Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (270 page)

There was that little notice in the paper in the spring of
‘47.
That was when Hank quit at Oak Ridge.
“Only two or three per cent of those guilty of infanticide are being caught and punished in Japan today…”
But
MY BABY’S
all right.

She was dressed, combed, and ready to the last light brush-on of lip paste, when the door chime sounded. She dashed for the door, and heard, for the first time in eighteen months the almost-forgotten sound of a key turning in the lock before the chime had quite died away.

“Hank!”

“Maggie!”

And then there was nothing to say. So many days, so many months, of small news piling up, so many things to tell him, and now she just stood there, staring at a khaki uniform and a stranger’s pale face. She traced the features with the finger of memory. The same high-bridged nose, wide-set eyes, fine feathery brows; the same long jaw, the hair a little farther back now on the high forehead, the same tilted curve to his mouth. Pale…Of course, he’d been underground all this time. And strange, stranger because of lost familiarity than any newcomer’s face could be.

She had time to think all that before his hand reached out to touch her, and spanned the gap of eighteen months. Now, again, there was nothing to say, because there was no need. They were together, and for the moment that was enough.

* * * *

“Where’s the baby?”

“Sleeping. She’ll be up any minute.”

No urgency. Their voices were as casual as though it were a daily exchange, as though war and separation did not exist. Margaret picked up the coat he’d thrown on the chair near the door, and hung it carefully in the hall closet. She went to check the roast, leaving him to wander through the rooms by himself, remembering and coming back. She found him, finally, standing over the baby’s crib.

She couldn’t see his face, but she had no need to.

“I think we can wake her just this once.” Margaret pulled the covers down, and lifted the white bundle from the bed. Sleepy lids pulled back heavily from smoky brown eyes.

“Hello.” Hank’s voice was tentative.

“Hello.” The baby’s assurance was more pronounced.

He had heard about it, of course, but that wasn’t the same as hearing it. He turned eagerly to Margaret. “She really can—?”

“Of course she can, darling. But what’s more important, she can even do nice normal things like other babies do, even stupid ones. Watch her crawl!” Margaret set the baby on the big bed.

For a moment young Henrietta lay and eyed her parents dubiously.

“Crawl?” she asked.

“That’s the idea. Your Daddy is new around here, you know. He wants to see you show off.”

“Then put me on my tummy.”

“Oh, of course.” Margaret obligingly rolled the baby over.

“What’s the matter?” Hank’s voice was still casual, but an undercurrent in it began to charge the air of the room. “I thought they turned over first.”

“This baby,” Margaret would not notice the tension,
“this
baby does things when she wants to.”

This baby’s father watched with softening eyes while the head advanced and the body hunched up, propelling itself across the bed.

“Why the little rascal,” he burst into relieved laughter. “She looks like one of those potato-sack racers they used to have on picnics. Got her arms pulled out of the sleeves already.” He reached over and grabbed the knot at the bottom of the long nightie. “I’ll do it, darling.” Margaret tried to get there first. “Don’t be silly, Maggie. This may be your first baby, but
I
had five kid brothers.” He laughed her away, and reached with his other hand for the string that closed one sleeve. He opened the sleeve bow, and groped for an arm.

“The way you wriggle,” he addressed his child sternly, as his hand touched a moving knob of flesh at the shoulder, “anyone might think you were a worm, using your tummy to crawl on, instead of your hands and feet.”

Margaret stood and watched, smiling. “Wait till you hear her sing, darling—”

His right hand traveled down from the shoulder to where he thought an arm would be, traveled down, and straight down, over firm small muscles that writhed in an attempt to move against the pressure of his hand. He let his fingers drift up again to the shoulder. With infinite care, he opened the knot at the bottom of the night gown. His wife was standing by the bed, saying, “She can do
‘Jingle
Bells,’ and—”

His left hand felt along the soft knitted fabric of the gown, up towards the diaper that folded, flat and smooth, across the bottom end of his child. No wrinkles. No kicking. No…

“Maggie.” He tried to pull his hands from the neat fold in the diaper, from the wriggling body. “Maggie.” His throat was dry; words came hard, low and grating. He spoke very slowly, thinking the sound of each word to make himself say it. His head was spinning, but he had to
know
before he let it go. “Maggie, why…didn’t you…tell me?”

“Tell you what, darling?” Margaret’s poise was the immemorial patience of woman confronted with man’s childish impetuosity. Her sudden laugh sounded fantastically easy and natural in that room; it was all clear to her now. “Is she wet? I didn’t know.”

She didn’t know.
His hands, beyond control, ran up and down the soft-skinned baby body, the sinuous, limbless body. Oh God, dear God—his head shook and his muscles contracted, in a bitter spasm of hysteria. His fingers tightened on his child—Oh, God, she didn’t know…

* * * *

Copyright © 1948, 1976 by Judith Merril; first appeared in
Astounding Science Fiction
; from HOMECALLING AND OTHER STORIES: THE COMPLETE SOLD SHORT SF OF JUDITH MERRIL; reprinted by permission of the author’s Estate and the Estate’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

(1923-1996)

Walter Miller’s career has largely been overshadowed by the only novel he was able to complete in his lifetime, the astonishing study of post-apocalyptic monasticism and religious doubt,
A Canticle for Leibowitz
.

A college student (and atheist) at the outset of World War II, Miller left school to serve in the U.S. Army Air Force, where he participated in bombing missions as a B-25 crew member. On one of those missions, he helped to destroy the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino, filled with war refugees at the time. His wartime actions profoundly affected Miller.

After the war he married and had four children, and converted to Catholicism in 1947. Although he returned to college for engineering, Miller never graduated. Beginning around 1950 he turned to writing, and produced about forty stories in the next decade, often both beautifully written and searingly painful to read. He won a Hugo for “The Darfstellar” in 1957, and again in 1961 for
Canticle
, a fix-up of earlier stories.

Years of depression and writer’s block followed. When he shot himself in 1996, Miller left behind a partial sequel to
Canticle
, later finished by Terry Bisson and published as
St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman
.

First published in
Amazing Stories
, March 1954

Old Donegal was dying. They had all known it was coming, and they watched it come—his haggard wife, his daughter, and now his grandson, home on emergency leave from the pre-astronautics academy. Old Donegal knew it too, and had known it from the beginning, when he had begun to lose control of his legs and was forced to walk with a cane. But most of the time, he pretended to let them keep the secret they shared with the doctors—that the operations had all been failures, and that the cancer that fed at his spine would gnaw its way brainward until the paralysis engulfed vital organs, and then Old Donegal would cease to be. It would be cruel to let them know that he knew. Once, weeks ago, he had joked about the approaching shadows.

“Buy the plot back where people won’t walk over it, Martha,” he said. “Get it way back under the cedars—next to the fence. There aren’t many graves back there yet. I want to be alone.”

“Don’t
talk
that way, Donny!” his wife had choked. “You’re not dying.”

His eyes twinkled maliciously. “Listen, Martha, I want to be buried face-down. I want to be buried with my back to space, understand? Don’t let them lay me out like a lily.”

“Donny,
please
!”

“They oughta face a man the way he’s headed,” Donegal grunted. “I been up—
way
up. Now I’m going straight down.”

Martha had fled from the room in tears. He had never done it again, except to the interns and nurses, who, while they insisted that he was going to get well, didn’t mind joking with him about it.

Martha can bear my death, he thought, can bear pre-knowledge of it. But she couldn’t bear thinking that he might take it calmly. If he accepted death gracefully, it would be like deliberately leaving her, and Old Donegal had decided to help her believe whatever would be comforting to her in such a troublesome moment.

“When’ll they let me out of this bed again?” he complained.

“Be patient, Donny,” she sighed. “It won’t be long. You’ll be up and around before you know it.”

“Back on the moon-run, maybe?” he offered. “Listen, Martha, I been planet-bound too long. I’m not too old for the moon-run, am I? Sixty-three’s not so old.”

That had been carrying things too far. She knew he was hoaxing, and dabbed at her eyes again. The dead must humor the mourners, he thought, and the sick must comfort the visitors. It was always so.

But it was harder, now that the end was near. His eyes were hazy, and his thoughts unclear. He could move his arms a little, clumsily, but feeling was gone from them. The rest of his body was lost to him. Sometimes he seemed to feel his stomach and his hips, but the sensation was mostly an illusion offered by higher nervous centers, like the “ghost-arm” that an amputee continues to feel. The wires were down, and he was cut off from himself.

* * * *

He lay wheezing on the hospital bed, in his own room, in his own rented flat. Gaunt and unshaven, gray as winter twilight, he lay staring at the white net curtains that billowed gently in the breeze from the open window. There was no sound in the room but the sound of breathing and the loud ticking of an alarm clock. Occasionally he heard a chair scraping on the stone terrace next door, and the low mutter of voices, sometimes laughter, as the servants of the Keith mansion arranged the terrace for late afternoon guests.

With considerable effort, he rolled his head toward Martha who sat beside the bed, pinch-faced and weary.

“You ought to get some sleep,” he said.

“I slept yesterday. Don’t talk, Donny. It tires you.”

“You ought to get more sleep. You never sleep enough. Are you afraid I’ll get up and run away if you go to sleep for a while?”

She managed a brittle smile. “There’ll be plenty of time for sleep when…when you’re well again.” The brittle smile fled and she swallowed hard, like swallowing a fish-bone. He glanced down, and noticed that she was squeezing his hand spasmodically.

There wasn’t much left of the hand, he thought. Bones and ugly tight-stretched hide spotted with brown. Bulging knuckles with yellow cigaret stains. My hand. He tried to tighten it, tried to squeeze Martha’s thin one in return. He watched it open and contract a little, but it was like operating a remote-control mechanism. Goodbye, hand, you’re leaving me the way my legs did, he told it. I’ll see you again in hell. How hammy can you get, Old Donegal? You maudlin ass.

“Requiescat,” he muttered over the hand, and let it lie in peace.

Perhaps she heard him. “Donny,” she whispered, leaning closer, “won’t you let me call the priest now? Please.”

He rattled a sigh and rolled his head toward the window again. “Are the Keiths having a party today?” he asked. “Sounds like they’re moving chairs out on the terrace.”

“Please, Donny, the priest?”

He let his head roll aside and closed his eyes, as if asleep. The bed shook slightly as she quickly caught at his wrist to feel for a pulse.

“If I’m not dying, I don’t need a priest,” he said sleepily.

“That’s not right,” she scolded softly. “You know that’s not right, Donny. You know better.”

Maybe I’m being too rough on her? he wondered. He hadn’t minded getting baptized her way, and married her way, and occasionally priest-handled the way she wanted him to when he was home from a space-run, but when it came to dying, Old Donegal wanted to do it his own way.

* * * *

He opened his eyes at the sound of a bench being dragged across the stone terrace. “Martha, what kind of a party are the Keiths having today?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said stiffly. “You’d think they’d have a little more respect. You’d think they’d put it off a few days.”

“Until—?”

“Until you feel better.”

“I feel fine, Martha. I like parties. I’m glad they’re having one. Pour me a drink, will you? I can’t reach the bottle anymore.”

“It’s empty.”

“No, it isn’t, Martha, it’s still a quarter full. I know. I’ve been watching it.”

“You shouldn’t have it, Donny. Please don’t.”

“But this is a party, Martha. Besides, the doctor says I can have whatever I want. Whatever I want, you hear? That means I’m getting well, doesn’t it?”

“Sure, Donny, sure. Getting well.”

“The whiskey, Martha. Just a finger in a tumbler, no more. I want to feel like it’s a party.”

Her throat was rigid as she poured it. She helped him get the tumbler to his mouth. The liquor seared his throat, and he gagged a little as the fumes clogged his nose. Good whiskey, the best—but he couldn’t take it any more. He eyed the green stamp on the neck of the bottle on the bed-table and grinned. He hadn’t had whiskey like that since his space-days. Couldn’t afford it now, not on a blastman’s pension.

* * * *

He remembered how he and Caid used to smuggle a couple of fifths aboard for the moon-run. If they caught you, it meant suspension, but there was no harm in it, not for the blastroom men who had nothing much to do from the time the ship acquired enough velocity for the long, long coaster ride until they started the rockets again for Lunar landing. You could drink a fifth, jettison the bottle through the trash lock, and sober up before you were needed again. It was the only way to pass the time in the cramped cubicle, unless you ruined your eyes trying to read by the glow-lamps. Old Donegal chuckled. If he and Caid had stayed on the run, Earth would have a ring by now, like Saturn—a ring of Old Granddad bottles.

“You said it, Donny-boy,” said the misty man by the billowing curtains. “Who else knows the gegenschein is broken glass?”

Donegal laughed. Then he wondered what the man was doing there. The man was lounging against the window, and his unzipped space rig draped about him in an old familiar way. Loose plug-in connections and hose-ends dangled about his lean body. He was freckled and grinning.

“Caid,” Old Donegal breathed softly.

“What did you say, Donny?” Martha answered.

Old Donegal blinked hard and shook his head. Something let go with a soggy snap, and the misty man was gone. I’d better take it easy on the whiskey, he thought. You got to wait, Donegal, old lush, until Nora and Ken get here. You can’t get drunk until they’re gone, or you might get them mixed up with memories like Caid’s.

Car doors slammed in the street below. Martha glanced toward the window.

“Think it’s them? I wish they’d get here. I wish they’d hurry.”

Martha arose and tiptoed to the window. She peered down toward the sidewalk, put on a sharp frown. He heard a distant mutter of voices and occasional laughter, with group-footsteps milling about on the sidewalk. Martha murmured her disapproval and closed the window.

“Leave it open,” he said.

“But the Keiths’ guests are starting to come. There’ll be such a racket.” She looked at him hopefully, the way she did when she prompted his manners before company came.

Maybe it wasn’t decent to listen in on a party when you were dying, he thought. But that wasn’t the reason. Donegal, your chamber-pressure’s dropping off. Your brains are in your butt-end, where a spacer’s brains belong, but your butt-end died last month. She wants the window closed for her own sake, not yours.

“Leave it closed,” he grunted. “But open it again before the moon-run blasts off. I want to listen.”

She smiled and nodded, glancing at the clock. “It’ll be an hour and a half yet. I’ll watch the time.”

“I hate that clock. I wish you’d throw it out. It’s loud.”

“It’s your medicine-clock, Donny.” She came back to sit down at his bedside again. She sat in silence. The clock filled the room with its clicking pulse.

“What time are they coming?” he asked.

“Nora and Ken? They’ll be here soon. Don’t fret.”

“Why should I fret?” He chuckled. “That boy—he’ll be a good spacer, won’t he, Martha?”

Martha said nothing, fanned at a fly that crawled across his pillow. The fly buzzed up in an angry spiral and alighted on the ceiling. Donegal watched it for a time. The fly had natural-born space-legs. I know your tricks, he told it with a smile, and I learned to walk on the bottomside of things before you were a maggot. You stand there with your magnasoles hanging to the hull, and the rest of you’s in free fall. You jerk a sole loose, and your knee flies up to your belly, and reaction spins you half-around and near throws your other hip out of joint if you don’t jam the foot down fast and jerk up the other. It’s worse’n trying to run through knee-deep mud with snow-shoes, and a man’ll go nuts trying to keep his arms and legs from taking off in odd directions. I know your tricks, fly. But the fly was born with his magnasoles, and he trotted across the ceiling like Donegal never could.

“That boy Ken—he ought to make a damn good space-engineer,” wheezed the old man.

Her silence was long, and he rolled his head toward her again. Her lips tight, she stared down at the palm of his hand, unfolded his bony fingers, felt the cracked calluses that still welted the shrunken skin, calluses worn there by the linings of space gauntlets and the handles of fuel valves, and the rungs of get-about ladders during free fall.

“I don’t know if I should tell you,” she said.

“Tell me what, Martha?”

She looked up slowly, scrutinizing his face. “Ken’s changed his mind, Nora says. Ken doesn’t like the academy. She says he wants to go to medical school.”

Old Donegal thought it over, nodded absently. “That’s fine. Space-medics get good pay.” He watched her carefully.

She lowered her eyes, rubbed at his calluses again. She shook her head slowly. “He doesn’t want to go to space.”

The clock clicked loudly in the closed room.

“I thought I ought to tell you, so you won’t say anything to him about it,” she added.

Old Donegal looked grayer than before. After a long silence, he rolled his head away and looked toward the limp curtains.

“Open the window, Martha,” he said.

Her tongue clucked faintly as she started to protest, but she said nothing. After frozen seconds, she sighed and went to open it. The curtains billowed, and a babble of conversation blew in from the terrace of the Keith mansion. With the sound came the occasional brassy discord of a musician tuning his instrument. She clutched the window-sash as if she wished to slam it closed again.

“Well! Music!” grunted Old Donegal. “That’s good. This is some shebang. Good whiskey and good music and you.” He chuckled, but it choked off into a fit of coughing.

“Donny, about Ken—”

“No matter, Martha,” he said hastily. “Space-medic’s pay is good.”

“But, Donny—” She turned from the window, stared at him briefly, then said, “Sure, Donny, sure,” and came back to sit down by his bed.

He smiled at her affectionately. She was a man’s woman, was Martha—always had been, still was. He had married her the year he had gone to space—a lissome, wistful, old-fashioned lass, with big violet eyes and gentle hands and gentle thoughts—and she had never complained about the long and lonely weeks between blast-off and glide-down, when most spacers’ wives listened to the psychiatrists and soap-operas and soon developed the symptoms that were expected of them, either because the symptoms were
chic
, or because they felt they should do something to earn the pity that was extended to them. “It’s not so bad,” Martha had assured him. “The house keeps me busy till Nora’s home from school, and then there’s a flock of kids around till dinner. Nights are a little empty, but if there’s a moon, I can always go out on the porch and look at it and know where you are. And Nora gets out the telescope you built her, and we make a game of it. ‘Seeing if Daddy’s still at the office,’ she calls it.”

* * * *