A gong rang. He gulped food swiftly. The tumble for the tube began. They were blown like feathers across the island to Sociology and then, later, in the afternoon, back again for games. Hours passed.
Roby slipped away to the garden to be alone. Hatred for this insane, never-stopping routine, for his teachers and his fellow-students flashed through him in a scouring torrent. He sat alone and thought of his mother, a great distance away.
In great detail he recalled how she looked and what she smelled like and how her voice was and how she touched and held and kissed him. He put his head down into his hands and began to fill the palms of his hands with small tears.
He dropped the red rubber ball.
He didn’t care. He only thought of his mother.
The jungle shivered. Something shifted, quickly.
A woman ran through the deep grass!
She ran away from Roby, slipped, cried out, and fell.
Something glittered in the sunlight. The woman was running towards that silvery glittering thing. The spheroid. The silver star ship! And where had she come from? And why was she running towards the sphere?
And why had she fallen as he looked up? She didn’t seem to be able to get up. Roby leaped from his rock, gave chase. He caught up with her and stood over the woman.
‘Mother!’ he screamed.
Her face shivered and changed, like melting snow, then took on a hard cast, became definite and handsome.
‘I’m not your mother,’ she said.
He didn’t hear. He only heard his own breath moving over his shaking lips. He was so weak with shock he could hardly stand. He put out his hands towards her.
‘Can’t you understand?’ Her face was cold. ‘I’m not your mother. Don’t label me! Why must I have a name! Let me get back to my ship! I’ll kill you if you don’t!’
Roby swayed. ‘Mother, don’t you know me? I’m Roby, your son!’ He wanted only to cry against her, tell her of the long months of imprisonment. ‘Please, remember me!’
Sobbing, he moved forward and fell against her.
Her fingers tightened on his throat.
She strangled him.
He tried to scream. The scream was caught, pressed back into his bursting lungs. He flailed his legs.
Deep in her cold, hard, angry face, Roby found the answer even as her fingers tightened and things grew dark.
Deep in her face he saw a vestige of the Sandman.
The Sandman. The star falling on the summer sky. The silver sphere, the ship towards which this ‘woman’ had been running. The disappearance of the Sandman, the appearance of the red ball, the vanishing of the red ball and now the appearance of his mother. It all fitted.
Matrixes. Moulds. Thought habits. Patterns. Matter. The history of man, his body, all things in the universe.
She was killing him.
She would make him stop thinking, then she would be free.
Thoughts. Darkness. He could barely move, now. Weak, weak. He had thought ‘it’ was his mother. It wasn’t. Nevertheless ‘it’ was killing him. What if Roby thought something else? Try, anyway. Try it. He kicked. In the wild darkness he thought hard, hard.
With a wail, his ‘mother’ withered before him.
He concentrated.
Her fingers dwindled from his throat. Her bright face crumbled. Her body shrank to another size.
He was free. He rose up, gasping.
Through the jungle he saw the silver sphere lying in the sun. He staggered towards it, then cried out with the sharp thrill of the plan that formed in his mind.
He laughed triumphantly. He stared once more at ‘it’. What was left of the woman form changed before his eyes, like melting wax. He reshaped it into something new.
The garden wall trembled. A vacuum cylinder was hissing up through the tube. Mr Grill was coming. Roby would have to hurry or his plan would be ruined.
Roby ran to the spheroid, peered in. Simple controls. Just enough room for his small body – if the plan worked. It had to to work. It would work!
The garden trembled with the approaching thunder of the cylinder. Roby laughed. To hell with Mr Grill. To hell with this island.
He thrust himself into the ship. There was much he could learn, it would come in time. He was just on the skirt of knowledge now, but that little knowledge had saved his life, and now it would do even more.
A voice cried out behind him. A familiar voice. So familiar that it made Roby shudder. Roby heard small-boy feet crash the underbrush. Small feet on a small body. A small voice pleading.
Roby grasped the ship controls. Escape. Complete and unsuspected. Simple. Wonderful. Grill would never know.
The sphere door slammed. Motion.
The star, Roby inside, rose on the summer sky.
Mr Grill stepped out of the seal in the garden wall. He looked around for Roby. Sunlight struck him warmly in the face as he hurried down the path.
There! There was Roby. In the clearing ahead of him. Little Roby Morrison staring at the sky, making fists, crying out to nobody. At least Grill could see nobody about.
‘Hello, Roby,’ called Grill.
The boy jerked at the sound. He wavered – in colour, density, and quality. Grill blinked, decided it was only the sun.
‘I’m not Roby!’ cried the child. ‘Roby escaped! He left me to take his place, to fool you so you wouldn’t hunt for him! He fooled me, too!’ screamed the child, nastily, sobbing. ‘No, no, don’t look at me!
Don’t think that I’m Roby, you’ll make it worse! You came expecting to find him, and you found me and made me into Roby! You’re moulding me and I’ll never, never change, now! Oh, God!’
‘Come now, Roby –’
‘Roby’ll never come back. I’ll always be him. I was a rubber ball, a woman, a Sandman. But, believe me, I’m only malleable atoms, that’s all. Let me go!’
Grill backed up slowly. His smile was sick.
‘I’m a referent. I’m not a label!’ cried the child.
‘Yes, yes, I understand. Now, now, Roby, Roby, you just wait right there, right there now, while I, while I, while I call the Psycho-Ward.’
Moments later, a corps of assistants ran through the garden.
‘Damn you all!’ screamed the child, kicking. ‘God damn you!’
‘Tut,’ declared Grill quietly, as they forced the child into the vac-cylinder. ‘You’re using a label for which there is no referent!’
The cylinder sucked them away.
A star blinked on the summer sky and vanished.
The end
