said.

  "Automatic," said Delia slowly. "We have an automatic defroster on our refrigerator."

  "Um," I said. "You used the word right, but can someone else give us a sentence to show what the word means?"

  Several hands went up.

  Mr. Mines was edging across the back of the room.

  Where was Jerome?

  "Just a moment," I said, slapping the ruler hard against my palm.

  "Have to get out of here," he said. But he was edging slowly, moving his feet carefully, as though he thought this was making him invisible.

  "Please stay where you are a moment," I said. "Emily, let us hear your sentence."

  "An automatic dishwasher washes the dishes by itself without you having to do anything," said Emily with her usual prim correctness. Emily always wore starched plaid dresses with little white collars, and I couldn't help wondering if this were not what made her right all the time.

  "Very good," I said. "The 'auto' part of the word means 'self.' Like an automobile is something that runs by itself instead of having to be pulled by horses." I hunted around in my distracted mind for other "auto" words suitable for the fifth grade.

  "Thunk!" went the clock.

  The door clattered, creaked, and opened, and in came Joyce leading Jerome. Joyce carefully closed the door behind her and led Jerome to where I was standing in front of the blackboard.

  What now?

  Gerald had his hand up, swelling out of his desk with eagerness. Poor Gerald so seldom knew anything at all that whenever his hand was one of the raised ones, I called on him. "Yes, Gerald?"

  "An autocrat," he said, triumphantly remembering from the morning spelling lesson, "is a man who is king all by himself instead of having a president and senators."

  Jerome just stood there. Wondering, no doubt, what forgotten misdemeanor on the playground I might want to scold him about.

  I wondered what it was I had expected him to do about Mr. Mines.

  "Jerome," I said, taking him by the shoulders and turning him to face the back of the room, "this is David's daddy, Mr. Mines."

  Puzzled, Jerome looked.

  Mr. Mines was at the door, his hand on the knob, his face pale and frightened.

  "Thunk!" went the clock.

  Suddenly I could feel Jerome's little body grow taut under my hands, and he looked around at me with bottomless eyes.

  "It's going to blow up," he said, "when the hands are like that." And he made two-thirty with his arms.

  I swallowed and looked around at the clock.

  "Thunk!"

  Two twenty-five.

  "Bang!" went the door. It was Mr. Mines, gone.

  And Jerome and I were alone with it. We were the only ones who really knew.

  "Monitor!" I said, and Gerald marched up and came to the front of the class.

  "Messenger!" I said, and Delia marched up. "Get Mr. Buras immediately."

  I brought Jerome outside the room and closed the door behind me. It was too late to try to catch Mr. Mines. It was too late for almost anything. It was all up to Jerome, now.

  Through the glass-topped door I could see David with his head down on his desk, quietly sobbing. He didn't know about the bomb. But he knew about his daddy. And now everyone else did, too.

  "Thunk!" went the clock in the hall.

  "Where is it, Jerome?"

  "A dark place," he said. "A little place."

  I ran down the hall to the broom closet.

  Mr. Buras came out of his office with Delia.

  "Go back into the room, Delia," I said. "Run."

  She ran.

  "There's a bomb in the school," I said. "I'm finding it now. We have four minutes."

  "I'll fill a washtub with water," he said, "while I get the kids out and call the police."

  There was no time to find out how I knew or if I was crazy.

  He looked into the seventh-grade room and called out three of the big boys.

  He rang the bell for fire drill. But there woul
dn't be time. Time. I hoped my class would know enough to follow Miss Fremen's and get out safely without me.

  Jerome and I ran to the little room where old books and the movie projector are kept. He shook his head.

  "Which way?" I asked.

  He didn't know. Only, he would know the room if he saw it.

  I waved my class toward Miss Fremen's room as they came filing out. One look and she took them over.

  Small, dark room. Jerome and I ran down the stairs to the boys' lavatory. He shook his head.

  Girls' lavatory.

  No.

  Dear God!

  We rushed in and out of cloak rooms.

  No.

  No.

  No.

  "Jerome," I said. "You've got to. What else besides small, dark room?"

  "Scared. Very scared."

  "Of course. What else?"

  "No. Scared of a whipping. Scared of God."

  "Scared of —" I dragged Jerome into Mr. Buras's office. "Surely not here? And it isn't small and dark."

  "Almost," said Jerome. "This is how it feels, but this isn't where it is."

  I looked around the office. So bare and clean. No big, empty boxes with small, dark places in them.

  "The john!" I cried, for there is a little men's room attached to the principal's office. I yanked open the door.

  "Yes!" said Jerome. "Oh, quickly!"

  Yes, but where? Such a bare, clean little room. He must have slipped in during lunch hour, probably even before I saw him hanging around the playground.

  Where? Just walls, the wash basin—the radiator! It was too warm a day for the heat to be on, and perhaps there was room behind—there it was!

  "Run, Jerome," I cried, and I edged the thing out carefully. It was a briefcase affair, with one broken handle. A sad, forgotten briefcase.

  But Jerome didn't run. He hung on to the back of my skirt and followed me into the teachers' washroom, where I could hear the washtub filling up.

  I threw the briefcase into the washtub and splashed water all over Jerome and me, and I pulled him out of the room and closed the door behind me and sat down in the middle of the hall and had hysterics.

  Mr. Buras was there, and it was a while before I realized he had two aspirin tablets and a glass of water for me.

  "Thank you," I said. "Oh, dear God."

  "Come in my office and sit down," Mr. Buras said. "The police will be here any minute. Maybe they can catch him. If you can describe him."

  I stood up as best I could, ashamed of having broken down in front of Jerome. Children are terribly frightened when grown people lose control.

  We walked through the hollow school, so strange with all the children outside. I looked down at Jerome. Those eyes! I thought of the things he must know, with that reaching mind of his. He knew. He knew the most frightful thing there is to know in the whole world. That there is nobody, nobody at all who is sure about anything. Children should not have to know this thing.

  "Can you describe him? Do you know who it was?"

  I paused, passing the door of my room, for something caught my eye through the glass.

  It was David, his head still in his arms, all alone, waiting for the fire to come. So many things were worse than death.

  "It was —" Why did I have to be the one to tell? Why was this responsibility mine?

  I looked at Jerome. His, too. So many responsibilities would be his.

  "It was David's father," I said, and I went in to David.

  Maybe there would be some assurance I could give David.

  But not Jerome.

  For he would know assurance was not mine to give.

  Nor anyone else's.

  The End

  © by Ziff-Davis Publishing. © 1988 by the Estate of Rosel George Brown. Originally appeared in Amazing Stories, June 1960.

  What Now, Little Man?

  Mark Clifton

  The mystery of what made the goonie tick tormented me for twenty years.

  Why, when that first party of big game hunters came to Libo, why didn't the goonies run away and hide, or fight back? Why did they instantly, immediately, almost seem to say, "You want us to die, Man? For you we will do it gladly!" Didn't they have any sense of survival at all? How could a species survive if it lacked that sense?

  "Even when one of the hunters, furious at being denied the thrill of the chase, turned a machine gun on the drove of them," I said to Paul Tyler, "they just stood there and let him mow them down."

  Paul started to say something in quick protest, then simply looked sick.

  "Oh, yes," I assured him. "One of them did just that. There was a hassle over it. Somebody reminded him that the machine gun was designed just to kill human beings, that it wasn't sporting to turn it on game. The hassle sort of took the edge off their fun, so they piled into their space yacht and took off for some other place where they could count on a chase before the kill."

  I felt his sharp stare, but I pretended to be engrossed in measuring the height of Libo's second sun above the mountain range in the west. Down below us, from where we sat and smoked on Sentinel Rock, down in my valley and along the sides of the river, we could see the goonie herds gathering under their groves of pal trees before night fell.

  Paul didn't take issue, or feed me that line about harvesting the game like crops, or this time even kid me about my contempt for Earthers. He was beginning to realize that all the old-timer Liboans felt as I did, and that there was reasonable justification for doing so. In fact, Paul was fast becoming Liboan himself. I probably wouldn't have told him the yarn about that first hunting party if I hadn't sensed it, seen the way he handled his own goonies, the affection he felt for them.

  "Why were our animals ever called goonies, Jim?" he asked. "They're … Well, you know the goonie."

  I smiled to myself at his use of the possessive pronoun, but I didn't comment on it.

  "That, too," I said, and knocked the dottle out of my pipe. "That came out of the first hunting party." I stood up and stretched to get a kink out of my left leg, and looked back toward the house to see if my wife had sent a goonie to call us in to dinner. It was a little early, but I stood a moment to watch Paul's team of goonies up in the yard, still folding their harness beside his rickshaw. I'd sold them to him, as yearlings, a couple years before, as soon as their second pelt showed they'd be a matched pair. Now they were mature young males, and as handsome a team as could be found anywhere on Libo.

  I shook my head and marveled, oh, for maybe the thousandth time, at the impossibility of communicating the goonie to anyone who hadn't seen them. The ancient Greek sculptors didn't mind combining human and animal form, and somebody once said the goonie began where those sculptors left off. No human muscle cultist ever managed quite the perfect symmetry natural to the goonie—grace without calculation, beauty without artifice. Their pelts varied in color from the silver blond of this pair to a coal black, and their huge eyes from the palest topaz to an emerald green, and from emerald green to deep-hued amethyst. The tightly curled mane spread down the nape and flared out over the shoulders like a cape to blend with the short, fine pelt covering the body. Their faces were like Greek sculpture, too, yet not human. No, not human. Not even humanoid, because—well, because, that was a comparison never made on Libo. That comparison was one thing we couldn't tolerate. Definitely, then, neither human nor humanoid.

  I turned from watching the team which, by now, had finished folding their harness into neat little piles and had stretched out on the ground to rest beside the rickshaw. I sat back down and packed my pipe again, with a Libo weed we called tobacco.

  "Why do we call them goonies?" I repeated Paul's question. "There's a big bird on Earth. Inhabits some of the South Sea islands, millions of them crowd together to nest. Most stupid creature on Earth, seems like, the way they behave on their nesting grounds. A man can hardly walk among them; they don't seem to know enough to move out of the way, and don't try to protect themselves or their nests. Some reason
I don't know, it's called the Goonie Bird. Guess the way these animals on Libo behaved when that hunting party came and shot them down, didn't run away, hide, or fight, reminded somebody of that bird. The name stuck."

  Paul didn't say anything for a while. Then he surprised me.

  "It's called the Goonie Bird when it's on the ground," he said slowly. "But in the air it's the most magnificent flying creature known to man. In the air, it's called the albatross."

  I felt a chill. I knew the legend, of course, the old-time sailor superstition. Kill an albatross and bad luck will haunt you, dog you all the rest of your days. But either Paul didn't know The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or was too tactful a young man to make it plainer. I supplied the Libo colony with its fresh meat. The only edible animal on the planet was the goonie.

  Carson's Hill comes into the yarn I have to tell—in a way is responsible. Sooner or later almost every young tenderfoot finds it, and in his mind it is linked with anguish, bitterness, emotional violence, suppressed fury.

  It is a knoll, the highest point in the low range of hills that separates my valley from the smaller cup which shelters Libo City. Hal Carson, a buddy of mine in the charter colony, discovered it. Flat on top, it is a kind of granite table surrounded by giant trees, which make of it a natural amphitheater, almost like a cathedral in feeling. A young man can climb up there and be alone to have it out with his soul.

  At one time or another, most do. "Go out to the stars, young man, and grow up with the universe!" the posters say all over Earth. It has its appeal for the strongest, the brightest, the best. Only the dull-eyed breeders are content to stay at home.

  In the Company recruiting offices they didn't take just anybody, no matter what his attitude was—no, indeed. Anybody, for example, who started asking questions about how and when he might get back home—with the fortune he would make—was coldly told that if he was already worrying about getting back, he shouldn't be going.

  Somehow, the young man was never quite sure how, it became a challenge to his bravery, his daring, his resourcefulness. It was a bait which a young fellow, anxious to prove his masculinity, the most important issue of his life, couldn't resist. The burden of proof shifted from the Company to the applicant, so that where he had started out cautiously inquiring to see if this offer might suit him, he wound up anxiously trying to prove he was the one they wanted.