Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time

by Judith Merril (ed. )

  There was a green, lovely forest, a lovely river, a purple mountain, high voices singing, and Rima, lovely and mysterious, lurking in the trees with colorful flights of butterflies, like animated bouquets, lingering in her long hair. The African veldtland was gone. The lions were gone. Only Rima was here now, singing a song so beautiful that it brought tears to your eyes.

  George Hadley looked in at the changed scene. “Go to bed,” he said to the children.

  They opened their mouths.

  “You heard me,” he said.

  They went off to the air closet, where a wind sucked them like brown leaves up the flue to their slumber rooms.

  George Hadley walked through the singing glade and picked up something that lay in the corner near where the lions had been. He walked slowly back to his wife.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “An old wallet of mine,” he said.

  He showed it to her. The smell of hot grass was on it and the smell of a lion. There were drops of saliva on it, it had been chewed, and there were blood smears on both sides.

  He closed the nursery door and locked it, tight.

  In the middle of the night he was still awake and he knew his wife was awake. “Do you think Wendy changed it?” she said at last, in the dark room.

  “Of course.”

  “Made it from a veldt into a forest and put Rima there instead of lions?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s staying locked until I find out.”

  “How did your wallet get there?”

  “I don’t know anything,” he said, “except that I’m beginning to be sorry we bought that room for the children. If children are neurotic at all, a room like that—”

  “It’s supposed to help them work off their neuroses in a healthful way.”

  “I’m starting to wonder.” He stared at the ceiling.

  “We’ve given the children everything they ever wanted. Is this our reward—secrecy, disobedience?”

  “Who was it said, ‘Children are carpets, they should be stepped on occasionally’? We’ve never lifted a hand. They’re insufferable—let’s admit it. They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were offspring. They’re spoiled and we’re spoiled.”

  “They’ve been acting funny ever since you forbade them to take the rocket to New York a few months ago.”

  “They’re not old enough to do that alone, I explained.”

  “Nevertheless, I’ve noticed they’ve been decidedly cool toward us since.”

  “I think I’ll have David McClean come tomorrow morning to have a look at Africa.”

  “But it’s not Africa now, it’s Green Mansions country and Rima.”

  “I have a feeling it’ll be Africa again before then.”

  A moment later they heard the screams.

  Two screams. Two people screaming from downstairs. And then a roar of lions.

  “Wendy and Peter aren’t in their rooms,” said his wife.

  He lay in his bed with his beating heart. “No,” he said. “They’ve broken into the nursery.”

  “Those screams—they sound familiar.”

  “Do they?”

  “Yes, awfully.”

  And although their beds tried very hard, the two adults couldn’t be rocked to sleep for another hour. A smell of cats was in the night air.

  “Father?” said Peter.

  “Yes.”

  Peter looked at his shoes. He never looked at his father any more, nor at his mother. “You aren’t going to lock up the nursery for good, are you?”

  “That all depends.”

  “On what?” snapped Peter.

  “On you and your sister. If you intersperse this Africa with a little variety—oh, Sweden perhaps, or Denmark or China—”

  “I thought we were free to play as we wished.”

  “You are, within reasonable bounds.”

  “What’s wrong with Africa, Father?”

  “Oh, so now you admit you have been conjuring up Africa, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t want the nursery locked up,” said Peter coldly. “Ever.”

  “Matter of fact, we’re thinking of turning the whole house off for about a month. Live sort of a carefree one-for-all existence.”

  “That sounds dreadful! Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the shoe tier do it? And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and give myself a bath?”

  “It would be fun for a change, don’t you think?”

  “No, it would be horrid. I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter last month/’

  “That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son.”

  “I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?”

  “All right, go play in Africa.”

  “Will you shut off the house sometime soon?”

  “We’re considering it.”

  “I don’t think you’d better consider it any more, Father.”

  “I won’t have any threats from my son!”

  “Very well.” And Peter strolled off to the nursery.

  “Am I on time?” said David McClean.

  “Breakfast?” asked George Hadley.

  “Thanks, had some. What’s the trouble?”

  “David, you’re a psychologist.”

  “I should hope so.”

  “Well, then, have a look at our nursery. You saw it a year ago when you dropped by; did you notice anything peculiar about it then?”

  “Can’t say I did; the usual violences, a tendency toward a slight paranoia here or there, usual in children because they feel persecuted by parents constantly, but, oh, really nothing.”

  They walked down the hall. “I locked the nursery up,” explained the father, “and the children broke back into it during the night. I let them stay so they could form the patterns for you to see.”

  There was a terrible screaming from the nursery.

  “There it is,” said George Hadley. “See what you make of it.”

  They walked in on the children without rapping.

  The screams had faded. The lions were feeding.

  “Run outside a moment, children,” said George Hadley. “No, don’t change the mental combination. Leave the walls as they are. Get!”

  With the children gone, the two men stood studying the lions clustered at a distance, eating with great relish whatever it was they had caught.

  “I wish I knew what it was,” said George Hadley. “Sometimes I can almost see. Do you think if I brought high-powered binoculars here and—”

  David McClean laughed dryly. “Hardly.” He turned to study all four walls. “How long has this been going on?”

  “A little over a month.”

  “It certainly doesn’t feel good.”

  “I want facts, not feelings.”

  “My dear George, a psychologist never saw a fact in his life. He only hears about feelings; vague things. This doesn’t feel good, I tell you. Trust my hunches and my instincts. I have a nose for something bad. This is very bad. My advice to you is to have the whole damn room torn down and your children brought to me every day during the next year for treatment.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “I’m afraid so. One of the original uses of these nurseries was so that we could study the patterns left on the walls by the child’s mind, study at our leisure, and help the child. In this case, however, the room has become a channel toward—destructive thoughts, instead of a release away from them.”

  “Didn’t you sense this before?”

  “I sensed only that you had spoiled your children more than most. And now you’re letting them down in some way. What way?”

  “I wouldn’t let them go to New York.”

  “What else?”

  “I’ve taken a few machines from the house and threatened them, a month ago, with closing up the nursery unless they did their homework. I did close it for
a few days to show I meant business.”

  “Ah, ha!”

  “Does that mean anything?”

  “Everything. Where before they had a Santa Claus now they have a Scrooge. Children prefer Santas. You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children’s affections. This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along and want to shut it off. No wonder there’s hatred here. You can feel it coming out of the sky. Feel that sun. George, you’ll have to change your life. Like too many others, you’ve built it around creature comforts. Why, you’d starve tomorrow if something went wrong in your kitchen. You wouldn’t know how to tap an egg. Nevertheless, turn everything off. Start new. It’ll take time. But we’ll make good children out of bad in a year, wait and see.”

  “But won’t the shock be too much for the children, shutting the room up abruptly, for good?”

  “I don’t want them going any deeper into this, that’s all.”

  The lions were finished with their red feast.

  The lions were standing on the edge of the clearing watching the two men.

  “Now I’m feeling persecuted,” said McClean. “Let’s get out of here. I never have cared for these damned rooms. Make me nervous.”

  “The lions look real, don’t they?” said George Hadley. “I don’t suppose there’s any way—”

  “What?”

  “—that they could become real?”

  “Not that I know.”

  “Some flaw in the machinery, a tampering or something?”

  “No.”

  They went to the door.

  “I don’t imagine the room will like being turned off,” said the father.

  “Nothing ever likes to die—even a room.”

  “I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?”

  “Paranoia is thick around here today,” said David McClean. “You can follow it like a spoor. Hello.” He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. “This yours?”

  “No.” George Hadley’s face was rigid. “It belongs to Lydia.”

  They went to the fuse box together and threw the switch that killed the nursery.

  The two children were in hysterics. They screamed and pranced and threw things. They yelled and sobbed and swore and jumped at the furniture.

  “You can’t do that to the nursery, you can’t!”

  “Now, children.”

  The children flung themselves onto a couch, weeping.

  “George,” said Lydia Hadley, “turn on the nursery, just for a few moments. You can’t be so abrupt.”

  “No.”

  “You can’t be so cruel.”

  “Lydia, it’s off, and it stays off. And the whole damn house dies as of here and now. The more I see of the mess we’ve put ourselves in, the more it sickens me. We’ve been contemplating our mechanical, electronic navels for too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!”

  And he marched about the house turning off the voice clocks, the stoves, the heaters, the shoe shiners, the shoe lacers, the body scrubbers and swabbers and massagers, and every other machine he could put his hand to.

  The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.

  “Don’t let them do it!” wailed Peter at the ceiling, as if he were talking to the house, the nursery. “Don’t let Father kill everything.” He turned to his father. “Oh, I hate you!”

  “Insults won’t get you anywhere.”

  “I wish you were dead!”

  “We were, for a long while. Now we’re going to really start living. Instead of being handled and massaged, we’re going to live.”

  Wendy was still crying and Peter joined her again. “Just a moment, just one moment, just another moment of nursery,” they wailed.

  “Oh, George,” said the wife, “it can’t hurt.”

  “All right—all right, if they’ll only just shut up. One minute, mind you, and then off forever.”

  “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” sang the children, smiling with wet faces.

  “And then we’re going on a vacation. David McClean is coming back in half an hour to help us move out and get to the airport. I’m going to dress. You turn the nursery on for a minute, Lydia, just a minute, mind you.”

  And the three of them went babbling off while he let himself be vacuumed upstairs through the air flue and set about dressing himself. A minute later Lydia appeared.

  “I’ll be glad when we get away,” she sighed.

  “Did you leave them in the nursery?”

  “I wanted to dress too. Oh, that horrid Africa. What can they see in it?”

  “Well, in five minutes we’ll be on our way to Iowa. Lord, how did we ever get in this house? What prompted us to buy a nightmare?”

  “Pride, money, foolishness.”

  “I think we’d better get downstairs before those kids get engrossed with those damned beasts again.”

  Just then they heard the children calling, “Daddy, Mommy, come quick—quick!”

  They went downstairs in the air flue and ran down the hall. The children were nowhere in sight. “Wendy? Peter!”

  They ran into the nursery. The veldtland was empty save for the lions waiting, looking at them. “Peter, Wendy?”

  The door slammed.

  “Wendy, Peter!”

  George Hadley and his wife whirled and ran back to the door.

  “Open the door!” cried George Hadley, trying the knob. “Why, they’ve locked it from the outside! Peter!” He beat at the door. “Open up!”

  He heard Peter’s voice outside, against the door.

  “Don’t let them switch off the nursery and the house,” he was saying.

  Mr. and Mrs. George Hadley beat at the door. “Now, don’t be ridiculous, children. It’s time to go. Mr. McClean’ll be here in a minute and…”

  And then they heard the sounds.

  The lions on three sides of them, in the yellow veldt grass, padding through the dry straw, rumbling and roaring in their throats.

  The lions.

  Mr. Hadley looked at his wife and they turned and looked back at the beasts edging slowly forward, crouching, tails stiff.

  Mr. and Mrs. Hadley screamed.

  And suddenly they realized why those other screams had sounded familiar.

  “Well, here I am,” said David McClean in the nursery doorway. “Oh, hello.” He stared at the two children seated in the center of the open glade eating a little picnic lunch. Beyond them was the water hole and the yellow veldtland; above was the hot sun. He began to perspire. “Where are your father and mother?”

  The children looked up and smiled. “Oh, they’ll be here directly.”

  “Good, we must get going.” At a distance Mr. McClean saw the lions fighting and clawing and then quieting down to feed in silence under the shady trees.

  He squinted at the lions with his hand up to his eyes.

  Now the lions were done feeding. They moved to the water hole to drink.

  A shadow flickered over Mr. McClean’s hot face. Many shadows flickered. The vultures were dropping down the blazing sky.

  “A cup of tea?” asked Wendy in the silence.

  J. J. Coupling is the pen name for one of the country’s leading communications engineers, the editor of an important technical journal, author of two weighty volumes on electronics, and far and away the best unpublished poet I have ever encountered at a cocktail party.

  “Mr. Kinkaid’s Pasts” brings us back again to the complex problem of predestination vs. free will. The idea of varying degrees of probability in the future, as expressed in “The Golden Man,” is comforting—hut immediately poses a fresh difficulty:

  If we assume that the present is just a cross-section of time, coexistent with past and future—and if we further assume that the future is not entirely rigidly set—how can we then deny the same fl
exibility to the past?

  We can’t, says Mr. Coupling: “Since the past is not unique,” he explains simply. “No one, in fact, can even say that it didn’t happen—not with absolute certainty. But what didn’t happen, if it did? That can never be settled either.”

  Mr. Kinkaid’s Pasts by J. J. Coupling

  I am sure that the Company’s records are quite adequate and represent the best insurance practice. It is a fine company, and on April 14 I shall have represented it for forty-three years. But I try to feel a personal sort of responsibility for my clients, and I keep a card file in my room to remind me of their interests. This I go through at least once a week; but more often, when I have no other plans, I run through it almost every evening, assessing eventualities and trying to remember my clients as the human beings that they are.

  That evening I noticed that I should finally take action concerning the card with the violet tab and the red-and-green marker with the number 27. All cards have a tab; violet is for term insurance. The marker, however, is for premiums in arrears. The colors and the number told me that in just two weeks from that day the policy would lapse. I allow myself that much time to add my personal efforts to the company routines in serving the interests of my clients.

  The card bore no photograph opposite the name F. X. Nordstrom (sometimes I manage to obtain snapshots of my clients), but I remembered the man well. He was a tall, vigorous, blond, bearded man. He had taken out $20,000 of term insurance for two years. The first annual premium had been paid; but the second had not, and later communications had been returned undelivered. I remembered further that Mr. Nordstrom had been very uncommunicative. He had spoken only in answer to direct questions, and then only if absolutely necessary. I had surmised, however, that he had taken the insurance in connection with some business venture. This was rather confirmed by the fact that the first address he gave, c/o S. F. Kinkaid, 710 Starr St., was that of the beneficiary of the policy. This address had been changed by post card (I remembered) to Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo, and that later by air mail (I saved the cover for Samuel T. Henry, whose son, Jeremy S., collects stamps and likes the Near East particularly) to Poste Restante, Luxor. The Company or I had had no occasion to communicate with Mr. Nordstrom there until the second annual premium was due, and as I have noted, the letter was returned undelivered.