The Third Science Fiction Megapack Page 25

  Sally muttered: “Enough of that!” and started for the kitchen door. Just as she reached it the telephone rang.

  Sally went quickly to the phone and lifted the receiver. The instant she pressed it to her ear she recognized her husband’s voice―or thought she did.

  “Sally, come to the office!” came the voice, speaking in a hoarse whisper. “Hurry―or it will be too late! Hurry, Sally!”

  Sally turned with a startled gasp, looked out through the kitchen window at the autumn leaves blowing crisp and dry across the lawn. As she looked the scattered leaves whirled into a flurry around Tommy, then lifted and went spinning over the fence and out of sight.

  The dread in her heart gave way to a sudden, bleak despair. As she turned from the phone something within her withered, became as dead as the drifting leaves with their dark autumnal mottlings.

  She did not even pause to call Tommy in from the yard. She rushed upstairs, then down again, gathering up her hat, gloves and purse, making sure she had enough change to pay for the taxi.

  The ride to the office was a nightmare…Tall buildings swept past, facades of granite as gray as the leaden skies of mid-winter, beehives of commerce where men and women brushed shoulders without touching hands.

  Autumnal leaves blowing, and the gray buildings sweeping past. Despite Tommy, despite everything there was no shining vision to warm Sally from within. A cottage must be lived in to become a home and Sally had never really had a home.

  One-night stand! It wasn’t an expression she’d have used by choice, but it came unbidden into her mind. If you live for nine years with a man who can’t relax and be human, who can’t be warm and loving you’ll begin eventually to feel you might as well live alone. Each day had been like a lonely sentinel outpost in a desert waste for Sally.

  She thought about Tommy…Tommy wasn’t in the least like his father when he came racing home from school, hair tousled, books dangling from a strap. Tommy would raid the pantry with unthinking zest, invite other boys in to look at the Westerns on TV, and trade black eyes for marbles with a healthy pugnacity.

  Up to a point Tommy was normal, was healthy.

  But she had seen mirrored in Tommy’s pale blue eyes the same abnormal calmness that was always in his father’s, and the look of derisive withdrawal which made him seem always to be staring down at her from a height. And it filled her with terror to see that Tommy’s mood could change as abruptly and terrifyingly cold…

  Tommy, her son. Tommy, no longer boisterous and eager, but sitting in a corner with his legs drawn up, a faraway look in his eyes. Tommy seeming to look right through her, into space. Tommy and Jim exchanging silent understanding glances. Tommy roaming through the cottage, staring at his toys with frowning disapproval. Tommy drawing back when she tried to touch him.

  Tommy, Tommy, come back to me! How often she had cried out in her heart when that coldness came between them.

  Tommy drawing strange figures on the floor with a piece of colored chalk, then erasing them quickly before she could see them, refusing to let her enter his secret child’s world.

  Tommy picking up the cat and stroking its fur mechanically, while he stared out through the kitchen window at rusty blackbirds on the wing…

  “This is the address you gave me, lady. Sixty-seven Vine Street,” the cab driver was saying.

  Sally shivered, remembering her husband’s voice on the phone, remembering where she was…“Come to the office, Sally! Hurry, hurry―or it will be too late!”

  Too late for what? Too late to recapture a happiness she had never possessed?

  “This is it, lady!” the cab driver insisted. “Do you want me to wait?”

  “No,” Sally said, fumbling for her change purse. She descended from the taxi, paid the driver and hurried across the pavement to the big office building with its mirroring frontage of plate glass and black onyx tiles.

  The firm’s name was on the directory board in the lobby, white on black in beautifully embossed lettering. White for hope, and black for despair, mourning…

  The elevator opened and closed and Sally was whisked up eight stories behind a man in a checkered suit.

  “Eighth floor!” Sally whispered, in sudden alarm. The elevator jolted to an abrupt halt and the operator swung about to glare at her.

  “You should have told me when you got on, Miss!” he complained.

  “Sorry,” Sally muttered, stumbling out into the corridor. How horrible it must be to go to business every day, she thought wildly. To sit in an office, to thumb through papers, to bark orders, to be a machine.

  Sally stood very still for an instant, startled, feeling her sanity threatened by the very absurdity of the thought. People who worked in offices could turn for escape to a cottage in the sunset’s glow, when they were set free by the moving hands of a clock. There could be a fierce joy at the thought of deliverance, at the prospect of going home at five o’clock.

  But for Sally was the brightness, the deliverance withheld. The corridor was wide and deserted and the black tiles with their gold borders seemed to converge upon her, hemming her into a cool magnificence as structurally somber as the architectural embellishments of a costly mausoleum.

  She found the office with her surface mind, working at cross-purposes with the confusion and swiftly mounting dread which made her footsteps falter, her mouth go dry.

  Steady, Sally! Here’s the office, here’s the door. Turn the knob and get it over with…

  Sally opened the door and stepped into a small, deserted reception room. Beyond the reception desk was a gate, and beyond the gate a large central office branched off into several smaller offices.

  Sally paused only an instant. It seemed quite natural to her that a business office should be deserted so late in the afternoon.

  She crossed the reception room to the gate, passed through it, utter desperation giving her courage.

  Something within her whispered that she had only to walk across the central office, open the first door she came to to find her husband…

  The first door combined privacy with easy accessibility. The instant she opened the door she knew that she had been right to trust her instincts. This was his office…

  He was sitting at a desk by the window, a patch of sunset sky visible over his right shoulder. His elbows rested on the desk and his hands were tightly locked as if he had just stopped wringing them.

  He was looking straight at her, his eyes wide and staring.

  “Jim!” Sally breathed. “Jim, what’s wrong?”

  He did not answer, did not move or attempt to greet her in any way. There was no color at all in his face. His lips were parted, his white teeth gleamed. And he was more stiffly controlled than usual―a control so intense that for once Sally felt more alarm than bitterness.

  There was a rising terror in her now. And a slowly dawning horror. The sunlight streamed in, gleaming redly on his hair, his shoulders. He seemed to be the center of a flaming red ball…

  He sent for you, Sally. Why doesn’t he get up and speak to you, if only to pour salt on the wounds you’ve borne for eight long years?

  Poor Sally! You wanted a strong, protective, old-fashioned husband. What have you got instead?

  Sally went up to the desk and looked steadily into eyes so calm and blank that they seemed like the eyes of a child lost in some dreamy wonderland barred forever to adult understanding.

  For an instant her terror ebbed and she felt almost reassured. Then she made the mistake of bending more closely above him, brushing his right elbow with her sleeve.

  * * * *

  That single light woman’s touch unsettled him. He started to fall, sideways and very fast. Topple a dead weight and it crashes with a swiftness no opposing force can counter-balance.

  It did Sally no good to clutch frantically at his arm as he fell, to tug and jerk at the slackening folds of his suit. The heaviness of his descending bulk dragged him down and away from her, the awful inertia of lifeless flesh.

&
nbsp; He thudded to the floor and rolled over on his back, seeming to shrink as Sally widened her eyes upon him. He lay in a grotesque sprawl at her feet, his jaw hanging open on the gaping black orifice of his mouth…

  Sally might have screamed and gone right on screaming―if she had been a different kind of woman. On seeing her husband lying dead her impulse might have been to throw herself down beside him, give way to her grief in a wild fit of sobbing.

  But where there was no grief there could be no sobbing…

  One thing only she did before she left. She unloosed the collar of the unmoving form on the floor and looked for the small brown mole she did not really expect to find. The mole she knew to be on her husband’s shoulder, high up on the left side.

  She had noticed things that made her doubt her sanity; she needed to see the little black mole to reassure her…

  She had noticed the difference in the hair-line, the strange slant of the eyebrows, the crinkly texture of the skin where it should have been smooth…

  Something was wrong…horribly, weirdly wrong…

  Even the hands of the sprawled form seemed larger and hairier than the hands of her husband. Nevertheless it was important to be sure…

  The absence of the mole clinched it.

  Sally crouched beside the body, carefully readjusting the collar. Then she got up and walked out of the office.

  Some homecomings are joyful, others cruel. Sitting in the taxi, clenching and unclenching her hands, Sally had no plan that could be called a plan, no hope that was more than a dim flickering in a vast wasteland, bleak and unexplored.

  But it was strange how one light burning brightly in a cottage window could make even a wasteland seem small, could shrink and diminish it until it became no more than a patch of darkness that anyone with courage might cross.

  The light was in Tommy’s room and there was a whispering behind the door. Sally could hear the whispering as she tiptoed upstairs, could see the light streaming out into the hall.

  She paused for an instant at the head of the stairs, listening. There were two voices in the room, and they were talking back and forth.

  Sally tiptoed down the hall, stood with wildly beating heart just outside the door.

  “She knows now, Tommy,” the deepest of the two voices said. “We are very close, your mother and I. She knows now that I sent her to the office to find my ‘stand in.’ Oh, it’s an amusing term, Tommy―an Earth term we’d hardly use on Mars. But it’s a term your mother would understand.”

  A pause, then the voice went on, “You see, my son, it has taken me eight years to repair the ship. And in eight years a man can wither up and die by inches if he does not have a growing son to go adventuring with him in the end.”

  “Adventuring, father?”

  “You have read a good many Earth books, my son, written especially for boys. Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. What paltry books they are! But in them there is a little of the fire, a little of the glow of our world.”

  “No, father. I started them but I threw them away for I did not like them.”

  “As you and I must throw away all Earth things, my son. I tried to be kind to your mother, to be a good husband as husbands go on Earth. But how could I feel proud and strong and reckless by her side? How could I share her paltry joys and sorrows, chirp with delight as a sparrow might chirp hopping about in the grass? Can an eagle pretend to be a sparrow? Can the thunder muffle its voice when two white-crested clouds collide in the shining depths of the night sky?”

  “You tried, father. You did your best.”

  “Yes, my son, I did try. But if I had attempted to feign emotions I did not feel your mother would have seen through the pretense. She would then have turned from me completely. Without her I could not have had you, my son.”

  “And now, father, what will we do?”

  “Now the ship has been repaired and is waiting for us. Every day for eight years I went to the hill and worked on the ship. It was badly wrecked, my son, but now my patience has been rewarded, and every damaged astronavigation instrument has been replaced.”

  “You never went to the office, father? You never went at all?”

  “No, my son. My stand-in worked at the office in my place. I instilled in your mother’s mind an intense dislike and fear of the office to keep her from ever coming face to face with the stand-in. She might have noticed the difference. But I had to have a stand-in, as a safeguard. Your mother might have gone to the office despite the mental block.”

  “She’s gone now, father. Why did you send for her?”

  “To avoid what she would call a scene, my son. That I could not endure. I had the stand-in summon her on the office telephone, then I withdrew all vitality from it. She will find it quite lifeless. But it does not matter now. When she returns we will be gone.”

  “Was constructing the stand-in difficult, father?”

  “Not for me, my son. On Mars we have many androids, each constructed to perform a specific task. Some are ingenious beyond belief―or would seem so to Earthmen.”

  There was a pause, then the weaker of the two voices said, “I will miss my mother. She tried to make me happy. She tried very hard.”

  “You must be brave and strong, my son. We are eagles, you and I. Your mother is a sparrow, gentle and dun-colored. I shall always remember her with tenderness. You want to go with me, don’t you?”

  “Yes, father. Oh, yes!”

  “Then come, my son. We must hurry. Your mother will be returning any minute now.”

  Sally stood motionless, listening to the voices like a spectator sitting before a television screen. A spectator can see as well as hear, and Sally could visualize her son’s pale, eager face so clearly there was no need for her to move forward into the room.

  She could not move. And nothing on Earth could have wrenched a tortured cry from her. Grief and shock may paralyze the mind and will, but Sally’s will was not paralyzed.

  It was as if the thread of her life had been cut, with only one light left burning. Tommy was that light. He would never change. He would go from her forever. But he would always be her son.

  The door of Tommy’s room opened and Tommy and his father came out into the hall. Sally stepped back into shadows and watched them walk quickly down the hall to the stairs, their voices low, hushed. She heard them descend the stairs, their footsteps dwindle, die away into silence…

  You’ll see a light, Sally, a great glow lighting up the sky. The ship must be very beautiful. For eight years he labored over it, restoring it with all the shining gifts of skill and feeling at his command. He was calm toward you, but not toward the ship, Sally―the ship which will take him back to Mars!

  How is it on Mars, she wondered. My son, Tommy, will become a strong, proud adventurer daring the farthest planet of the farthest star?

  You can’t stop a boy from adventuring. Surprise him at his books and you’ll see tropical seas in his eyes, a pearly nautilus, Hong Kong and Valparaiso resplendent in the dawn.

  There is no strength quite like the strength of a mother, Sally. Endure it, be brave…

  Sally was at the window when it came. A dazzling burst of radiance, starting from the horizon’s rim and spreading across the entire sky. It lit up the cottage and flickered over the lawn, turning rooftops to molten gold and gilding the long line of rolling hills which hemmed in the town.

  Brighter it grew and brighter, gilding for a moment even Sally’s bowed head and her image mirrored on the pane. Then, abruptly, it was gone…

  ALIEN STILL LIFE, by John Gregory Betancourt

  She strolled up to Cris in a knot of friends and hangers-on, her skin chocolate and azure, her hair a shimmering bow done in soft shades of orange. Her holodress swirled around her like a writhing snake, revealed dark thighs and the occasional smooth curve of breast, but Marica was like that and Cris expected it of her. It was part of her charm, part of her power, all of which drew him inexorably closer, a moth
to her flame. After all, what did he, mere painter, mere artist, know of fashion? Only her eyes seemed normal tonight, that pale piercing shade of blue he’d always found so distracting.

  “Crispin darling,” she said, and when she smiled her teeth were dark as her skin, crawling with geometric designs.

  “Marica,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you. I thought you found my gallery openings too tame.”

  “Wifely duty,” she said, and a titter came from her coterie. Cris glared and they shut up. They too sported holographic clothes and wild polychromatic hair designs. He remembered none of their names; they were just glitterfolk, like Marica. They came and went and others would replace them tomorrow.

  He forced a smile. “Of course, your portrait. I’d forgotten it’s on exhibit.” She hadn’t been his wife in months, not since he’d finished painting her. That portrait hung on the far wall, a masterful study in oil and holo laserwork, five meters high and ten wide: Marica, naked on a beach, with gulls constantly wheeling overhead, the interplay of shadows on her face the piece’s focal point. It was his greatest work thus far. Something about Marica inspired him as no other woman ever had. Or, he thought, ever would again.

  A lull in talk around them brought the gulls’ raucous voices to his ears. After Marica abandoned him, he’d dubbed in crow caws. It made an interesting contrast to his usual hyper-realism.

  She pressed something into his hand. “I’m having a party later tonight. Come?”

  “I don’t know…”

  Her lips pursed, a mock kiss. “I’ll send someone to pick you up, dear. Ta.” And off she swept, followed by her glitterdressed friends, a quick circuit of the room then away.

  Cris watched silently. He doubted she’d even remember having asked him in an hour…but that was the way she’d always been. He’d known their time would be limited when he’d proposed in January. Still, their three months together (he’d dawdled over her portrait) had been more than most of her lovers enjoyed.

  He glanced at the card. Someone (surely not Marica) had neatly inked ALIENATION in all caps.