The Year's Best Science Fiction 5

by Judith Merril

  He nodded in the chair and finally slept, sitting upright, with his chin resting on his chest and his crossed arms wrapped around himself as if to keep him warm.

  When he woke, in the dark before the dawn, with the lamp flickering on the table and the fire in the stove burned low, the alien had died.

  There was no doubt of death. The thing was cold and rigid and the husk that was its body was rough and drying out - as a corn stalk in the field dries out, whipping in the wind once the growing had been ended.

  Mose pulled the blanket up to cover it, and although this was early to do the chores, he went out by lantern light and got them done.

  After breakfast, he heated water and washed his face and shaved, and it was the first time in years he’d shaved any day but Sunday. Then he put on his one good suit and slicked down his hair and got the old jalopy out of the machine shed and drove into town.

  He hunted up Eb Dennison, the town clerk, who also was the secretary of the cemetery association.

  ‘Eb,’ he said, ‘I want to buy a lot.’

  ‘But you’ve got a lot,’ protested Eb.

  ‘That plot,’ said Mose, ‘is a family plot. There’s just room for me and Molly.’

  ‘Well, then,’ asked Eb, ‘why another one? You have no other members of the family.’

  ‘I found someone in the woods,’ said Mose. ‘I took him home and he died last night. I plan to bury him.’

  ‘If you found a dead man in the woods,’ Eb warned him, ‘you better notify the coroner and sheriff,’

  ‘In time I may,’ said Mose, not intending to. ‘Now how about that plot?’

  Washing his hands of the affair entirely, Eb sold him the plot.

  Having bought his plot, Mose went to the undertaking establishment run by Albert Jones.

  ‘Al,’ he said, ‘there’s been a death out at the house. A stranger I found out in the woods. He doesn’t seem to have anyone and I aim to take care of it.’

  ‘You got a death certificate?’ asked Al, who subscribed to none of the niceties affected by most funeral parlor operators.

  ‘Well, no, I haven’t.’

  ‘Was there a doctor in attendance?’

  ‘Doc Benson came out last night.’

  ‘He should have made you out one. I’ll give him a ring.’

  He phoned Doctor Benson and talked with him a while and got red around the gills. He finally slammed down the phone and turned on Mose.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to pull off,’ he fumed, but Doc tells me this thing of yours isn’t even human. I don’t take care of dogs or cats or-’

  ‘This ain’t no dog or cat.’

  ‘I don’t care what it is. It’s got to be human for me to handle it. And don’t go trying to bury it in the cemetery, because it’s against the law.’

  Considerably discouraged, Mose left the undertaking parlor and trudged slowly up the hill toward the town’s one and only church.

  He found the minister in his study working on a sermon. Mose sat down in a chair and fumbled his battered hat around and around in his work-scarred hands.

  ‘Parson,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you the story from first to last,’ and he did. He added, ‘I don’t know what it is. I guess no one else does, either. But it’s dead and in need of decent burial and that’s the least that I can do. I can’t bury it m the cemetery, so I suppose I’ll have to find a place for it on the farm. I wonder if you could bring yourself to come out and say a word or two.’

  The minister gave the matter some deep consideration.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mose,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t believe I can. I am not sure at all the church would approve of it.’

  ‘This thing may not be human,’ said Old Mose, ‘but it is one of God’s critters.’

  The minister thought some more, and did some wondering out loud, but made up his mind finally that he couldn’t do it.

  So Mose went down the Street to where his car was waiting and drove home, thinking about what heels some humans are.

  Back at the farm again, he got a pick and shovel and went into the garden, and there, in one corner of it, he dug a grave. He went out to the machine shed to hunt up some boards to make the thing a casket, but it turned out that he had used the last of the lumber to patch up the hog pen.

  Mose went to the house and dug around in a chest in one of the back rooms which had not been used for years, hunting for a sheet to use as a winding shroud, since there would be no casket. He couldn’t find a sheet, but he did unearth an old white linen table cloth. He figured that would do, so he took it to the kitchen.

  He pulled back the blanket and looked at the critter lying there in death and a sort of lump came into his throat at the thought of it - how it had died so lonely and so far from home without a creature of its own to spend its final hours with. And naked, too, without a stitch of clothing and with no possession, with not a thing to leave behind as a remembrance of itself.

  He spread the table cloth out on the floor beside the bed and lifted the thing and laid it on the table cloth. As he laid it down, he saw the pocket in it - if it was a pocket - a sort of slitted flap in the center of what could be its chest. He ran his hand across the pocket area. There was a lump inside it. He crouched for a long moment beside the body, wondering what to do.

  Finally he reached his fingers into the flap and took out the thing that bulged. It was a ball, a little bigger than a tennis ball, made of cloudy glass - or, at least, it looked like glass. He squatted there, staring at it, then took it to the window for a better look.

  There was nothing strange at all about the ball. It was just a cloudy ball of glass and it had a rough, dead feel about it, just as the body had.

  He shook his head and took it back and put it where he’d found it and wrapped the body securely in the cloth. He carried it to the garden and put it in the grave. Standing solemnly at the head of the grave, he said a few short words and then shoveled in the dirt.

  He had meant to make a mound above the grave and he had intended to put up a cross, but at last he didn’t do either one of these. There would be snoopers. The word would get around and they’d be coming out and hunting for the spot where he had buried this thing he had found out in the woods. So there must be no mound to mark the place and no cross as well. Perhaps it was for the best, he told himself, for what could he have carved or written on the cross?

  By this time it was well past noon and he was getting hungry, but he didn’t stop to eat, because there were other things to do. He went out into the pasture and caught up Bess and hitched her to the stoneboat and went down into the woods.

  He hitched her to the birdcage that was wrapped around the tree and she pulled it loose as pretty as you please. Then he loaded it on the stoneboat and hauled it up the hill and stowed it in the back of the machine shed, in the far corner by the forge.

  After that, he hitched Bess to the garden plow and gave the garden a cultivating that it didn’t need so it would be fresh dirt all over and no one could locate where he’d dug the grave.

  He was just finishing the plowing when Sheriff Doyle drove up and got out of the car. The sheriff was a soft-spoken man, but he was no dawdler. He got right to the point.

  ‘I hear,’ he said, ‘you found something in the woods.’

  ‘That I did,’ said Mose.

  ‘I hear it died on you.’

  ‘Sheriff, you heard right.’

  ‘I’d like to see it, Mose.’

  ‘Can’t. I buried it. And I ain’t telling where.’

  ‘Mose,’ the sheriff said, ‘I don’t want to make you trouble, but you did an illegal thing. You can’t go finding people in the woods and just bury them when they up and die on you.’

  ‘You talk to Doc Benson?’

  The sheriff nodded. ‘He said it wasn’t any kind of thing he’d ever seen before. He said it wasn’t human.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Mose, ‘I guess that lets you out. If it wasn’t human, there could be no crime a
gainst a person. And if it wasn’t owned, there ain’t any crime against property. There’s been no one around to claim they owned the thing, is there?’

  The sheriff rubbed his chin. ‘No, there hasn’t. Maybe you’re right. Where did you study law?’

  ‘I never studied law. I never studied anything. I just use common sense.’

  ‘Doc said something about the folks up at the university might want a look at it.’

  ‘I tell you, Sheriff,’ said Mose. ‘This thing came here from somewhere and it died. I don’t know where it came from and I don’t know what it was and I don’t hanker none to know. To me it was just a living thing that needed help real bad. It was alive and it had its dignity and in death it commanded some respect. When the rest of you refused it decent burial, I did the best I could. And that is all there is to it.’

  ‘All right, Mose,’ the sheriff said, ‘if that’s how you want it.’

  He turned around and stalked back to the car. Mose stood beside old Bess hitched to her plow and watched him drive away. He drove fast and reckless as if he might be angry.

  Mose put the plow away and turned the horse back to the pasture and by now it was time to do chores again.

  He got the chores all finished and made himself some supper and after supper sat beside the stove, listening to the ticking of the clock, loud in the silent house, and the crackle of the fire.

  All night long the house was lonely.

  The next afternoon, as he was plowing corn, a reporter came and walked up the row with him and talked with him when he came to the end of the row. Mose didn’t like this reporter much. He was too flip and he asked some funny questions, so Mose clammed up and didn’t tell him much.

  A few days later, a man turned up from the university and showed him the story the reporter had gone back and written. The story made fun of Mose.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ the professor said. ‘These newspapermen arc unaccountable. I wouldn’t worry too much about anything they write.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Mose told him.

  The man from the university asked a lot of questions and made quite a point about how important it was that he should see the body.

  But Mose only shook his head. ‘It’s at peace,’ he said. ‘I aim to leave it that way.’

  The man went away disgusted, but still quite dignified.

  For several days there were people driving by and dropping in, the idly curious, and there were some neighbors Mose hadn’t seen for months. But he gave them all short shrift and in a little while they left him alone and he went on with his farming and the house stayed lonely.

  He thought again that maybe he should get a dog, but he thought of Towser and he couldn’t do it.

  One day, working in the garden, he found the plant that grew out of the grave. It was a funny-looking plant and his first impulse was to root it out.

  But he didn’t do it, for the plant intrigued him. It was a kind he’d never seen before and he decided he would let it grow, for a while at least, to see what kind it was. It was a bulky, fleshy plant, with heavy, dark-green, curling leaves, and it reminded him in some ways of the skunk cabbage that burgeoned in the woods come spring.

  There was another visitor, the queerest of the lot. He was a dark and intense man who said he was the president of a flying saucer club. He wanted to know if Mose had talked with the thing he’d found out in the woods and seemed terribly disappointed when Mose told him he hadn’t. He wanted to know if Mose had found a vehicle the creature might have traveled in and Mose lied to him about it. He was afraid, the wild way the man was acting, that he might demand to search the place, and if he had, he’d likely have found the birdcage hidden in the machine shed back in the corner by the forge. But the man got to lecturing Mose about withholding vital information.

  Finally Mose had taken all he could of it, so he stepped into the house and picked up the shotgun from behind the door. The president of the flying saucer club said good-by rather hastily and got out of there.

  Farm life went on as usual, with the corn laid by and the haying started and out in the garden the strange plant kept on growing and now was taking shape. Old Mose couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the sort of shape it took and he spent long evening hours just standing in the garden, watching it and wondering if his loneliness were playing tricks on him.

  The morning came when he found the plant standing at the door and waiting for him. He should have been surprised, of course, but he really wasn’t, for he had lived with it, watching it of eventide, and although he had not dared admit it even to himself, he had known what it was.

  For here was the creature he’d found in the woods, no longer sick and keening, no longer close to death, but full of life and youth.

  It was not the same entirely, though. He stood and looked at it and could see the differences - the little differences that might have been those between youth and age, or between a father and a son, or again the differences expressed in an evolutionary pattern.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Mose, not feeling strange at all to be talking to the thing. ‘It’s good to have you back.’

  The thing standing in the yard did not answer him. But that was not important; he had not expected that it would. The one important point was that he had something he could talk to.

  ‘I’m going out to do the chores,’ said Mose. ‘You want to tag along?’

  It tagged along with him and it watched him as he did the chores and he talked to it, which was a vast improvement over talking to himself.

  At breakfast, he laid an extra plate for it and pulled up an extra chair, but it turned out the critter was not equipped to use a chair, for it wasn’t hinged to sit.

  Nor did it eat. That bothered Mose at first, for he was hospitable, but he told himself that a big, strong, strapping youngster like this one knew enough to take care of itself, and he probably didn’t need to worry too much about how it got along.

  After breakfast, he went out to the garden, with the critter accompanying him, and sure enough, the plant was gone. There was a collapsed husk lying on the ground, the outer covering that had been the cradle of the creature at his side.

  Then he went to the machine shed and the creature saw the birdcage and rushed over to it and looked it over minutely. Then it turned around to Mose and made a sort of pleading gesture.

  Mose went over to it and laid his hands on one of the twisted bars and the critter stood beside him and laid its hands on, too, and they pulled together. It was no use. They could move the metal some, but not enough to pull it back in shape again.

  They stood and looked at one another, although looking may not be the word, for the critter had no eyes to look with. It made some funny motions with its hands, but Mose couldn’t understand. Then it lay down on the floor and showed him how the birdcage ribs were fastened to the base.

  It took a while for Mose to understand how the fastening worked and he never did know exactly why it did. There wasn’t actually, any reason that it should work that way.

  First you applied some pressure, just the right amount at the exact and correct angle, and the bar would move a little. Then you applied some more pressure, again the exact amount and at the proper angle, and the bar would move some more. You did this three times and the bar came loose, although there was, God knows, no reason why it should.

  Mose started a fire in the forge and shoveled in some coal and worked the bellows while the critter watched. But when he picked up the bar to put it in the fire, the critter got between him and the forge, and wouldn’t let him near. Mose realized then he couldn’t - or wasn’t supposed to - heat the bar to straighten it and he never questioned the entire rightness of it. For, he told himself, this thing must surely know the proper way to do it.

  So he took the bar over to the anvil and started hammering it back into shape again, cold, without the use of fire, while the critter tried to show him the shape that it should be. It took quite a while, but finally it was straightened out to the critte
r’s satisfaction.

  Mose figured they’d have themselves a time getting the bar back in place again, but it slipped on as slick as could be.

  Then they took off another bar and this one went faster, now that Mose had the hang of it.

  But it was hard and grueling labor. They worked all day and only straightened out five bars.

  It took four solid days to get the bars on the birdcage hammered into shape and all the time the hay was waiting to be cut.

  But it was all right with Mose. He had someone to talk to and the house had lost its loneliness.

  When they got the bars back in place, the critter slipped into the cage and starting fooling with a dingus on the roof of it that looked like a complicated basket. Mose, watching, figured that the basket was some sort of control.

  The critter was discouraged. It walked around the shed looking for something and seemed unable to find it. It came back to Mose and made its despairing, pleading gesture. Mose showed it iron and steel; he dug into a carton where he kept bolts and clamps and bushings and scraps of metal and other odds and ends, finding brass and copper and even some aluminium, but it wasn’t any of these.

  And Mose was glad - a bit ashamed for feeling glad, but glad all the same,

  For it had been clear to him that when the birdcage was all ready, the critter would be leaving him. It had been impossible for Mose to stand in the way of the repair of the cage, or to refuse to help. But now that it apparently couldn’t be, he found himself well pleased.

  Now the critter would have to stay with him and he’d have someone to talk to and the house would not be lonely.

  It would be welcome, he told himself, to have folks again. The critter was almost as good a companion as Towser.

  Next morning, while Mose was fixing breakfast, he reached up in the cupboard to get the box of oatmeal and his hand struck the cigar box and it came crashing to the floor. It fell over on its side and the lid came open and the dollars went free-wheeling all around the kitchen.