They took off their galoshes, and their soggy coats and hats, and put them in their proper places by the hook with the right name on it, and then they marched into room 204 of Washington School, Lakeside, where the sixth grade was taught, and were, to the last one of them, fully prepared to be horrid.
And it was only then that they realized that their troubles had just begun, for when they looked up at the big desk by the windows, behind which their blonde and pretty Miss Merridew, of whom they were all very, very fond, should by every right be sitting, there was, instead, a stranger, a person they had never seen in all their lives and wished they were not seeing now.
The stranger was a large, dark, balloonish woman. She seemed to be made up of roundness upon roundness; there was not a part of her that was not somehow connected with circularity from the coils of her thick, black hair, to the large, pearlish segments of her necklace and bracelets, to her round, wide, staring eyes with their dark irises set directly in the center of a roundness of white, which was a distinctly disconcerting effect since it made the eyes seem to stare at you so directly and penetratingly.
When the children were all settled at their desks and not one moment before, she stirred herself, making all those pearlish things rattle with a softly snakelike hiss, picked up the attendance sheet, consulted it very carefully with roundly pursed lips to indicate it was revealing many secrets to her, and when the class had become uncomfortable enough to make barely audible shifting noises, she looked up sharply and spoke.
“Good morning, students. I am Miss Or, that’s O-R, and I will be your teacher for a time as poor Miss Merridew cannot be here due to an unfortunate, ah, accident. I am sure we will all get along just fine.”
She paused to give a broad, rather fixed smile which the whole class disliked at once, and read off the attendance list, making little marks on the paper as she went along and studying the face of each student as they responded to their name. That done she stood, revealing that her roundness was not restricted to that part of her which showed over the desk, but continued through the length of her, down to a round, pearlish ball fixed to the toe of each of her black shoes, a decorative touch which none of the children ever remembered seeing on any Lakeside lady before, teacher or not. Her entire outfit, save for those pale, pearlish things, was black, unlike the colors of Miss Merridew’s outfits which tended always to be cheerful and pleasantly sunny.
“Today we will have a very special lesson,” she said, sweeping the children with another fixed smile and those strange, staring eyes. “We shall learn about a wonderful place which none of us have heard of before.”
She moved over to the map holder fixed above the center of the blackboard, revealing a lightness of foot which was extraordinary in so large a person; she seemed to float from step to step. The map holder was an ingenious affair which contained an apparently inexhaustible supply of maps and charts of all descriptions which could be pulled down at choice like window-shades, and then caused to fly back up into hiding by a clever tug at their bottoms.
Miss Or selected a bright green tag which the sharper children did not remember seeing before, and unrolled a large, brightly-colored map new to them all.
“This is Aliahah,” she said. “Ah-lee-ah-ah. Can you say that name, class?”
“Ah-lee-ah-ah,” they said, more or less.
“That’s fine. That’s very good. Now, as you can see, Aliahah is extremely varied geographically, having mountain ranges, lush valleys, deserts, several large bodies of water, and an interesting coastline bordered by two different seas.”
She paused and regarded the map with open affection while the children stared at it with varying degrees of disinterest.
“Mary Lou,” said Miss Or, turning and fixing a thin, pale girl in the front row with her eyes which, now that the students had observed them in action, were seen to have the same near fixity in their sockets as those of sharks, “can you tell me how many major bodies of water there are in Aliahah?”
Mary Lou Gorman colored slightly, frowned, counted silently without moving her lips and answered, “Three.”
“That is entirely correct,” said Miss Or with a nod of her round head which made her thick hair float and weave in the air as if it weighed nothing at all, or was alive like so many snakes. “The most important one, Lake Gooki—”
There was the briefest of amused snortings from some members of the class at the sound of the name of Lake Gooki, but it was instantly silenced by an icy, vaguely dangerous glance from Miss Or’s shark eyes.
“—is not only beautiful, but extremely useful, having no less than nine underwater mines, indicated by these pretty red triangles. The mines produce most of the radioactive ore needed for the war effort.”
Leonard Bates rather tentatively raised a hand.
“Yes, Lennie?”
“Ah, Miss, ah..
“Or, Lennie. My name is Miss Or.”
“Miss, ah, Or,” said Leonard, “I just wondered, was this going to be a test?”
“That’s a good question, Lennie. No. There will be no test. However, it would be wise of you to remember as much as you can about Aliahah for the information will be most useful to you. Think of all this as a friendly attempt to familiarize you with a country which, I hope very much, you will come to love.” Leonard looked at Miss Or for a puzzled moment, then nodded and said, “Thank you, Miss, ah, Or.”
Miss Or bestowed an odd, lingering glance on Leonard as she toyed absently with a pearlish thing or two on her necklace. Her nails were long and sharply pointed and painted a shiny black.
“Aliahah has only two cities of any size. Bunem, here in the north, and Kaldak in the midland plains.”
She sent the map of Aliahah flying up into the holder with a smart pluck at its lower edge and pulled down a somewhat smaller map showing Kaldak, which she gestured at roundly with one round arm.
“Kaldak, being our main center of weapons manufacture, is levitational, if need be.”
Harry Pierce and Earl Waters exchanged glances, and then Earl raised his hand.
“Yes, Earl?”
“Excuse me, Miss Or, but just what do you mean by ‘levitational’?”
“Only that it can be floated to various locations in order to confuse enemy orientation.”
Harry and Earl exchanged glances again, and this time made faces which Miss Or, turning back to the map with an alacrity which made her alarmingly weightless hair dance up from her skull in snakish hoops and coils, missed entirely.
“There are no less than two thousand, seven hundred and ninety four factories working ceaselessly in Kaldak,” said Miss Or, a new note of grimness creeping into her voice. “Ceaselessly.” She turned to the class, and there was no trace of her fixed smile now. She seemed, almost, to be anguished, and one or two of the children thought they caught a glimpse of a large, round tear falling from one of her staring, dark eyes, though it seemed incongruous.
“Do you realize,” she said, “how many of us that keeps from the fighting? The glorious fighting?”
She turned with a sweep and a rattling hiss of her pearlish things, snapped the map of Kaldak back into the holder, and uncoiled an involved chart whose labyrinthine compexities seemed to mock any possibility of comprehension, certainly from that of the sixth grade of Washington School.
“It is very important,” said Miss Or, looking over her black shoulder at them with her pale face, “that you understand everything of what I am going to tell you now!” And something about the roundness of her face and staring eyes, and something about how her round mouth worked in a circular, chewing fashion as she talked, put them all so much in mind of a shark staring at them, sizing them up, or was it a snake? that they all drew back in their little seats behind their little desks, at the same time realizing it wasn’t going to help at all.
And then she launched into a lecture of such intense and glorious inscrutability that it lost them all from its first sentence, from the first half of that sentence, from
its first word, so that they could only boggle and cringe and realize that at last they had encountered what they had all dreaded encountering from their very first day at school: a teacher and a lesson which were, really and truly, completely and entirely, un-understandable.
At the same moment Clarence Weed began, just began, to be able to see something peculiar about the long sides of the blackboard showing to the left and right of Miss Or’s hanging graph. At first he assumed he was imagining it, but when it persisted and even clarified, he thought in more serious terms, thought about the light flashes he had seen just before coming down with influenza late last winter. But he’d only seen those lights out of the corners of his eyes, so to speak, as if they had been flicking far off to one side or even way around at his back, and the lights he was looking at now were directly in front of him, and besides, they didn’t dim or blur if he squeezed his eyes shut for a second and then looked again, indeed, if anything, they seemed to get a little better defined.
“Of course,” Miss Or was saying, following the spiraling curves of some symbol with the shiny, black, pointy fingernail of her left index finger, “density confirms with the number of seedlings loosened and the quantity surviving flotation to the breeding layer.”
No, they did not blur or dim, nor, as he started harder at them, did they continue to be nothing more than lights. Now he could make out edges, now forms, now there were the vague beginnings of three-dimensionality.
“To be sure they will sometimes gomplex,” Miss Or explained carefully. “There is always the possibility of a gomplex.” Clarence Weed looked across the aisle, trying to catch the eye of Ernie Price, then saw there was no need to give him any kind of signal as Ernie was leaning intently forward, studying the blackboard with all his might, so he went back to do some more of it himself.
And now he saw the shapes and spaces showing—what exactly was the process? Were these things showing through the blackboard? Or were they, somehow, starting to supplant it?—showing by their relationships a kind of scene. He was beginning to make out a sort of landscape.
“Any species so selected,” Miss Or continued, “should count itself extravagantly fortunate.”
There were things in a kind of formal grouping. He could not tell what the things were, nothing about them seemed familiar, but they were alive, or at least capable of motion. A kind of wind seemed to disturb them constantly, they were always fighting a tendency to drift to one side caused by some sort of endlessly pushing draft, and they reached out thin tendrils and clung to the objects about them so as not to be blown away. Clarence felt he could almost hear the wind, a sort of mournful, bitter sighing, but then he decided that was an illusion.
“The odds against such wonderful luck are easily several zahli sekutai. And yet you won!”
The beings, they were definitely beings and not things, were all staring straight out at him, at the class. He could see nothing which looked like eyes, could not even determine what part of the beings could be their equivalent of a head which would contain eyes, but he knew without question that they were looking, intently, at him and the other children.
He turned to see how Ernie was doing and in the process saw that all of them, every one of the children, were examining the blackboard with as much concentration as he had been, and then had what was perhaps the strangest experience of this entire adventure when he realized that even though he was looking at his classmates he was still seeing what they were seeing through the blackboard, exactly as if he were seeing it through all of their eyes, and he knew, at the same time, that they were seeing themselves through his eyes. They all seemed, somehow, to have joined.
“Though we have searched extensively,” Miss Or was saying solemnly, “we have found no avenue of mental or psychic contact with the enemy. They are inscrutable to us, and we are inscrutable to them.”
There had been all along something about the grouping of the beings which was teasingly near recognizable and at last Clarence realized what it was: their grouping was a mirror image of the class’s grouping. They were assembled in four rows of five, just as the sixth grade was. And now he realized what else it was they reminded him of: balloons. They looked for all the world like a bunch of balloons of different shapes and colors such as you’d come across for sale in a circus or a fair.
Some were long and straight, some long and spiral; some, the majority, were almost perfectly round; some were a complex series of bulges of different sizes, and some were involved and elaborate combinations of some or all of these elements. In a weird sort of way this seemed to explain their lightness, their constant bobbing and sidewise slipping in the draft or wind which was so much a part of their world.
“Though there have been skeptics,” Miss Or pronounced, “there is no doubt we shall eventually taste the fruits of victory, or at least of mutual annihilation.”
But even now as Clarence watched them, the balloon beings were beginning some strange sort of group movement which, at first, he took to be an extreme change of posture on their parts; he even had a thought, though with no idea where it might have come from, that they were starting to engage in an elaborate magical dance ritual.
As the movements continued, though, he saw that they were much more extreme, much more basic than an ordinary shifting of parts, that these beings were involved in something a great deal more complicated than a changing of position. They were, he saw, actually engaged in a structural rearrangement of
themselves.
At this point all the children of grade six gave a tiny, soft little sigh in unison, a sound so gentle that, perhaps very fortunately, Miss Or missed hearing it entirely, and Clarence Weed, along with Ernie Price, along with Harry Pierce and Earl Waters and Mary Lou Gorman blurred and lost their edges and ceased to be any of those separate children.
The species, threatened severely and seeing that threat, went quickly and efficiently back to techniques long unused, abandoned since the tribal Cro-Magnon, tactics forsaken since the bold and generous experiment of giving the individual permission to separate from the herd in order to try for perilous, solitary excellence.
Now, faced with an alien danger serious enough to hint at actual extinction, the animal Man rejoined, temporarily abandoning the luxury of individuality and the tricky benefits of multiple consciousness in order to return to the one group mind, joining all strengths together for survival.
Meantime the beings on the other side of the blackboard had progressed significantly with their transformation. Gone now were the smooth, shiny surfaces and come instead were multiple depressions and extrusions, involved modelings and detailings. No longer were they reminiscent of balloons, now they looked like animated creatures in a crude cartoon with simple, splayed hands and blobby eyes, but they looked somewhat like humans, which was not so before.
“Not a retreat,” intoned Miss Or, “but an expansion. Not a falling back, but a bold exploration!”
She looked skyward, smiling and starry eyed, a figure in a patriotic mural. Around her the blackboard figures continued to take on something more like a structure based on bones and the fine points of the faces and fingers and even of costume trivia. Here was Helen Custer’s belt with the doe’s head buckle coming into focus, now, clearer and clearer, could you make out the round, black rubber patches pasted on the ankles of Dick Doub’s gym shoes, and there was no mistaking the increasingly clear pattern of tiny hearts on Elsie Nonan’s blouse.
But they were not Helen nor Dick nor Elsie forming there behind the blackboard. They were something quite else. Something entirely different.
“And if Aliahah, even sweet Aliahah, must perish in the flames and rays of war rather than fall into the power of vile invaders,” Miss Or had now grown quite ecstatic in her posing before what she still took to be grade six of Washington School, one hand was clenched at her breast and the other raised to take hold of yet another tab from the map holder’s inventory, her shark eyes glistening freely with sentimental tears, “its noble race s
hall survive, at whatever cost!”
The beings, now completely convincing simulations of grade six, began to form a column, two abreast, leading to the graph chart and, on perfect cue, Miss Or smartly sent the chart up into hiding in the map holder and pulling down a long, wide sheet, far bigger than even the map of Aliahah, a design altogether different from anything that had come before, a clearly potent cabalistic symbol which, from its linear suggestions of perspective and its general shape, could represent nothing other than some sort of hermetic door, a pathway for Miss Or’s race—her identity with the ominous creatures on the other side of the blackboard was certainly now established beyond any shade of doubt—an entry for the invasion of our own dear planet, Earth.
“Let me show the way!” cried Miss Or joyfully, and all the round, pearlish baubles on her suddenly lit up brightly in orange and magenta, doubtless the colors of Aliahah, as she stepped forward, and with a broad and highly theatrical gesture of invitation to the beings which were even now advancing in step toward the sinister opening she had provided for them, shouted, “Let me be th—”
But, unfortunately for Miss Or, unfortunately for her approaching countrybeings, what had been the sixth grade of Washington School rose as one creature, strode forward, lifted her—she was, as her floating hair and prancing steps had suggested, extremely light—and flung her through the door where she impacted on her fellow Aliahahians much as a bowling ball strikes a line of ninepins, and the whole group of them no sooner gave a great wail of despair, when the sheet bearing the drawing of the door flew up into the map holder with a huge puff of smoke and a fine shower of sparks.
It was less than a quarter hour later that Michael O’Donoghue, the school’s hard working janitor, experienced the greatest shock and surprise of his life since birth when he opened a storage closet of the main assembly hall with its biographical murals showing pivotal scenes from George Washington’s life, and, sprawling with all the abandon of a Raggedy Ann, out tumbled the comely body of Miss Merridew, the regular and rightful teacher of the sixth grade.
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