“They are tough. How about the pool?”
“We’ve drained and scrubbed it. Doctor Lofting’s coming over to give them their final checkups and help with the party.”
“Good old Doc! Without him and Tsitsav, 1 don’t know how we’d have survived.”
The five youths leaned against the front of the post office. Fisher, having picked himself up, glowered at the backs of Riegel and the Ahlian. He said: “Now we just gotta spatter those…” He rolled out a string of epithets that stigmatized his subjects* legitmacy, ancestry, chances of salvation, and sexual habits all at once. “We’re not gonna let ’em get away with that!”
“What you got in mind, spud?” asked Meehan.
“Listen. Longpants bought a gallon of ice-cream. That means a party for all the little off-earthers, see? Now, have we all got baseball bats?”
“I don’t have none,” said Snow.
“Then we’ll bust into old man Rizzi’s sporting-goods store and get you one. Now, here’s what we’ll do…” He was finishing his explanation when Doctor Lofting got out of his car and walked towards the post office. Again the ventriloquistic muttering arose:
“Look at old Whiskers.”
“Bet he chews it in his sleep.”
“Nah, that’s to make him look like a doctor.”
“Him a doctor? Just a drunken old bum.”
“He couldn’t doctor a horse.”
At the entrance to the post office, Lofting turned and said pleasantly: “Boys, if you’re trying to make a date with me, you’re wasting your time. I’m not that kind of guy”
Then he went in. Lofting at this stage was neither old nor drunken; merely convivial and middle-aged. A widower, he had been drawn to the Riegels by a common interest in the Society for Interplanetary Union. His beard was the only unconventional thing about him, though it was enough to draw the attention of the five.
As Lofting got back in his automobile, Carmichael said: “Sassy little bustard, ain’t he?”
“Some day we’ll pay him a visit,” said Snow.
“Hey, not till we’ve worked Riegel over!” said Fisher.
“Okay,” said Meehan. “Time enough to figure something out for Doc later. Let’s meet at twenty-hundred…
The party went beautifully through the long August evening. The young off-earthers sang and romped and played games—all but Gnish the Vza, who lay panting in the heat, and the spidery Martian, who was not built for Terran gravity.
Alice Riegel looked at the darkening sky. The Gordon-ian was getting out of hand, prancing around and nipping the other guests to get them to chase it. Twice Norman Riegel had ordered it down from the high-diving tower of the empty pool.
Lightning flashed and thunder growled. Zeu, the Morenan, threw its tentacles around Alice Riegel in terror. She called: “Dear! We’d better take them inside.”
Riegel looked skyward. “Not yet; it won’t rain for another half-hour.”
Meehan’s gang watched the proceedings through a privet-hedge on the grounds. While Mrs. Scarron lived, her gardener had kept the hedge in trim; but now it had shot up to a height of ten feet. From where they stood, the youths could see the mob of young extraterrestrials playing behind the house—but not the kitchen door, which was hidden by a comer of the rambling edifice.
The gang had arrived late because Kraus had not appeared at the rendezous, and they had gone to fetch him. In fact, he was afraid of the consequences of the raid, and less avid for aggression and destruction than the others. He had hoped they would go without him. But when they appeared at his home, fear of losing status as a gang-member led him to join them.
“Shall we get ’em now?” whispered Fisher, swinging his bat in little circles. “Shall we?”
“Wait till it gets darker,” said Meehan. “They’d know us, even with masks, in this light.”
“Gonna rain soon,” said Snow. “Then they’ll go in.”
“Keep your shirt on, spud,” said Meehan. “Who’s running this?”
“Boy, I’d sure like a crack at that Martian,” said Carmichael. “He’d go splush like a bug.”
“He’s a buggy bug all right,” said Snow, suppressing a giggle at his own wit.
The off-earthers played musical chairs, all but the Martian, the Vza, and Kranakiloa the Gordonian. Kranakiloa was chasing its tail in circles, as its mind could not be kept on any one thing for more than a few seconds.
Thunder came louder. Though the sun had not long set,, the clouds darkened the scene almost to full nocturnal gloom. Doc Lofting, wearing a butler’s apron, called from the kitchen door: “Hey, Norman! Better start herding ’em in. I’ll dish up the ice-cream and cake.” Those off-earthers who could not eat these substances were to get their native foods.
“We gotta go now!” wailed Fisher.
“Okay, put the bags on,” said Meehan. Each youth produced a paper bag with holes cut for eyes, pulled it over his head, and fastened it in place with a rubber band around his neck.
“Hurry up!” groaned Fisher.
“Ready?” said Meehan. “Let’s go!”
The Riegels were herding the last of the extraterrestrials in the kitchen door when the five youths pushed through the hedge, breaking down some of the privet-plants, and ran towards the back of the mansion. They ran quietly, stopping and gripping their bats. As they rounded the comer of the house they could see the kitchen door and the tail-end of the procession going in.
At that instant, Kranakiloa ducked under Riegel’s arm and bolted out the door, screeching: “You catch me!” It loped across the back lawn towards the swimming-pool. The first drops fell.
“I will getting him, Profethor,” said Tsitsav, the young Ahlian. He pushed past Riegel.
Kranakiloa headed for the high-diving tower. Fisher pointed at the long dark shape rippling past in front of the gang.
“Let’s get that one!” he said. “He’s by himself.”
“Come back!” cried Tsitsav.
Kranakiloa glanced around. There was a bright flash and a crash of thunder; Kranakiloa scooted for a patch of shrubbery.
“Hey! Who you are?” said Tsitsav to the gang as they converged from different directions on the track of the fleeing Gordonian. The gang slowed uncertainly. Tsitsav danced around to place himself between them and Kranakiloa, who had vanished into the bushes.
“You go away!” said Tsitsav. “I am responsible for him.”
Meehan and Fisher stepped forward, swinging their clubs. Tsitsav advanced too, baring his teeth, though he weighed only half what they did.
There was an instant of furious whirling action, a thudding of bats in the hands of five brawny adolescents, and then they stepped back. Meehan wrung blood from his right arm, Which had been gashed by Tsitsav’s teeth. Tsitsav lay on the sward, his limbs thrashing and tail flopping.
The sound of footsteps brought the boys around. Riegel and Lofting were bearing down on them, the latter armed with a rolling-pin. The Meehan gang, despite their advantage in weight and armament, raced off into the darkness, scattering. The older men ran after them until they were winded and the youths had outrun them and vanished.
“C’mon back—see if he’s alive—” gasped Lofting.
He and Riegel returned, breathing heavily. The rain started to come down hard. Riegel said: “Did you see—any of their faces?”
“No—they had some kind of mask—or hood.”
Riegel raised his voice over the storm. “I can guess who they were.”
“So—can I but—you’d have a hell of a time proving it.”
The got to where Tsitsav lay. Lofting bent over and said: “Get my bag. You’ll find it inside the front door. And tell Alice to keep the others in.”
When Riegel got back, Lofting looked up at him, water dripping from his goatee. “I’ll check, but it’ll just be a formality.”
“Dead?”
“Good and dead. Skull smashed.”
“Isn’t there—I mean, he’s more like a reptile, and t
hey’re pretty tenacious…
“No. His brains are squashed and his heart’s stopped.” Lofting got instruments out of the bag.
“Shall I call police?”
“Just a minute. Let me think,” said Lofting. He continued his examination. The downpour slackened.
At last Lofting spoke: “If we call the cops, they’ll arrest our young friends and there’ll be a big stink. But nobody’ll be convicted. We can’t swear we recognized anybody, because of those bags over their heads. Even if we could, you know what juries are. Electrocute one of our poor dear boys for socking some slimy reptile from outer space?”
“We have to start somewhere with equal enforcement of law.”
“What law? The state legislature debated a bill to count off-earthers as people at the last session, but did nothing. Some politicians used just that argument about our poor dear boys. No doubt such a law will be passed, but not in time to help Tsitsav.”
“Well, do we just let those little obscenities get away with it?”
“I’m thinking.”
“What in hell shall I tell Uzhegh?”
Lofting continued: “If this comes out, it’ll break up the Conference. The Ahlians won’t sign the Constitution—not that I’d blame them—and a lot of the others will pull out too. Away goes interplanetary union! That’s too important. I don’t think it’s worth revenge for Tsitsav’s murder, even if we could get revenge.”
“Well then, what? Shall we pretend it was an accident?”
“You’re catching on, Norm. First I’ll heave Tsitsav into the pool.” The body flopped on to the concrete below. “Now let’s catch that fool Gordonian. Maybe he doesn’t know enough to spoil our scheme.”
They dragged a whimpering Kranakiloa out of the bushes. The Gordonian could hardly talk intelligently—not that its talk was ever very intelligent. All they got from it was that it had seen Tsitsav running after it, had started for the shrubs, and then had been frightened out of its few wits by thunder and hidden itself.
“Go on in the house, Krana,” said Riegel, “and get your ice-cream and cake.” When the Gordonian had left, he said to the doctor: “It apparently never even saw the five masked figures. Now what?”
“We’ll say Tsitsav climbed the tower, looking for Kranakiloa, and fell into the empty pool.”
“So we did,” said Lofting. “There was a lot of grief and sympathy but no hostility.”
“But how did that land you here?” asked Mpanza. “Couldn’t stand it where I was. The Riegels got disgusted with Far Hills and moved away too. I stayed for a few years, watching Meehan’s gang sneer when they saw me. They knew I knew. It hurt my professional conscience to fake the death-certificate; and it hurt it even more to let those five get away scot-free. Young Tsitsav, under his scales, was a good person.
“Well, I began hitting this stuff more than I should, and my practice went to pot. So I came out here, as it’s hard to get a qualified medico to serve the Embassy on Ahlia. If you wonder why I like to do favors for the Ahlians, who aren’t very chummy, it’s to try to make things up to them.”
Okmen said: “If the bottle bothers you, you can fix that by being psyched.”
“But don’t you see, their modem techniques drag everything out of you? How long could I have hidden the true story of Tsitsav?”
“Oh. But now—”
“Now I don’t give a damn any more.”
“Well, what did happen to Meehan’s gang?”
“Oh, Meehan was killed in a knife-fight over a girl. Carmichael went to jail for burglary, and Fisher was killed trying to fly his family’s plane under a bridge. The other two grew up to be more or less normal adults. A few years later, the current childrearing fad changed from progressive-permissive to rigidly disciplinary. So, the last I heard, the kids were being kept under fair control. But from my point of view, the harm had been done. Charlie! Pour me another, please.”
DO IT YOURSELF
by Milton Lesser
Seething, billowing fog greeted the rising sun as Robert McPeek shipped the oars of his dinghy and ran it aground on the east side of the river.
As much as McPeek hated the fog, he had to be grateful for it this once. With its help, he’d been able to lose the New Rochelle vigilantes in northern Manhattan. He wondered if they were still looking for him over by the North River, on the wrong side of the island. He shrugged. They were invading Manhattan territory and they knew it. If they hadn’t already, they would have to give up the chase with the light of the new day. Besides, vigilantes distrusted one another and usually ended their pursuit in a senseless free-for-all. For the time being, at least, McPeek was safe.
He turned once and saw the upper half of the old U.N. Building—now the East Manhattan Home Workshop Center—rising ghostlike from the fog. Then he forgot all about the fog and the home workshop weather-makers who sowed their clouds from jerry-rigged planes, and dueled with artificial local high and low pressure areas like Cavaliers with swords—thus bringing the fog—and set out across the deserted wastelands of Long Island City, looking for work.
There was no work in Long Island City, of course. Someday in the future, the farms which had been moving east across the flat terrain of Long Island for a generation and more would encroach upon the gaunt, silent buildings and rat-infested rubble of Long Island City. Right now, though, the place was virtually deserted.
As the fog began to rise, leaving a last few tendrils on the ground to be dissipated by the rising sun, McPeek saw the scavengers, the homeless bags of rag, skin and bone who were the dregs of the old industrial society and hadn’t yet been absorbed by the new rural America. They were pitiful creatures, looting what was left of the old abandoned warehouses. No one bothered them because no one else wanted the loot. Until the farmers moved as far west as the river, they were safe. Years or even decades, perhaps. Maybe it was better to be a scavenger, thought McPeek. His margin of safety might be measured in hours. Or minutes.
“Hello!” McPeek shouted as one of the scavengers, a grubby old woman in tattered cloak and shawl, came close. “I’m looking for Harry Crawford’s farm.”
The crone looked at McPeek from out of watery eyes, deep-sunk in folds of puckered skin. “Do which?” she croaked.
“The Crawford farm. It’s right on the edge of Long Island City, I think.”
“I don’t have no truck with farmers.” She looked as if she were waiting for McPeek to pull a weapon on her.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said. “You can save me a lot of time if you help me locate the farm. I’ll pay you.”
“Money? You can keep it.”
McPeek had seen no money in two years. He shook his head, opened his traveling bag and withdrew a bolt of drab homespun he had received as partial payment on his New Rochelle job. “This,” said McPeek. The material was drab but looked thick, felt heavy and might be warm. With winter coming, the crone eyed it greedily.
“Be a farm not two miles down the street, youngster. It’s only one.”
“You’re sure?” McPeek said suspiciously. The crone could be making that up. Her eyes said she wanted the bolt of fabric, and two miles would be a long way for McPeek to come back running in case she had lied.
“That’s the only farm I know of in this here area.”
McPeek shrugged. He didn’t need the bolt of homespun, except for barter. If the old woman were lying, he could chalk it up to overhead and find the Crawford farm on his own. He tossed her the bolt and watched her clutching at it with claw-like fingers, holding it close to her watery eyes and examining the warp and woof of the fabric. Satisfied, she hobbled away across the rubble, big black rats squeaking and fleeing from her path. She ignored them completely, but they unnerved McPeek. He set out for the Crawford farm, keeping to the middle of the cracked, weathered asphalt street.
A young man with a shotgun ready on the crook of his arm met McPeek at the gate of the Crawford enclosure. A nervous type, McPeek decided, tall and thin with an anxious harried loo
k on his face and sinewy arms protruding from the short sleeves of the homespun shirt
“What is it?” the young man growled.
“I’m looking for Harry Crawford.”
“Is that so?”
“He’s expecting me.” McPeek reached into his pocket and got out a hand-printed card. He’d been right about the young man. The shotgun came down and pointed squarely at his chest until the young man saw it was only a business card he was fetching. The young man took the card, read it, then, following the instructions printed on it, lit a match and burned the card.
“This is the Crawford farm, isn’t it?” McPeek asked, suddenly alarmed because the young man just stood there staring at him.
“Yeah. Yeah, sure. I never saw none of your kind before, that’s all. I’m Gil Crawford, his oldest son.”
McPeek sighed and relaxed. “Let’s go on inside,” he suggested. A moment later, Gil Crawford followed him inside the barbed wire enclosure.
A fantastic airplane of struts and wires and canvas—and probably spit and string, too, thought McPeek—skipped and sputtered through the air overhead. “My brother Paul’s going up to sow some weather,” Gil Crawford explained.
“Can he get enough altitude?”
Gil Crawford spat at his feet. “Got the plans in the Home Workshop Center. Took us two years to build. It ought to be good.”
“I’m sorry,” McPeek said. Maybe that was why he had never settled down on a farm of his own, he thought. You could make fun of a man’s wife, or go to the other extreme and compromise her. You could laugh at his looks, or debate the fierce pride he took in his personal religion, or take liberties with his hospitality months on end. But criticize a product of his home workshop, and you had an enemy.
“There’s Dad now,” Gil Crawford said, pointing.
McPeek stared in that direction. The Crawford farmhouse was a small, one-story shack with sagging walls and unpaned windows. Evidently the Crawfords hadn’t been here long. The house was always the last thing a man worked on.
Beyond the shabby house was a great sprawling structure of glass and cement block. Glass brick flanked the polished, ornate door in a decorative panel on either side. One of the Crawford family—it was usually a girl, McPeek knew—had painted murals on the cement block walls of the building. The murals had been executed with only a modicum of artistic talent but the labor which had gone into them must have been enormous. The murals depicted awkward, stick-like figures which McPeek assumed to be members of the Crawford family at work within the giant cement block structure, the workshop.
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