Collected Fiction (1940-1963)

by William P. McGivern

  “Please come with me,” he said.

  She rose and accompanied him and he led her through the building to a side exit.

  “Wait here, please,” he said.

  Mark took the self-service elevator up to Little Star’s floor. The child was standing in the middle of his room, facing the door, when Mark came in.

  “I am ready,” he said softly.

  “The guard,” Mark said.

  “I sent him away,” Little Star said. “I told him that I was ill and he had gone for the doctor.”

  “All right, let’s go.”

  They went downstairs in the elevator and joined the Puerto Rican girl. She began to sob and reached for Little Star, but Mark led them outside into the darkness. Then she picked the boy up and hugged him fiercely.

  “You go home now,” Mark told her.

  “Yes, I go. I ’ave my son.”

  “Goodby, Little Star.”

  “Goodbye.”

  He stared after them, straining his eyes until they were at last surrounded by darkness, and then he turned and walked away.

  I LOVE LUCIFER

  First published in the December 1953-January 1954 issue of Amazing Stories.

  Her parents must have been kidding. Who ever heard of naming a sweet, beautiful little girl Lucifer? If she had been some nauseous brat right out of the Brimstone Heights section of Hell, you could understand it. But actually she was just the opposite and as smart as you could want.

  Maybe that was her trouble . . .

  “HI,” said the little girl.

  She was about four-feet tall, with silky blonde hair and big blue eyes. Her face was very pretty, grave and delicate at once, and her clothes had been chosen by someone who had known how to flatter her fragile beauty. She wore a pale blue dress, starched and immaculate, with a full skirt that flared out over a white ruffled petticoat. There was a black bow in her hair that neatly matched her tiny, black patent-leather pumps, and her short white socks were almost as white as her childishly slim legs.

  “Well, well,” the old man said putting down his newspaper and looking at her with a surprised smile. He had been sitting in the sun, surrounded by space and silence, his chair tilted back against the wall of a small, stoutly-constructed house. Before him spread the fantastic beauty of a space-ship dump—dozens of acres of tall gleaming ships, moored here permanently, their slim noses pointing upward to the great reaches of space they would never know again.

  “Say, where’d you come from?” he asked, shifting around in his chair to face her. His name was John Logan and he had been the caretaker of this space-ship cemetery for twenty-six years; and this was the first time he had entertained such an improbable visitor.

  “I came from the city,” the little girl said in a sweet low voice.

  The city was five miles away, old John knew. “I’ll be darned,” he said, chuckling. “Did you walk?”

  She looked away from him and sighed. “Well, yes,” she said patiently, in the voice children use to relegate adult teasing to its proper low status.

  “Your Mommy’s going to be worried about you,” old John said, a trifle concerned.

  “I suppose,” she said, facing it practically. “But I wanted to come so I came. I’ll be back in time for dinner if I don’t stay too long.”

  “Well, you’re mighty welcome,” old John said. “It’s just that I don’t want your folks worrying.”

  “Oh, well,” she said matter-of-factly, dismissing the idea. “Can I play here?”

  “Sure,” old John said. “Johnny!” he called. “Come out here. We got a pretty little visitor.”

  THE DOOR of the house opened and a sturdy, apple-cheeked boy appeared. He was about five, with taffy-colored hair which needed cutting, and a span of freckles running from one cheekbone across a snub nose. His eyes were full of shy wonder as he stared at the small, fragile girl.

  “This here’s Johnny,” old John said to the girl. “He don’t see many people so he’s apt to be bashful with you for a while. What’s your name?”

  “Lucifer,” she said.

  Old John grinned. “That ain’t no name for a pretty little girl.”

  “Well, it’s my name anyway.”

  “I ain’t quarrelling with you about it,” old John said. “But what’s your other name. I mean the one you’re Mommy and Daddy call you by.”

  “Lucifer,” she told him patiently.

  His shrewd gambit having failed, old John gave up. “All right, Lucifer it is,” he said.

  The little girl took a red rubber ball from her pocket and began bouncing it on the ground. “Come on, let’s play,” she said to Johnny.

  But Johnny pressed closer to old John’s leg and stared at her in silence. His fat little fingers twitched with excitement as he watched her bounce the ball up and down, but his expression was confused and shy.

  “I told you he don’t see many people,” old John said apologetically.

  This was true, of course, and it was a great source of worry to the old man. He was Johnny’s grandfather; both the boys’ parents were dead, and it was his task to raise him. And he wasn’t doing a very good job, he knew. He dressed him and fed him and saw to it that he got his rest, but his work kept him out here at the cemetery seven days a week and he couldn’t provide much companionship for the little boy. Not that he didn’t try; but no adult can play satisfactorily with children. The child soon realizes that an adult on his knees playing with blocks and toy soldiers is no substitute for the real thing, which is a real child.

  “He’ll get used to you after a while,” said old John hopefully.

  “Sure he will,” the little girl said, and went on bouncing her red rubber ball. “It’s just because he’s so young.”

  Johnny looked at her for a moment and then sat down and with elaborate indifference began drawing a circle on the ground with a twig. “I’m not young,” he said earnestly to a crawling ant.

  The little girl played around on the concrete platform that stretched along in front of old John’s house and the small storage building which adjoined it. Once she ventured twenty or thirty yards away and stared at the hulls of the great ships which were moored in orderly rows about a city block from old John’s house. But she soon returned to continue her games in the more immediate vicinity of old John and his grandson. Finally, as the sun began to settle in the sky, she said regretfully, “Well, I’d better be starting home. May I come here and play tomorrow?”

  “Of course, but I don’t want your folks worrying about you.”

  “Well, I’ll come then.” She marched over to Johnny and handed him the red ball. “You can play with this, if you like.”

  Johnny took it shyly from her and followed her with his eyes as she marched out the gate and started across the field. On his earnest, pudgy face was an expression of pure adoration.

  SHE CAME to play at the spaceship cemetery every afternoon that week, and by the third day Johnny was following her about like a puppy. He had never been so happy; after lunch he stood at the gate waiting for her to appear at the top of the hill, fidgeting with impatience. A dozen times a minute he would pester his grandfather with questions. “Is she coming?” “Really coming?” “Will she always come to play with us?” “How soon will she be here?”

  “Can’t she live with us?”

  And when she appeared, marching down the hill, a tiny, perfect figure against the sky, he would race to meet her, whooping and hollering with joy.

  She had a wonderful, imaginative way with him. She taught him an intricate version of hopscotch, which they played in the long shadows of the great ships. He was clumsy as a young puppy in his attempts to hop from square to square in the approved sequence, while she was as surefooted and gracious as a deer. But she never teased him or made fun of him; when he lost his balance or tripped, she would say kindly, “Well, you almost made it, Johnny. You’re getting better all the time.”

  And she told him endless stories and built toy cities for him and
made him a pirate’s hat from a handkerchief and the black ribbon from her hair.

  Eventually they began cautiously exploring the avenues formed by the rows of silent, gleaming ships.

  Old John was a bit apprehensive about this and gave them a stern warning about penetrating too far into the maze of derelict space craft. The little girl assured him solemnly that they would be most careful, but once out of his sight she airily ignored his injunctions. She had a knack of direction and could make half-a-dozen turns and remember each one when she started back. Little Johnny never knew where he was once he lost sight of the house. He trotted happily beside her, listening to her stories, staring at the big ships, as carefree as a wandering bird.

  The little girl had an orderly process of investigation. She roamed the great stretch of ground from left to right, going in deeper each day.

  “We must see it all,” she told Johnny firmly.

  “But it’s all alike,” he said, not caring one way or the other as long as they were together.

  “But you can’t be sure it’s all alike until you’ve seen it all,” she insisted.

  “Really?” Johnny said, awed by this logic.

  They walked hand-in-hand through the wide empty lanes between the hulls of the giant ships, chatting in their piping, children’s voices, occasionally halting to stare upward at the slender noses that pierced the sky hundreds of feet above their heads.

  FINALLY, after two weeks of exploration, they reached the back of the huge yard, which was the farthest point from the house. It was quiet there, and the light was blocked off by the shadows of the towering ships.

  “Well, I guess we’d better go back,” she said.

  “All right,” Johnny said. “Let’s go home and play bridge and trains.”

  “That’s what we’ll do,” she said. Then she cried, “Oh look,” and pointed to an object on the ground.

  “What?” he said.

  “There, right there!” She squatted down and picked up a shred of tobacco in her tiny fingers. Johnny squatted beside her and looked at it with round, solemn eyes. He saw no significance in this half-inch of tobacco but he was interested in anything which interested Lucifer.

  “That’s what Grampa smokes,” he said wisely.

  “But he never comes back here, does he?”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  The little girl wriggled her shoulders with excitement. “That means someone else was here,” she said.

  Johnny wriggled his shoulders, too, excited because she was. “Yeah,” he said. “Somebody else was here.”

  “Who could it be?” she cried happily. “We must find them, Johnny.”

  Johnny looked around and saw no one. “How can we find them?”

  “We’ll search until we do,” she said, in the same high, excited voice. “And we’ll tell your Grampa and make him help us. Oh, it will be such fun.”

  “Such fun,” Johnny repeated the words, laughing.

  Above their heads a lock clicked and the sound of it cracked through the shadowed silence. They looked up and saw a door swing open on the ramp of one of the ships. A man in a leather jacket stepped out on the platform and smiled down at them. “Hello, kids,” he said. “Did you get lost?”

  “No, we aren’t lost,” the little girl said. “We were just going home when we found some tobacco.”

  The man laughed. “You’ve got sharp eyes, haven’t you? But don’t go yet. I’m coming down.” He pulled a small lever on the hull of the ship and a ladder emerged from the base of the platform and sank swiftly to the ground. They stared without fear as he descended the ladder. He was a big man, with black hair and a black smudge of whiskers along his heavy jawline, and alert, dancing eyes. They didn’t fear him because they were the end products of a society which had almost completely eliminated evil. Wars, murders, cruelty—these things were unknown to them; the few unregenerates who still lusted for violence were detected by solar police and quarantined on distant asteroids. For this reason the little boy and the little girl watched the man without anxiety as he approached and sank down on his haunches beside them. People were good, they knew. The bad people were sent away and never bothered anybody. Therefore this man must be good; otherwise he would not be free.

  “What were you looking for down here?” he asked them.

  “We were exploring,” the little girl said. “We didn’t think we’d find any people though. It’s very exciting, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is,” the man said. “My name is Dan, by the way.”

  “We’re pleased to meet you, Dan,” she said gravely.

  The man studied their small, alert faces for a few seconds, smiling thoughtfully. “I heard you mention Grampa. Who would that be?”

  “That’s Johnny’s grandfather.”

  “The caretaker?”

  “That’s right. I think we must be going,” she said. “It was fun talking to you. But he’ll be worried about us.”

  “Wait just a second,” Dan said, rubbing a hand along his dark jaw-line. The smile on his lips was strained and hard. “I want to tell you a secret.”

  “I love secrets,” the little girl said, her eyes dancing.

  “I love secrets too,” Johnny said laughing.

  “Well, okay. You’re the only two people in the whole world who know that I’m here. That’s a big secret, isn’t it?”

  “It sure is,” she said.

  “Now you must keep the secret,” he said. “You can’t tell anyone you saw me, understand?”

  “Why not?” she asked him gravely.

  “Because then it wouldn’t be a secret anymore,” he said. “Do you see?”

  “Well, in a way,” the little girl said, tilting her head to one side and frowning. “But it isn’t an important secret, I don’t think.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” he said, speaking in a low impressive voice. “It’s terribly important. If anyone knew I was here it would cause the greatest trouble you can imagine.”

  “What trouble?”

  “That’s one thing I can’t tell you. But I will someday, if you promise me now not to tell anyone you saw me. Will you promise?”

  The little girl looked undecided and the man watched her with narrowed eyes. Then she said, “All right, I promise.”

  “Me too,” said Johnny.

  “Good, fine,” the man said, letting out his breath slowly.

  “Can we come to see you again?” she asked him.

  “Yes, if you don’t tell anyone about me,” he said. “Not even his Grampa.”

  “We won’t,” she said. “We promise. Come on now, Johnny, we must go. Goodby, Dan.”

  “Goodby, kids.”

  “Goodby, Dan,” Johnny yelled and ran after the little girl.

  DAN watched them skipping off, tiny, unreal figures in the shadows thrown by the great hulls, and then he rubbed his jaw again and ascended the ladder to the platform where he had first appeared. When he looked down they had vanished from his sight; there was nothing below him but the silence and the wide empty streets.

  Dan opened the hatchway and walked into the lighted interior of the vast ship. He walked down a bright companionway and turned into a room whose metal walls were covered with dials and control panels. A man sat there behind a desk working on a graph with a sextant. He was small, neatly built, with thick, graying hair and a lined, unrevealing face. The only expression was in his restless, irritable eyes.

  “Well,” he said, without looking up. “Where’ve you been? Outside?”

  “Yeah, outside,” Dan said, seating himself and facing the smaller man across the desk. “Taking my evening constitutional, Willie.”

  The man called Willie looked up sharply then, his eyes hot and angry. “You know that’s against orders, don’t you?”

  “Sure, sure,” Dan said easily. “But listen a minute. I heard voices outside and I took a look. We had some visitors.”

  Willie jumped to his feet so quickly that his chair fell over backward wi
th a crash. “Who were they? Did they see you?” he demanded.

  “Sure, I talked with them,” Dan said, smiling. “Now calm down. They were a pair of kids. The caretaker’s grandson and a funny, dressed-up little girl.”

  “And you let them get away?”

  “Be sensible. If we held them the place would be crawling with people looking for them. So I made them promise me they wouldn’t tell anyone about meeting me.”

  “You took a big chance on our lives.”

  “Don’t worry. Relax. Those kids are going to solve our problem.”

  THE LITTLE girl and Johnny stopped at the base of a ship almost within sight of the house. That is, she stopped and Johnny followed suit automatically. She looked gravely at him and said, “You understand that we aren’t going to tell, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Even if someone asks us?” Johnny looked up at her, his round, pink-cheeked face settling into a frown. “But, we’d have to tell if we’re asked. We can’t lie.”

  “It isn’t lying,” she said firmly. “It’s just not telling the truth.”

  “There’s no difference,” he said stubbornly. He looked very unhappy; disagreeing with her on any point made him feel sad. But he knew lying was bad. Just as bad as stealing or cheating.

  “If you tell, I’ll never play with you again,” she said, staring intently at him with her bold blue eyes. “Do you understand? I’ll take my red ball home with me tonight, and I’ll never, never come back.”

  Johnny began to cry. “Don’t say that,” he pleaded with her. “I won’t tell, honest. Say you’ll come back tomorrow, please.”

  “All right,” she said, relenting. “Dry your eyes. I’ll come and play with you as long as you don’t tell.”

  “I’ll never tell,” he said, his breath catching unevenly.

  THEY RESUMED their customary routine the following afternoon, playing with the ball, hopping about the hop-scotch squares, running with shrieks through the cool, pleasant sunlight.

  They didn’t go exploring among the ships, however.

  Everything went on as usual for a few days, and then came an interruption. A small airplane settled down at the front gate and a neatly-dressed young man climbed and strolled over to say hello to John Logan. He had pleasant, sun-tanned features, and an air of casual good humor about him; but his steady brown eyes were unusually sharp and observant.