by J F Bone
“What do you intend to do now?” a reporter asked. “The Board can’t allow you to continue teaching. They’ve got you labelled as a menace to society. In Socrates’ time they’d have fed you a hemlock cocktail.”
“I couldn’t care less,” Dodds said. “It makes no difference what they do. I’m six months past retirement so they can’t take away my pension. That was my last class. I stayed on only because I was asked.” Mr. Dodds chuckled. “I guess I have finally become too old to be worried about anything. I was tired of distorting the truth. Put it down to senile dementia if you wish.”
“Your diagnosis may be correct,” the reporter said, “but I doubt it.”
“You might be right,” Dodds replied. “That could have been the only sane act of my entire life.”
And while this was going on and the staid order of John Tyler High School was being destroyed, things were happening to Lenny. His shoelaces came untied. His books disappeared. Drinks spilled on him. He stumbled and fell in empty corridors, and suffered embarrassing rips in his trousers. Things were constantly getting in his way. Accidents clung to him as though he was their patron saint. He developed alertness and a sixth sense of impending disaster that enabled him to dodge things like falling fire axes and flower pots. Lenny was certain that Mary Ellen was behind the trouble. He was always conscious of her presence. And gradually his feeling of resentment and persecution turned from fear to a growing anger. Enough was enough. He had no desire to become a statistic, but he was damned if he’d spend the rest of the school year looking over his shoulder or listening for things that went bump in the dark. He was damned if he was going to duck every time a bird flew over his head: He’d see Mary Ellen alone and settle this once and for all.
It took two days to corner her in a deserted corridor.
“Eve taken all I’m going to,” Lenny told her fiercely. “Now get off my back and stay off.”
“You just think you have, Lenny Stone.” Mary Ellen replied. “I haven’t even started on you!” Her eyes widened and her slim body tensed. “You’re going to regret the day you jilted me!”
“I never—” Lenny began.
“Don’t lie! You kissed me last summer, and then went right over to Sue Chambers.”
“Good Grief—did you think I meant anything? That was just common courtesy. You girls expect to be kissed. I’ve known that from Junior High.”
“No boy ever kissed me before. You lied to me and you’ll pay for it.”
“The way you’re overreacting a guy would think we made out.” Lenny said. “I wouldn’t touch you with tongs. You’re a weirdo of the worst kind. And if you’re worrying about me kissing you—don’t. It won’t happen again. Just lay off, that’s all I ask. I don’t want any part of you, anytime. Get out of my life and stay out of it. I don’t give a damn what you do to anyone else, even though I know you’re responsible for everything that’s wrong around here. I don’t know how you do it, but so help me, if you try to put the whammy on me again I’ll—”
“You’ll what?”
“I don’t know—but it’ll be something drastic.”
Mary’s body tensed and Lenny felt an overwhelming weight settle on his shoulders. His knees buckled under the strain and his body sagged as it was forced toward the floor. I’d love to see you crawl!” Mary Ellen gritted. “You snake!”—and he was a snake, complete with skin and scales. He wanted to slither away from here. An empty high school corridor was no place for a snake. He shivered and straightened. This was wrong! He wasn’t a snake, he was a man! Sweat poured from his face as he forced his sagging body erect, hands clawing at the air for support. One hand struck Mary Ellen’s shoulder, and as it did, a sharp gasp came from the girl. The weight on his back was gone, his scales vanished. Volition rushed back to his muscles—and Mary Ellen writhed on her back on the corridor floor looking up at him with hate-filled eyes. “You pushed me!” she gasped. “You knocked me down!”
“I told you I’d do something if you tried any more fancy tricks,” Lenny said heavily. “So long Man’—see you around.” He turned from her and walked away, slowly at first. Then he began to run. He skidded around a corner and disappeared.
Mary Ellen rose to her feet. Rage radiated from her. He had made a fool of her again. The window beside her exploded in a burst of flying glass. Two girls coming down the corridor were slammed against the wall. Mary stood in the center of a whirlpool of fury. The floor heaved, a crack appeared in the ceiling, chunks of plaster fell, and a rain of fine gray dust drifted down in crazy patterns through the tortured air.
Mary gasped at the ruin surrounding her. Was she doing this? The thought that Lenny might be right crossed her mind, followed by a wave of terror. For if be was right, she’d be expelled—maybe even sent to jail! But on the heels of her terror came another thought. If Lenny was right and she did have this kind of power, there must be a way of controlling it—Mary Ellen’s lips curled in a peculiar half smile that was hard and unpleasant. Lenny Stone would whistle a different tune when she got through with him! Meantime, she’d better do something about those two girls. They had seen her and the wreckage that surrounded her, and they would talk. They’d cackle like hens. She’d make them forget—make them forget everything! She began walking slowly toward them.
EMILY JONES intruded into her husband’s martini with the expertise of nearly two decades of marriage. “John,” she said, “this can’t go on much longer. Mary Ellen’s already damaged the Ellingsen’s marriage, got poor Mr. Curtis beat up, put Mrs.
Albritton in the hospital, ruined Mr. Dodd’s reputation, interfered with the lives of Bill Reichart and Susan Chambers, and made amnesiacs of Ellen Andress and Tami Johnston.” Emily eyed her husband accusingly. “You’re her father,” she said. “Do something! You should have known she’d be a tween, before we were done here.”
“You’re overreacting,” Jones said, “Just what can I do? Who can do anything with a tween?
“We should have watched her more closely. It’s our fault.”
“For heavens sake, stop acting like the natives. It’s not our fault. Tweens are as old as history. Can’t you remember what you were like?”
Emily blushed, “I can,” she said, “and that’s what worries me.”
“Damn it!” Jones said, “It’s bad enough living in this crazy breastbeating society without adopting its attributes. I figure we have at least another six months. Kids grow up fast in this environment, but not that fast. We’ll be in the Arizona desert working with the Navaho by June and after that phase is over we can go home. I suppose living around sexually mature youngsters fourteen or fifteen years old has some effect but it’ll wear off once we get into a more stable environment. However, I’ll put your data into the matrieizer and run it out.”
“What good will that do? What we need is a way to handle Mary Ellen right now. We aren’t going to be able to carry this bag of worms by ourselves. You know that.”
“We re not going to do a thing as long as they don’t suspect her, we re going to keep our hands off. I’m in the final phase of this study and if I abort it now we’ll wind up in Limbo, or on the backside of the moon, or some other misbegotten place where we’d be conveniently forgotten. We’d spend the rest of our lives scratching flea bites and shaking dust out of our clothing. We simply have to stick it out.”
Emily shook her head. “I think you’re wrong, John. There are three weeks left, and by that time if she keeps growing Mary Ellen can destroy the school. I don’t even want to think of what can happen to the graduation ceremony if she comes to it in as foul a mood as she was in this afternoon. She uprooted a whole row of petunias along the front walk as she came in. Didn’t leave a speck of earth on the roots and she never came within three feet of them! I don’t think she noticed the damage that followed her from the bus and no one was on the street. No, John, we simply must leave.”
“We can’t. I can’t even pack my records in a w eek.”
“Call a moving company.”
“Are you mad? One of those people might be intelligent enough to know what he was packing. Do you want to blow our cover?”
“I want to get out of here.”
“Why? No one has accused us of anything. No one suspects Mary Ellen. We can hold out another two or three weeks.”
“I suppose you want to wait until she kills someone. Do you want your daughter to be a murderess?”
“She isn’t going to kill anyone. She’s been raised to respect life.”
“And how much does that mean to a tween in the middle of an emotional storm?”
“Damn it, Emily! I’m not going to blow fifteen year’s work just to keep an adolescent from acting like an idiot!”
“I wasn’t thinking of us—or even of Mary Ellen,” Emily said, “I was thinking of the people around us. They’re nice inoffensive folks, but they don’t really understand what children can do. They take a dim view of vandalism, mayhem and murder, and they have absolutely no experience handling tweens. If Mary Ellen is discovered as the cause of all this they might even try to restrain her.”
Jones gulped. He had a mental picture of what might happen, and it wasn’t pleasant. A chilly grue squiggled down his spine. He shivered and not entirely from the cold. Once the plaster stopped falling and the bodies were removed from the wreckage his cover would be blown wide open. And naturally, people would draw the wrong conclusions, and a century of study and preparation would go down the drain. The prospect was appalling. “They’d think we were spies,” he said, “They might even think we were a prelude to invasion.”
“Well—aren’t we?”
“Not that way. We want to open trade, not war. We want to exchange technology.”
“Doesn’t it amount to the same thing in the end? We’ll eventually make an economic conquest, and that can be just as bad as a military one.”
“No one gets killed.”
“Not directly. But the inferior culture doesn’t survive. It gets replaced. And in the end we conquer as surely as if we came with bombs and blasters.”
John shrugged. “That’s not our affair. We have nothing to do with the economics of empire. We simply collect demographic and sociopolitical data.”
“You’re being awfully narrowminded. Can’t you remember what happened to Enserala? Or won’t you think of what happened to the primitive societies here when they came into contact with Europe? The primitive society always dies except for a few taboos and inconsequential customs.”
Jones sighed. He couldn’t forget it even though he tried. The path of empire was strewn with the corpses of civilizations and cultures. It was inevitable. One could take some comfort in the thought that nothing could be done to a Class B culture that was half as bad as the things the culture did to itself if it developed in the direction of nation-states. This world had a fairly poor prognosis. Indeed it was a miracle that it has lasted as long as it had. But there was a hard streak of self-preservation in its peoples. At least they’d never started a nuclear war. Somehow despite their mass hysterias, their irrationality, their uncontrolled appetites, their overbreeding, their prides, ideologies and bigotry, they never took that catastrophic final step. It had aroused Imperial curiosity several decades ago after the first surveys gave the planet a potential lifespan of about fifty standard years. The world had already lasted almost a hundred and seemed in no particular haste to exterminate itself. Yet the inhabitants were to all intents and purposes a non-survival type. They were hardly more than tweens without psi—children masquerading as adults. And their continued existence drew the attention of Empire. They might be useful.
“They need to trade with us, Jones said, “We can educate them in the ways of peace and self control.”
“You don’t mention that trade is the lifeblood of our society,” Emily said. “Without it, we’d have died long ago.”
“It gives us a reason for existence,” he admitted.
“And increases our power and prestige, and gives our people places to go and things to do.”
“It’s not our fault that our ancestors overpopulated our world.”
“I won’t argue that. We’re stuck with a demographic fact and we have learned to live with it, but I don’t like thinking that this beautiful world will become another Lyrane.”
“Emily—we need this world. The Council has it on first priority. Even thought I like these people and don’t want to see them hurt, I can’t scrap my own loyalties. The survey and investigation must go on. Without data we can accomplish nothing.”
“They’re not going to forgive us if Mary Ellen runs wild,” Emily answered.
Jones shrugged. It was a rotten little problem. “Does she hate anyone?” he asked, “or is she behaving in a reasonably normal tween fashion?”
“I think she doesn’t like Lenny Stone, but mainly she’s peaking and bottoming out emotionally.”
“Is Stone that kid who was hanging around most of last summer? The one whose parents work in the city?”
Emily nodded.
“I can’t see why she’d hate him. He’s not worth that much thought.”
“She’s a tween.”
“Poor Lenny. I should warn him. It might be well if he left town.”
“He’d think you were crazy,” Emily said.
“Hey! what’s going on here? Are you two plotting something?” Mary Ellen’s voice preceded her into the room. “I come down for a glass of milk and find you two whispering over martinis like a pair of spies. What’s up?”
Jones looked at his daughter and choked back a reply that sprung to his lips. She was a very satisfactory tween, leggy, elf-faced with eyes of clearest green that were almost too large. Her bones were good and her body was beginning to mature. Odd that he hadn’t noticed—but he’d been busy the last few months. She was tween all right. There was something fey, alien and appealing about her, like a Keane painting come to life. “It’s grown-up talk, sprout,” he said, “None of your business.”
“We were talking about your future,” Emily said.
“Maybe you ought to let me in on it,” Mary Ellen said.
“We will, in due time,” Emily said blandly. “This talk was about college and money and a career—the kind of background data we have to talk about before we put the savings account on the line.”
Such a magnificent liar, John thought with admiration. The diplomatic service lost a star performer when Emily married and went with him on this mission.
“After all, dear, you’re our only child and we are concerned about you. The way time passes and the way you kids grow nowadays it’s almost no time before you’re adults. You’ll even be able to vote this fall and chances are you’ll be away from home and in college.”
“I don’t think I want to go to college.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m sort of tired of school. It’s getting to be a real drag. I think I’d like to get a job, like maybe with the paper, the U.N. or the Peace Corps.”
“You’re old enough, but you’d be better off in school.”
“As usual, you don’t understand,” Mary Ellen said. “I have to get out. It’s—you know—a drag. Irrelevant.”
“Stop mouthing,” John said. “In the first place I don’t know, and in the second there’s nothing more relevant to a modern technological society than education.”
“You sound like a teacher, Daddy.”
“Oh—I won’t stop you if you want to get a job. You’ll learn a lot from the experience. And besides, if you earn money you can pay board which will help our budget.”
“Mercenary,” Mary Ellen said.
Jones grinned. The conversation was safely sidetracked. He hoped that neither the strain nor the relief showed in his face. It had taken a genuine effort to keep from blurting it out when Mary Ellen had wanted a straight answer badly enough to push for it. If it hadn’t been for Emily, he might have done just that. He thought bitterly that life had some damnably unpleasant episodes during its p
assage. This was going to be one of them. There was no question that the girl was dangerous . . . He’d have to warn Lenny . . . And he’d have to be prepared to brainwash the kid if he wouldn’t listen to reason . . .
JOHN JONES leaned over the table in the back of McGonigle’s Pizza Parlor and looked at the skinny kid with the shock of black hair who sat on the base of his spine and eyed a half-consumed Idiot’s Delight pizza, and an empty coke bottle. The boy’s face was moody and introspective.
“Are you Lenny Stone?” Jones asked.
“Yeah—that’s me.”
Tin Mary Ellen’s father.”
I remember you from last summer. And if Mary Ellen’s said anything about me, she’s lying.”
“It’s not that, I want to talk with you.”
“No way. I don’t want anything to do with you—or your daughter. Anything related to Mary Ellen is bad news.”
“I don’t care what you want. I must warn you. Your life is in danger. Mary Ellen is capable of destroying you. I’m trying to do you a favor.”
Lenny shook his head. “Naw—she can’t hurt me. All she can do is hurt my friends.”
“That’s not very charitable.”
“Who said I was charitable? Look. Mr. Jones, I hate her guts. She pesters me. She broke up my thing with Sue Chambers. She louses up my classes. The only favor you could do me would be to move far away and take Mary Ellen with you.”
“I’ve considered that,” Jones said. He would have been amused if he weren’t so worried. Lenny and Emily had the same solution, and the same objections still applied. He couldn’t move—not now. It was Lenny who’d have to go. Mary Ellen would murder him! Lenny was a poor innocent idiot playing with the trigger of a loaded machine gun. “The only trouble is that I can’t move right now. But maybe you could. I’ll pay the expenses.”
“No way,” Lenny said. “No girl is going to run me out of town, and besides my folks wouldn’t let me go.” He eyed Jones with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. He felt drawn to the man. There was none of the strangeness about him that marked his daughter.
