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 Marriage Mender
IN the sun, the headboard was like a fountain, tossing up plumes of clear light. It was carved with lions and gargoyles and bearded goats. It was an awe-inspiring object even at midnight, as Antonio sat on the bed and unlaced his shoes, and put his large calloused hand out to touch its shimmering harp. Then he rolled over into this fabulous machine for dreaming, and he lay breathing heavily, his eyes beginning to close.
‘Every night,’ his wife’s voice said, ‘we sleep in the mouth of a calliope.’
Her complaint shocked him. He lay a long while before daring to reach up his hard-tipped fingers to stroke the cold metal of the intricate headboard, the threads of this lyre that had sung many wild and beautiful songs down the years.
‘This is no calliope,’ he said.
‘It cries like one,’ Maria said. ‘A billion people on this world tonight have beds. Why, I ask the saints, not us?’
‘This,’ said Antonio gently, ‘is a bed.’ He plucked a little tune on the imitation brass harp behind his head. To his ears it was Santa Lucia.
‘This bed has humps like a herd of camels was under it.’
‘Now, Mama,’ Antonio said. He called her Mama when she was mad, though they had no children. ‘You were never this way,’ he went on, ‘until five months ago when Mrs Brancozzi downstairs bought her new bed.’
Maria said wistfully, ‘Mrs Brancozzi’s bed. It’s like snow. It’s all flat and white and smooth.’
‘I don’t want any damn snow, all flat and white and smooth! These springs – feel them!’ he cried angrily. ‘They know me. They recognize that this hour of night I lie thus, at two o’clock, so! Three o’clock this way, four o’clock that. We are like a tumbling act, we’ve worked together for years, and know all the holds and falls.’
Maria sighed and said, ‘Sometimes, I dream we’re in the taffy machine at Bartole’s candy store.’
‘This bed,’ he announced to the darkness, ‘served our family before Garibaldi! From this wellspring alone came precincts of honest voters, a squad of clean-saluting Army men, two confectioners, a barber, four second-leads for Il Trovatore and Rigoletto, and two geniuses so complex they never could decide what to do in their lifetime! Not to forget enough beautiful women to provide ballrooms with their finest decoration. A cornucopia of plenty, this bed! A veritable harvesting machine!’
‘We have been married two years,’ she said, with dreadful control over her voice. ‘Where are our second-leads for Rigoletto, our geniuses, our ballroom decorations?’
‘Patience, Mama.’
‘Don’t call me Mama! While this bed is busy favouring you all night, never once has it done for me. Not even so much as a baby girl !’
He sat up. ‘You’ve let these women in this tenement ruin you with their dollar-down, dollar-a-week talk. Has Mrs Brancozzi children? Her and her new bed that she’s had for five months?’
‘No! But soon ! Mrs Brancozzi says … and her bed, so beautiful.’
He slammed himself down and yanked the covers over him. The bed screamed like all the Furies rushing through the night sky, fading away towards the dawn.
The moon changed the shape of the window pattern on the floor. Antonio awoke. Maria was not beside him.
He got up and went to peer through the half-open door of the bathroom. His wife stood at the mirror looking at her tired face.
‘I don’t feel well,’ she said.
‘We argued.’ He put out his hand to pat her. ‘I’m sorry. We’ll think it over. About the bed, I mean. We’ll see how the money goes. And if you’re not well tomorrow, see the doctor, eh? Now, come back to bed.’
At noon the next day, Antonio walked from the lumber-yard to a window where stood fine new beds with their covers invitingly turned back.
‘I,’ he whispered to himself, ‘am a beast.’
He checked his watch. Maria, at this time, would be going to the doctor’s. She had been like cold milk this morning; he had told her to go. He walked on to the candy-store window and watched the taffy machine folding and threading and pulling.
Does taffy scream? he wondered. Perhaps, but
