The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  Shadows were blue in the hollows of his gaunt cheeks. “It won’t work. They’ll smell a rat when you show up there without this family you invented.”

  “The only thing I invented,” I chuckled as once more I picked up the phone, “Was that stuff about Helen’s being a nurse—Oh, Jen. Will you ask Mrs. Clark to step in here, please?” I cradled the instrument. “She’s been Martha. Propper’s assistant on the Woman’s Page since about two weeks after you left us.”

  “You never told me you had a daughter.”

  “I never had one, till Kay Clark adopted me as her grandfather and her mother seconded the motion. Quite something, that youngster. She—But here’s Helen.”

  As she pulled the door shut behind her, she saw George. Her irises, a luminous brown flecked with gold, dilated slightly and for the briefest instant breath was caught between the warm, red bows of her lips. Then she turned to me.

  “You asked to have me come in?”

  Helen is long-flanked, slender, but her voice is a deep contralto underlaid by a vague huskiness that pulls at my old heartstrings. “I did.” Her dark gray suit was professional enough looking, in spite of the sweater that molded her curves, but something would have to be done about that unruly tousle of chestnut hair. “This is George Carson, Helen. I think you’ve heard me speak of him.”

  “Once or twice.” The smile with which she acknowledged the introduction was frank. Friendly. “Did you know, Lieutenant, that not a single stick of literate copy has appeared in the Globe since you beat your typewriter into a torpedo tube?”

  “I shouldn’t wonder,” he said, abstractedly looking at his wrist-watch.

  I watched the girl’s upper lip start to curl, said, “Helen! You’re going up to Westchester with us this afternoon. Right now.”

  “I couldn’t possibly. I’ve got four more ways of disguising watercress as food to think up before deadline, and a column of lovelorn blah—”

  “Phone Kay’s school to have her ready for us to pick up.” I pushed creakingly to my feet. “I’m going downstairs to Circulation, to wangle the loan of a car out of Ramsey. Meet me out front in ten minutes.”

  Amusement crinkled the corners of Helen’s eyes and mouth. “Perfect!” she exclaimed, applauding with silent palms.

  “Call yourselves reporters?” snarled Scrooge, the demon editor. “Come with me and I’ll show you how to get the story.”

  “Right. A story the radio won’t beat us to, for once.”

  “It is—Oh, no.” Her face fell. “No, you’re kidding me. If it was, really, you wouldn’t want Kay along.”

  “Kay’s the key to the whole thing,” I said from the door. I was to recall saying that, in a moment of horror. “George will explain, while you’re getting your duds.”

  I stopped a moment to fix things up with Helen’s boss. Martha’s never liked me, but there’s one advantage in being around a shop as long as I have. You know where all the skeletons are buried.

  CHAPTER III

  I don’t know any landscape in the world more nostalgically lovely than New York’s Westchester County. The rolling hills, brilliant with soft green flame, the blue-gray haze in the hollows, the limpid chatter of tumbling small streams—

  You can have your Cote d’Azur before the war, your Isle of Capri. I’ll take the Sawmill River Road in April.

  I was driving, Kay was a vibrant little bundle of restlessness beside me. We’d told her only that when we got where we were going, we would pretend that I was her real grandfather, her mother an army nurse, and that we were looking for a place for her to live. “It’s something for the paper,” Helen had explained, “And so it’s not really a lie but just making believe.”

  Which bit of sophistry had at least eased the mother’s conscience, however it had been accepted by the child.

  She was a brat, but a nice one. A sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of a tiny, tip-tilted nose, close-cropped hair the color of honey—one sometimes surprised a wistfulness in Kay’s pert countenance that vanished the instant she knew herself observed. Left almost from infancy to her own devices, and the scant supervision of such maids-by-the-day as a very slim purse could afford, she was altogether self-sufficient yet on occasion she could display a surprising capacity for deep affection.

  Just why she’d chosen to extend this to the crusty, cynical old curmudgeon I am, I never pretended to comprehend.

  “Don’t forget, Pop.” George broke in on my thoughts. “You turn off into a side road, left, just beyond that curve ahead.”

  “I’m driving this car,” I growled, “And I don’t need any help.” I glanced up into the rear-view mirror, discreetly tilted to reflect the rear compartment. He sat bolt upright at one end of the seat, expressionless except for the throb, throb of his temple. Helen was in the other corner, as far as she could get from him.

  I’d maneuvered to get them back there together, with the disingenuous statement that the car had been loaned to me on my express promise that I alone would drive it, and the help of Kay’s insistence on riding up front. I had my trouble for my pains. Helen’s half-hearted attempts at conversation had elicited only monosyllabic grunts from her companion, and she’d finally sunk into a brown study of her own.

  I couldn’t blame George. Peter was more to him than his son. He was the living memory of the wife whose death, six years ago, had come near to breaking the man.

  Slowing on the long curve and watching for a chance to break through the opposing flow of traffic to the side road whose narrow entrance was banked with azaleas, I decided that there must be at least ten years between those two. Helen had been eighteen when she’d contracted the unfortunate marriage that had lasted only long enough to produce Kay. The girl had had a tough time, but she’d won—

  The azaleas brushed the car’s sides and their fragrance filled it. “Oh, shucks, gran’pa Harry,” Kay pouted. “Now I can’t watch it any more.”

  “See what, grandchild Kay?”

  “A tomahawk, I think it was; I’d have been sire in another second.”

  “That you’d seen a tomahawk?” I teased. “I didn’t know there were any more Indians in these parts.”

  She giggled, delighted at my mistake. “A Curtiss Tomahawk, gran’pa. A pursuit plane. It was flying around and around, way high up, and all of a sudden it started to fly straight, like the pilot saw something. Do you think it was Jap bombers he saw, maybe? Do you think maybe they’re coming to bomb New York and kill a lot of people and—?”

  “Stop it, Kay!” Helen’s voice was sharper than I’d ever heard it to her daughter. “Stop it this instant!” And then she was apologizing. “All this is so peaceful, I’d forgotten all about the war. Please find something else to talk about, sweetheart.”

  “Why should she?” George demanded harshly. “What else is there to talk about? Or think about?”

  She twisted to him. “But not the children, Lieutenant Carson. Please. Not the children.”

  He looked at her, not really seeing her. “Do you think you can hide from them the filthy world we’ve made for them to live in?”

  “We ought to try—”

  “Ought we? Listen, Mrs. Clark. In the lifeboat we picked up last night there was a refugee boy, six, or seven years old by his size. His size was the only way you could tell anything about him. He’d been burned—They told me at the Naval Hospital that he will live, that they’re hopeful he will not be badly scarred. His body, they meant. What about the scars on his soul, do you think?”

  Reaching brush whispered along the sides of the car but within the car there was only the hiss of Helen’s pulled-in breath.

  “Listen,” George said again. “I used to read to my son from the great books of all time, I used to take him to the art galleries, the concert halls, teaching him what beauty man can create. Other times we would go where some skyscraper, some bridge, was being erected, some tunnel dug, learning what strength and usefulness man can build. And if I happened to write a line that sang, a pa
ragraph that shone, I carried it home to Peter in my hands, and he was very proud of his father.”

  He laughed; shortly, bitterly. “What have I now to show my son, to bring home to him? Congratulate your old man, Pete. Today I dropped a depth bomb and blasted a submarine—”

  “Gee!” Kay broke in, wide-eyed. “Gee, did you? That’s swell. Was it a German one?”

  “Kay! You—”

  “No, Mrs. Clark. It’s no use.” George came around to her daughter, his lips—only his lips—smiling. “Yes, it was a German, Kay. We know, because some things came up to the top of the water, splintered wood, shattered—Well, things that float.

  “One was a kit box that must have belonged to one of the sailors. It was watertight and among the other things in it there was a picture of a blonde little girl, about your age only she had a little button of a nose and pigtails. On the picture was written, ‘Komm bald deinem Elsa zuruck, Vater,’ which in English means, ‘Come back soon to your Elsa, father,’ but Elsa’s father won’t ever come back to her because I killed him. Isn’t that a pity?”

  Kay nodded, speechless for once.

  “Oh,” George exclaimed. “I forgot! We’re certain it was that very submarine which torpedoed the ship that had almost brought the little boy I was talking about safe to America. It might even have been Elsa’s father who aimed the torpedo.”

  “That’s different. I’m glad you killed him. I’m awful glad.”

  There was an incoherent sound in Helen’s throat, then—“You—You’re despicable, George Carson!”

  He swung back to her. “Of course I am. So are we all. We’re all trapped in a despicable, brutal world and there’s no escape; no longer the slightest possibility of escape for me or you or Kay or Pete—Pete,” he repeated, the name a groan, and he sank back into his corner, hands closing into tight fists on his thighs.

  After that there was no more talk, except for Kay’s chatter. The road climbed steadily through a rustling, second-growth thicket and for all the sign of human habitation we might have been five thousand miles from New York instead of fifty. We crested a hill, glimpsed the distant Tappan Zee, in the sky above its silver shimmer a V of black planes flying South. The woods closed around us once more as the road dipped into leafy shadow.

  My mind clung to those planes. There had been a waspish sort of haste about their flight, an odd sense of urgency. They were ours, of course. They must be ours. If they were not, the guns I knew to be hidden all through this placid countryside would be blasting—Light struck through slim, young boles ahead and I started braking.

  I checked the figures on my speedometer. “Thirteen miles from the Sawmill River. This must be it.”

  George had his car door open before the car had stopped. I caught up with him and we made as little noise as we could, working through underbrush. We reached the edge of the thicket and peered through a green screen of brambles.

  A lush meadow sloped gently away from before us, affording pasturage to a half-dozen brown and white cows. In the hollow below was a grove of tall old maples and beneath their leafy spread nestled a low-roofed small house, its shingled walls mottled gray and brown and velvet green by moss and weather.

  “Yes,” George breathed. “That’s it.”

  The sun struck through the trees, brightening the rear of the house and the shadows it cast were deep purple—George’s fingers dug into my arm, bruising. “Look there, Pop. In that bush.” His grip transmitted to me the tremor that ran through him. “See it?”

  I located what he meant, one of those model planes boys build and fly. It was caught, nose down, in a welter of thorny withes not five yards from us, rain-spattered, stained by mold but seemingly intact. “That’s Pete’s,” George whispered. “That design painted on the fuselage, it’s one he worked out for himself and he put it on all his planes.”

  “So what? We know he was here. What we’re out to find out is if he’s here now.”

  “We’ve found out. Pete would never have let that plane rot like that if he could help it. Even when one of his models smashed up, he always salvaged what parts he could for the next one. He isn’t here and he hasn’t been here for weeks.”

  It was abruptly chilly, there at the edge of the woods. “Okay,” I said. “You wait here while we go down and find out where he is, and why.”

  It took almost physical persuasion to get him to agree.

  CHAPTER IV

  The room, extending all across the front of the house, was low-ceiled, its woodwork dark with the mellow patina of the years but dancing flames in a fieldstone fireplace, a missing of flowers in the deep-silled, many-paned windows, made it very cheerful. The furniture, much used but not shabby, had a timeless grace of line that made altogether appropriate the juxtaposition of, say, the plum-colored Georgian sofa where Kay sat demurely beside her, mother with the Hepplewhite chair Mary Barret occupied.

  “Yes, Mrs. Clark.” Her low voice was as musical as I’d heard it in the telephone. “John and I always have loved children, though we’ve never had any of our own.”

  “I suppose that was what prompted this plan of yours.”

  “Yes,” John Barret replied. “We wanted to help, and it seemed the best way.”

  He stood behind his wife, blue-veined hand on her shoulder in an unschooled gesture of affection. As so often happens when two people have lived long together, there was a definite physical resemblance between the white-haired couple. Both had the same broad, thoughtful brows, the same clear transparency of skin that age had not so much wrinkled as brushed with a tracery of fine lines that crinkled with kindly humor at the corners of bright little eyes and emphasized the sensitiveness of thin, pale lips.

  “The only way we could.”

  “It’s a wonderful way,” Helen smiled. “I was at my wit’s ends what to do.”

  About both the old people, she in her modest black silk dress with its relieving, creamy lace at the throat, he in a well-worn velvet smoking jacket open to reveal a high-cut, lapelled vest and Ascot cravat, there was a fragile, almost spiritual quality utterly disarming to anyone but a newspaperman who cynically recalled a certain woman convicted for swindling her fellow church members, the sanctified countenance of a certain mass poisoner.

  The wall opposite that through which he had entered was, save for a single, closed door, completely covered with books and I was putting this circumstance to good use. No book-lover could find anything alarming in a visitor’s browsing along his shelves but such a random occupation can cover a very thorough visual scrutiny of a room.

  This one was warmly lived in, but nowhere was there any hint of the kind of disorder with which even the best behaved boy of twelve inevitably betrays his presence in a home.

  “At my wits’ ends,” Helen repeated. “Nurses are needed so desperately with our Expeditionary Forces, but I have a duty to my daughter too. She did not ask me to bring her into the world.”

  “No,” Barret agreed with the cliché. “She did not. A mother’s first duty is to her child, but I’m positive Kay will be very happy with us.”

  “I’m sure of that, now that I’ve met you both. There’s only one thing that still troubles me—Won’t my little girl be lonely here, without any other children for company?”

  “No,” the woman responded, with assurance. “I can guarantee that she will not be lonely.”

  “Then you do have another child here!” Clever girl! “I suppose he’s at school?” Neat. Very neat. “Will he be home soon enough for us to meet him?” She’d rocked them right back on their heels.

  If she had, Mary Barret made a quick recovery.

  “Unfortunately, our little house is too small for more than one youngster—but I want you to see the rest of it.” She rose, held out a hand to Kay. “Come, my dear, and see the lovely room that will be yours if your mother decides to let you stay with us for a while. You’d like her to, wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes!” Kay jumped up and came eagerly to her. “You’re awful nice
.” No child could simulate her glowing enthusiasm. “And he is too. You’re almost as nice as Moms and gran’pa Harry.”

  Don’t ever tell me again, I thought, that a child’s instinct is unerring.

  Helen got to her feet to join them and John Barret came toward me. “Ah, Mr. Gatlin,” he smiled. “I see you’ve found the most prized of my possessions.”

  “The—” I glanced down at the book in my hand. It was open to a page of abstruse mathematical formulae. “I’m afraid this is quite meaningless to me.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder,” he chuckled. “There are supposed to be only a dozen men in the world who can really understand it. But have you seen the flyleaf?”

  “Why no.” I turned to it, found an inscription in an angular, very foreign hand. “Mmm. Most interesting. ‘To John Barret, who has progressed much farther along the path we both tread than I can ever hope to.’”

  The signature was that of the foremost physicist of our day.

  “He was altogether too kind when he wrote that,” the old man murmured. “All I’ve done is to find a practical application of his discovery of the essential identity of Space and Time, Matter and Energy. I—”

  “John, dear,” his wife’s gentle tones intervened. “Don’t you think Mr. Gatlin would like to look around with us? I’m as proud of my kitchen,” she favored me with that vague, sweet smile of hers, “As John is of his books.”

  “You have every right to be,” Helen’s voice came from somewhere beyond the now open door in the book-lined wall. “Just look at this, Father!”

  I crossed a dim hallway, went in through another doorway. The white-tiled room was walled on one side by enameled cupboards, chromium trimmed. A solid-fronted counter ran the full length of the other side, its grayish monel metal glowing in the sunlight that poured through a gaily curtained window open to the rustle of the maples and smells of spring.