Collected Fiction

by Theodore R. Cogswell

  “Why not now?” Porgie asked stubbornly. “With eagles.”

  “Because we’re not ready,” Mr. Wickens snapped. “Look at mind-talk. It was only thirty years ago that the proper incantations were worked out, and even now there are only a few who have the skill to talk across the miles by just thinking out their words. Time, Porgie—it’s going to take time. We were placed here to learn the Way, and everything that might divert us from the search is evil. Man can’t walk two roads at once. If he tries, he’ll split himself in half.”

  “Maybe so,” said Porgie. “But birds get over the Wall and they don’t know any spells. Look, Mr. Wickens, if everything is magic, how come magic won’t work on everything? Like this, for instance—”

  He took a shiny quartz pebble out of his pocket and laid it on the desk.

  Nudging it with his finger, he said:

  “Stone fly,

  Rise on high,

  Over cloud

  And into sky.”

  The stone didn’t move.

  “You see, sir? If words work on broomsticks, they should work on stones, too.”

  Mr. Wickens stared at the stone. Suddenly it quivered and jumped into the air.

  “That’s different,” said Porgie. “You took hold of it with your mind. Anybody can do that with little things. What I want to know is why the words won’t work by themselves.”

  “We just don’t know enough yet,” said Mr. Wickens impatiently. He released the stone and it clicked on the desktop. “Every year we learn a little more. Maybe by your children’s time we’ll find the incantation that will make everything lift.” He sniffed. “What do you want to make stones fly for, anyhow? You get into enough trouble just throwing them.”

  PORGIE’S brow furrowed.

  “There’s a difference between making a thing do something, like when I lift it with my hand or mind, and putting a spell on it so it does the work by itself, like a broomstick.”

  There was a long silence in the study as each thought his own thoughts.

  Finally Mr. Wickens said, “I don’t want to bring up the unpleasant past, Porgie, but it would be well to remember what happened to your father. His doubts came later than yours—for a while he was my most promising student—but they were just as strong.”

  He opened a desk drawer, fumbled in it for a moment, and brought out a sheaf of papers yellow with age. “This is the paper that damned him—An Enquiry into Non-Magical Methods of Levitation. He wrote it to qualify for his Junior Adeptship.” He threw the paper down in front of Porgie as if the touch of it defiled his fingers.

  Porgie started to pick it up.

  Mr. Wickens roared, “Don’t touch it! It contains blasphemy!”

  Porgie snatched back his hand. He looked at the top paper and saw a neat sketch of something that looked like a bird—except “that it had two sets of wings, one in front and one in back.

  Mr. Wickens put the papers back in the desk drawer. His disapproving eyes caught and held Porgie’s as he said, “If you want to go the way of your father, none of us can stop you.” His voice rose sternly. “But there is one who can . . . Remember the Black Man, Porgie, for his walk is terrible! There are fires in his eyes and no spell may defend you against him. When he came for your father, there was midnight at noon and a high screaming. When the sunlight came back, they were gone—and it is not good to think where.”

  Mr. Wickens shook his head as if overcome at the memory and pointed toward the door. “Think before you act. Porgie. Think well!”

  Porgie was thinking as he left, but more about the sketch in his father’s paper than about the Black Man.

  THE orange crate with the two boards across it for wings had looked something like his father’s drawing, but appearances had been deceiving. Porgie sat on the back steps of his house feeling sorry for himself and alternately rubbing two tender spots on his anatomy. Though they were at opposite ends, and had different immediate causes, they both grew out of the same thing. His bottom was sore as a result of a liberal application of his uncle’s hand. His swollen nose came from an aerial crack-up.

  He’d hoisted his laboriously contrived machine to the top of the woodshed and taken a flying leap in it. The expected soaring glide hadn’t materialized. Instead, there had been a sickening fall, a splintering crash, a momentary whirling of stars as his nose banged into something hard.

  He wished now he hadn’t invited Bull Pup to witness his triumph, because the story’d gotten right back to his uncle—with the usual results.

  Just to be sure the lesson was pounded home, his uncle had taken away his broomstick for a week—and just so Porgie wouldn’t sneak it out, he’d put a spell on it before locking it away in the closet.

  “Didn’t feel like flying, anyway,” Porgie said sulkily to himself, but the pretense wasn’t strong enough to cover up the loss. The gang was going over to Red Rocks to chase bats as soon as the sun went down, and he wanted to go along.

  He shaded his eyes and looked toward the western Wall as he heard a distant halloo of laughing voices. They were coming in high and fast on their broomsticks. He went back to the woodshed so they wouldn’t see him. He was glad he had when they swung low and began to circle the house yelling for him and Bull Pup. They kept hooting and shouting until Homer flew out of his bedroom window to join them.

  “Porgie can’t come,” he yelled. “He got licked and Dad took his broom away from him. Come on, gang!”

  With a quick looping climb, he took the lead and they went hedgehopping off toward Red Rocks. Bull Pup had been top dog ever since he got his big stick. He’d zoom up to five hundred feet, hang from his broom by his knees, and then let go. Down he’d plummet, his arms spread and body arched as if he were making a swan dive—and then, when the ground wasn’t more than a hundred feet away, he’d call and his broomstick would arrow down after him and slide between his legs, lifting him up in a great sweeping arc that barely cleared the treetops.

  “Showoff!” muttered Porgie and shut the woodshed door on the vanishing stick-riders.

  Over on the work bench sat the little model of paper and sticks that had got him into trouble in the first place. He picked it up and gave it a quick shove into the air with his hands. It dove toward the floor and then, as it picked up speed, tilted its nose toward the ceiling and made a graceful loop in the air. Leveling off, it made a sudden veer to the left and crashed against the woodshed wall. A wing splintered.

  Porgie went to pick it up. “Maybe what works for little things doesn’t work for big ones,” he thought sourly. The orange crate and the crossed boards had been as close an approximation of the model as he had been able to make. Listlessly, he put the broken glider back on his work bench and went outside. Maybe Mr. Wickens and his uncle and all the rest were right. Maybe there was only one road to follow.

  He did a little thinking about it and came to a conclusion that brought forth a secret grin. He’d do it their way—but there wasn’t any reason why he couldn’t hurry things up a bit. Waiting for his grandchildren to work things out wasn’t getting him over the Wall.

  Tomorrow, after school, he’d start working on his new idea, and this time maybe he’d find the way.

  IN the kitchen, his uncle and aunt were arguing about him. Porgie paused in the hall that led to the front room and listened.

  “Do you think I like to lick the kid? I’m not some kind of an ogre. It hurt me more than it hurt him.”

  “I notice you were able to sit down afterward,” said Aunt Olga dryly.

  “Well, what else could I do? Mr. Wickens didn’t come right out and say so, but he hinted that if Porgie didn’t stop mooning around, he might be dropped from school altogether. He’s having an unsettling effect on the other kids. Damn it, Olga, I’ve done everything for that boy I’ve done for my own son. What do you want me to do, stand back and let him end up like your brother?”

  “You leave my brother out of this! No matter what Porgie does, you don’t have to beat him. He’s still only a
little boy.”

  There was a loud snort. “In case you’ve forgotten, dear, he had his thirteenth birthday last March. He’ll be a man pretty soon.”

  “Then why don’t you have a man-to-man talk with him?”

  “Haven’t I tried? You know what happens every time. He gets off with those crazy questions and ideas of his and I lose my temper and pretty soon we’re back where we started.” He threw up his hands. “I don’t know what to do with him. Maybe that fall he had this afternoon will do some good. I think he had a scare thrown into him that he won’t forget for a long time. Where’s Bull Pup?”

  “Can’t you call him Homer? It’s bad enough having his friends calling him by that horrible name. He went out to Red Rocks with the other kids. They’re having a bat hunt or something.”

  Porgie’s uncle grunted and got up. “I don’t see why that kid can’t stay at home at night for a change. I’m going in the front room and read the paper.”

  Porgie was already there, flipping the pages of his schoolbooks and looking studious. His uncle settled down in his easy chair, opened his paper, and lit his pipe. He reached out to put the charred match in the ashtray, and as usual the ashtray wasn’t there.

  “Damn that woman,” he muttered to himself and raised his voice: “Porgie.”

  “Yes, Uncle Very!?”

  “Bring me an ashtray from the kitchen, will you please? Your aunt has them all out there again.”

  “Sure thing,” said Porgie and shut his eyes. He thought of the kitchen until a picture of it was crystal-clear in his mind. The beaten copper ashtray was sitting beside the sink where his aunt had left it after she had washed it out. He squinted the little eye inside his head, stared hard at the copper bowl, and whispered:

  “Ashtray fly,

  Follow eye.”

  Simultaneously he lifted with his mind. The ashtray quivered and rose slowly into the air.

  KEEPING it firmly suspended, Porgie quickly visualized the kitchen door and the hallway and drifted it through.

  “Porgie!” came his uncle’s angry voice.

  Porgie jumped, and there was a crash in the hallway outside as the bowl was suddenly released and crashed to the floor.

  “How many times have I told you not to levitate around the house? If it’s too much work to go out to the kitchen, tell me and I’ll do it myself.”

  “I was just practicing,” mumbled Porgie defensively.

  “Well, practice outside. You’ve got the walls all scratched up from banging things against them. You know you shouldn’t fool around with telekinesis outside sight range until you’ve mastered full visualization. Now go and get me that ashtray.”

  Crestfallen, Porgie went out the door into the hall. When he saw where the ashtray had fallen, he gave a silent whistle. Instead of coming down the center of the hall, it had been three feet off-course and heading directly for the hall table when he let it fall. In another second, it would have smashed into his aunt’s precious black alabaster vase.

  “Here it is, Uncle,” he said, taking it into the front room. “I’m sorry.”

  His uncle looked at his unhappy face, sighed and reached out and tousled his head affectionately.

  “Buck up, Porgie. I’m sorry I had to paddle you this afternoon. It was for your own good. Your aunt and I don’t want you to get into any serious trouble. You know what folks think about machines.” He screwed up his face as if he’d said a dirty word. “Now, back to your books—we’ll forget all about what happened today. Just remember this, Porgie: If there’s anything you want to know, don’t go fooling around on your own. Come and ask me, and we’ll have a man-to-man talk.”

  Porgie brightened. “There’s something I have been wondering about.”

  “Yes?” said his uncle encouragingly.

  “How many eagles would it take to lift a fellow high enough so he could see what was on the other side of the Wall?”

  Uncle Veryl counted to ten very slowly.

  THE next day Porgie went to work on his new project. As soon as school was out, he went over to the Public Library and climbed upstairs to the main circulation room.

  “Little boys are not allowed in this section,” the librarian said. “The children’s division is downstairs.”

  “But I need a book,” protested Porgie. “A book on how to fly.”

  “This section is only for adults.” Porgie did some fast thinking. “My uncle can take books from here, can’t he?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And he could send me over to get something for him, couldn’t he?”

  The librarian nodded reluctantly.

  Porgie prided himself on never lying. If the librarian chose to misconstrue his questions, it was her fault, not his.

  “Well, then,” he said, “do you have any books on how to make things fly in the air?”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Things like birds.”

  “Birds don’t have to be made to fly. They’re born that way.”

  “I don’t mean real birds,” said Porgie. “I mean birds you make.”

  “Oh, Animation. Just a second, let me visualize.” She shut her eyes and a card catalogue across the room opened and shut one drawer after another. “Ah, that might be what he’s looking for,” she murmured after a moment, and concentrated again. A large brass-bound book came flying out of the stacks and came to rest on the desk in front of her. She pulled the index card out of the pocket in the back and shoved it toward Porgie. “Sign your uncle’s name here.”

  He did and then, hugging the book to his chest, got out of the library as quickly as he could.

  BY the time Porgie had worked three-quarters of the way through the book, he was about ready to give up in despair. It was all grown-up magic. Each set of instructions he ran into either used words he didn’t understand or called for unobtainable ingredients like powdered unicorn horns and the blood of red-headed female virgins.

  He didn’t know what a virgin was—all his uncle’s encyclopedia had to say on the subject was that they were the only ones who could ride unicorns—but there was a redhead by the name of Dorothy Boggs who lived down the road a piece. He had a feeling, however, that neither she nor her family would take kindly to a request for two quarts of blood, so he kept on searching through the book. Almost at the very end he found a set of instructions he thought he could follow.

  It took him two days to get the ingredients together. The only thing that gave him trouble was finding a toad—the rest of the stuff, though mostly nasty and odoriferous, was obtained with little difficulty. The date and exact time of the experiment was important and he surprised Mr. Wickens by taking a sudden interest in his Practical Astrology course.

  At last, after laborious computations, he decided everything was ready.

  Late that night, he slipped out of bed, opened his bedroom door a crack, and listened. Except for the usual night noises and resonant snores from Uncle Veryl’s room, the house was silent. He shut the door carefully and got his broomstick from the closet—Uncle Veryl had relented about that week’s punishment.

  Silently he drifted out through his open window and across the yard to the woodshed.

  Once inside, he checked carefully to see that all the windows were covered. Then he lit a candle. He pulled a loose floorboard up and removed the book and his assembled ingredients. Quickly, he made the initial preparations.

  First there was the matter of molding the clay he had taken from the graveyard into a rough semblance of a bird. Then, after sticking several white feathers obtained from last Sunday’s chicken into each side of the figure to make wings, he annointed it with noxibus mixture he had prepared in advance.

  The moon was just setting behind the Wall when he began the incantation. Candlelight flickered on the pages of the old book as he slowly and carefully pronounced the difficult words.

  WHEN it came time for the business with the toad, he almost didn’t have the heart to go through with it; but he steeled himself an
d did what was necessary. Then, wincing, he jabbed his forefinger with a pin and slowly dripped the requisite three drops of blood down on the crude clay figure. He whispered:

  “Clay of graveyard,

  White cock’s feather,

  Eye of toad,

  Rise together!”

  Breathlessly he waited. He seemed to be in the middle of a circle of silence. The wind in the trees outside had stopped and there was only the sound of his own quick breathing. As the candlelight rippled, the clay figure seemed to quiver slightly as if it were hunching for flight.

  Porgie bent closer, tense with anticipation. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself building a giant bird with wings powerful enough to lift him over the Wall around the World. Swooping low over the schoolhouse during recess, he would wave his hands in a condescending gesture of farewell, and then as the kids hopped on their sticks and tried to follow him, he would rise higher and higher until he had passed the ceiling of their brooms and left them circling impotently below him. At last he would sweep over the Wall with hundreds of feet to spare, over it and then down—down into the great unknown.

  The candle flame stopped flickering and stood steady and clear. Beside it, the clay bird squatted, lifeless and motionless.

  Minutes ticked by and Porgie gradually saw it for what it was—a smelly clod of dirt with a few feathers stuck in it. There were tears in his eyes as he picked up the body of the dead toad and said softly, “I’m sorry.”

  When he came in from burying it, he grasped the image of the clay bird tightly in his mind and sent it swinging angrily around the shed. Feathers fluttered behind it as it flew faster and faster until in disgust he released it and let it smash into the rough boards of the wall. It crumbled into a pile of foul-smelling trash and fell to the floor. He stirred it with his toe, hurt, angry, confused.