She leaned down to kiss me and across the street the crowd cheered loudly and ribaldly at the kiss.
“My foot is stuck,” I said.
“Well, pull it loose,” she told me, smiling through tears of happiness.
I tried to pull it loose and couldn’t. It hurt when I pulled on it. She got up and went to the fence and tried to work it free, but it still stayed stuck.
“I think the ankle’s swelling,” she said and sat down upon the sidewalk, laughing. “The two of us,” she cried. “We have something with our ankles. First mine, now yours.”
“Your ankle is all right,” I said.
“They had magic at the castle,” she told me. “A most wonderful old magician with a long white beard and a funny cap and gown with stars all over them. It was the nicest place I’ve ever seen. So genteel and polite. I could have stayed forever if you had been there with me. And the unicorn. He was the nicest, sweetest thing. You saw the unicorn?”
“I saw the unicorn,” I said.
“Horton, who are those men coming down across the lawn?”
I had been so busy looking at her and so glad that she was back, that I’d not been looking at the lawn. When I did look, I saw them. The President was in the lead, running toward the fence, and behind him streamed the other people who’d been in the room.
The President reached the fence and stopped. He regarded me with something less than friendliness.
“Horton,” he demanded, “what the hell is going on out here?”
“My foot is caught,” I said.
“To hell with your foot,” he said. “That isn’t what I mean. I swear I saw a knight and a unicorn.”
The others were crowding close up against the fence.
A guard shouted from up by the gate. “Hey! Everybody look! There’s a car coming down the street!”
Sure enough, there was.
“But what about his foot?” Kathy asked, indignantly. “We can’t get it loose and his ankle’s swelling. I’m afraid it’s sprained.”
“Someone had better get a doctor,” said the Secretary of State. “If the cars are running, the phones may be working, too. How are you feeling, Horton?”
“I’m all right,” I said.
“And get someone down here with a hacksaw,” said the President. “For the love of God, we got to saw his foot loose.”
So I stayed there on the sidewalk and Kathy sat beside me, waiting for the doctor and the hacksaw man.
Disregarding the crowd inside the fence, some of the White House squirrels came sneaking out on the sidewalk to see what was going on. They sat up most daintily, with their forepaws crossed upon their chest, begging for a handout.
And the cars, more and more of them, went on rolling past.
About the Author
During his fifty-five-year career, Clifford D. Simak produced some of the most iconic science fiction stories ever written. Born in 1904 on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, Simak got a job at a small-town newspaper in 1929 and eventually became news editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, writing fiction in his spare time.
Simak was best known for the book City, a reaction to the horrors of World War II, and for his novel Way Station. In 1953 City was awarded the International Fantasy Award, and in following years, Simak won three Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award. In 1977 he became the third Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and before his death in 1988, he was named one of three inaugural winners of the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1970 by Clifford D. Simak
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1326-0
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Out of Their Minds Page 19