“It isn’t nice to call names,” I said weakly. “Get back into your seat. I’ll take care of Sue-lynn later.”
He got up and sat gingerly down in his chair, rubbing his ruffled hair, wanting to make more of a production of the situation but not knowing how. He twisted his face experimentally to see if he had tears available and had none.
“Dern girls,” he muttered and tried to shake his fingers free of a wisp of hair.
I kept my eye on Sue-lynn for the next half hour as I busied myself with the class. Her sobs soon stopped and her rigid shoulders relaxed. Her hands were softly in her lap and I knew she was taking comfort from her Anything Box. We had our talk together later, but she was so completely sealed off from me by her misery that there was no communication between us. She sat quietly watching me as I talked, her hands trembling in her lap. It shakes the heart, somehow, to see the hands of a little child quiver like that.
That afternoon I looked up from my reading group, startled, as though by a cry, to catch Sue-lynn’s frightened eyes. She looked around bewildered and then down at her hands again—her empty hands. Then she darted to the Isolation corner and reached under the chair. She went back to her seat slowly, her hands squared to an unseen weight. For the first time, apparently, she had had to go get the Anything Box. It troubled me with a vague unease for the rest of the afternoon.
Through the days that followed while the trial hung fire, I had Sue-lynn in attendance bodily, but that was all. She sank into her Anything Box at every opportunity. And always, if she had put it away somewhere, she had to go back for it. She roused more and more reluctantly from these waking dreams, and there finally came a day when I had to shake her to waken her.
I went to her mother, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t understand me, and made me feel like a frivolous gossip-monger taking her mind away from her husband, despite the fact that I didn’t even mention him—or maybe because I didn’t mention him.
“If she’s being a bad girl, spank her,” she finally said, wearily shifting the weight of a whining baby from one hip to another and pushing her tousled hair off her forehead. “Whatever you do is all right by me. My worrier is all used up. I haven’t got any left for the kids right now.”
Well, Sue-lynn’s father was found guilty and sentenced to the State Penitentiary and school was less than an hour old the next day when Davie came up, clumsily a-tiptoe, braving my wrath for interrupting a reading group, and whispered hoarsely, “Sue-lynn’s asleep with her eyes open again, Teacher.”
We went back to the table and Davie slid into his chair next to a completely unaware Sue-lynn. He poked her with a warning finger. “I told you I’d tell on you.”
And before our horrified eyes, she toppled, as rigidly as a doll, sideways off the chair. The thud of her landing relaxed her and she lay limp on the green asphalt tile—a thin paper-doll of a girl, one hand still clenched open around something. I pried her fingers loose and almost wept to feel enchantment dissolve under my heavy touch. I carried her down to the nurse’s room and we worked over her with wet towels and prayer and she finally opened her eyes.
“Teacher,” she whispered weakly.
“Yes, Sue-lynn.” I took her cold hands in mine.
“Teacher, I almost got in my Anything Box.”
“No,” I answered. “You couldn’t. You’re too big.”
“Daddy’s there,” she said. “And where we used to live.”
I took a long, long look at her wan face. I hope it was genuine concern for her that prompted my next words. I hope it wasn’t envy or the memory of the niggling nagging of Alpha’s voice that put firmness in my voice as I went on. “That’s play-like,” I said. “Just for fun.”
Her hands jerked protestingly in mine. “Your Anything Box is just for fun. It’s like Davie’s cowpony that he keeps in his desk or Sojie’s jet plane, or when the big bear chases all of you at recess. It’s fun-for-play, but it’s not for real. You mustn’t think it’s for real. It’s only play.”
“No!” she denied. “No!” she cried frantically and, hunching herself up on the cot, peering through her tear-swollen eyes, she scrabbled under the pillow and down beneath the rough blanket that covered her.
“Where is it?” she cried. “Where is it? Give it back to me, Teacher!”
She flung herself toward me and pulled open both my clenched hands.
“Where did you put it? Where did you put it?”
“There is no Anything Box,” I said flatly, trying to hold her to me and feeling my heart breaking along with hers.
“You took it!” she sobbed. “You took it away from me!” And she wrenched herself out of my arms.
“Can’t you give it back to her?” whispered the nurse. “If it makes her feel so bad? Whatever it is—”
“It’s just imagination,” I said, almost sullenly. “I can’t give her back something that doesn’t exist.”
Too young! I thought bitterly. Too young to learn that heart’s desire is only play-like.
Of course the doctor found nothing wrong. Her mother dismissed the matter as a fainting spell and Sue-lynn came back to class next day, thin and listless, staring blankly out the window, her hands palm down on the desk. I swore by the pale hollow of her cheek that never, never again would I take any belief from anyone without replacing it with something better. What had I given Sue-lynn? What had she better than I had taken from her? How did I know but that her Anything Box was on purpose to tide her over rough spots in her life like this? And what now, now that I had taken it from her?
Well, after a time she began to work again, and later, to play. She came back to smiles, but not to laughter. She puttered along quite satisfactorily except that she was a candle blown out. The flame was gone wherever the brightness of belief goes. And she had no more sharing smiles for me, no overflowing love to bring to me. And her shoulder shrugged subtly away from my touch.
Then one day I suddenly realized that Sue-lynn was searching our class room. Stealthily, casually, day by day she was searching, covering every inch of the room. She went through every puzzle box, every lump of clay, every shelf and cupboard, every box and bag. Methodically she checked behind every row of books and in every child’s desk until finally, after almost a week, she had been through everything in the place except my desk. Then she began to materialize suddenly at my elbow every time I opened a drawer. And her eyes would probe quickly and sharply before I slid it shut again. But if I tried to intercept her looks, they slid away and she had some legitimate errand that had brought her up to the vicinity of the desk.
She believes it again, I thought hopefully. She won’t accept the fact that her Anything Box is gone. She wants it again.
But it is gone. I thought drearily. It’s really-for-true gone.
My head was heavy from troubled sleep, and sorrow was a weariness in all my movements. Waiting is sometimes a burden almost too heavy to carry. While my children hummed happily over their fun-stuff, I brooded silently out the window until I managed a laugh at myself. It was a shaky laugh that threatened to dissolve into something else, so I brisked back to my desk.
As good a time as any to throw out useless things, I thought, and to see if I can find that colored chalk I put away so carefully. I plunged my hands into the wilderness of the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk. It was deep with a huge accumulation of anything—just anything—that might need a temporary hiding place. I knelt to pull out left-over Jack Frost pictures, and a broken bean shooter, a chewed red ribbon, a roll of capgun ammunition, one striped sock, six Numbers papers, a rubber dagger, a copy of The Gospel According to St. Luke, a miniature coal shovel, patterns for jack-o’-lanterns, and a pink plastic pelican. I retrieved my Irish linen hankie I thought lost forever and Sojie’s report card that he had told me solemnly had blown out of his hand and landed on a jet and broke the sound barrier so loud that it busted all to flitters. Under the welter of miscellany, I felt a squareness. Oh, happy! I thought, this is where I put the colored chalk! I
cascaded papers off both sides of my lifting hands and shook the box free.
We were together again. Outside, the world was an enchanting wilderness of white, the wind shouting softly through the windows, tapping wet, white fingers against the warm light. Inside all the worry and waiting, the apartness and loneliness were over and forgotten, their hugeness dwindled by the comfort of a shoulder, the warmth of clasping hands—and nowhere, nowhere was the fear of parting, nowhere the need to do without again. This was the happy ending. This was—
This was Sue-lynn’s Anything Box!
My racing heart slowed as the dream faded . . . and rushed again at the realization. I had it here! In my junk drawer! It had been here all the time!
I stood up shakily, concealing the invisible box in the flare of my skirts. I sat down and put the box carefully in the center of my desk, covering the top of it with my palms lest I should drown again in delight. I looked at Sue-lynn. She was finishing her fun paper, competently but unjoyously. Now would come her patient sitting with quiet hands until told to do something else.
Alpha would approve. And very possibly, I thought, Alpha would, for once in her limited life, be right. We may need “hallucinations” to keep us going—all of us but the Alphas—but when we go so far as to try to force ourselves, physically, into the Neverneverland of heart’s desire . . .
I remembered Sue-lynn’s thin rigid body toppling doll-like off its chair. Out of her deep need she had found—or created? Who could tell?—something too dangerous for a child. I could so easily bring the brimming happiness back to her eyes—but at what a possible price!
No, I had a duty to protect Sue-lynn. Only maturity—the maturity born of the sorrow and loneliness that Sue-lynn was only beginning to know—could be trusted to use an Anything Box safely and wisely.
My heart thudded as I began to move my hands, letting the palms slip down from the top to shape the sides of—
I had moved them back again before I really saw, and I have now learned almost to forget that glimpse of what heart’s desire is like when won at the cost of another’s heart.
I sat there at the desk trembling and breathless, my palms moist, feeling as if I had been on a long journey away from the little schoolroom. Perhaps I had. Perhaps I had been shown all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.
“Sue-lynn,” I called. “Will you come up here when you’re through?”
She nodded unsmilingly and snipped off the last paper from the edge of Mistress Mary’s dress. Without another look at her handiwork, she carried the scissors safely to the scissors box, crumpled the scraps of paper in her hand and came up to the waste basket by the desk.
“I have something for you, Sue-lynn,” I said, uncovering the box.
Her eyes dropped to the desk top. She looked indifferently up at me. “I did my fun paper already.”
“Did you like it?”
“Yes.” It was a flat lie.
“Good,” I lied right back. “But look here.” I squared my hands around the Anything Box.
She took a deep breath and the whole of her little body stiffened.
“I found it,” I said hastily, fearing anger. “I found it in the bottom drawer.”
She leaned her chest against my desk, her hands caught tightly between, her eyes intent on the box, her face white with the aching want you see on children’s faces pressed to Christmas windows.
“Can I have it?” she whispered.
“It’s yours,” I said, holding it out.
Still she leaned against her hands her eyes searching my face.
“Can I have it?” she asked again.
“Yes!” I was impatient with this anticlimax. “But—”
Her eyes flickered. She had sensed my reservation before I had. “But you must never try to get into it again.”
“OK,” she said, the word coming out on a long relieved sigh. “OK, Teacher.”
She took the box and tucked it lovingly into her small pocket. She turned from the desk and started back to her table. My mouth quirked with a small smile. It seemed to me that everything about her had suddenly turned upwards—even the ends of her straight taffy-colored hair. The subtle flame about her that made her Sue-lynn was there again. She scarcely touched the floor as she walked.
I sighed heavily and traced on the desk top with my finger a probable size for an Anything Box. What would Sue-lynn choose to see first? How like a drink after a drought it would seem to her.
I was startled as a small figure materialized at my elbow. It was Sue-lynn, her fingers carefully squared before her.
“Teacher,” she said softly, all the flat emptiness gone from her voice. “Any time you want to take my Anything Box, you just say so.”
I groped through my astonishment and incredulity for words. She couldn’t possibly have had time to look into the Box yet.
“Why, thank you, Sue-lynn,” I managed. “Thanks a lot. I would like very much to borrow it some time.”
“Would you like it now?” she asked, proffering it.
“No, thank you,” I said, around the lump in my throat. “I’ve had a turn already. You go ahead.”
“OK,” she murmured. Then—“Teacher?”
“Yes?”
Shyly she leaned against me, her cheek on my shoulder. She looked up at me with her warm, unshuttered eyes, then both arms were suddenly around my neck in a brief awkward embrace.
“Watch out!” I whispered laughing into the collar of her blue dress. “You’ll lose it again!”
“No I won’t,” she laughed back, patting the flat pocket of her dress. “Not ever, ever again!”
The Prize of Peril (1958)
ROBERT SHECKLEY
ROBERT SHECKLEY (1928–2005) is the author of about two dozen novels and scores of short stories, including The Status Civilization, The 10th Victim, and Mindswap. Much of his work is comic or satiric in tone; he gave us the notion that “I must not lesnerize.” Many people believe that Sheckley’s stories paved the way for Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Sheckley wrote for television and radio in the 1950s, and perhaps doing so inspired “The Prize of Peril.” This story was adapted for film as Le Prix du Danger, and there was also an earlier German television movie version of it.
AEDER LIFTED HIS head cautiously above the window sill. He saw the fire escape, and below it a narrow alley. There was a weather-beaten baby carriage in the alley, and three garbage cans. As he watched, a black-sleeved arm moved from behind the furthest can, with something shiny in its fist. Raeder ducked down. A bullet smashed through the window above his head and punctured the ceiling, showering him with plaster.
Now he knew about the alley. It was guarded, just like the door.
He lay at full length on the cracked linoleum, staring at the bullet hole in the ceiling, listening to the sounds outside the door. He was a tall man with bloodshot eyes and a two-day stubble. Grime and fatigue had etched lines into his face. Fear had touched his features, tightening a muscle here and twitching a nerve there. The results were startling. His face had character now, for it was reshaped by the expectation of death.
There was a gunman in the alley and two on the stairs. He was trapped. He was dead.
Sure, Raeder thought, he still moved and breathed; but that was only because of death’s inefficiency. Death would take care of him in a few minutes. Death would poke holes in his face and body, artistically dab his clothes with blood, arrange his limbs in some grotesque position of the graveyard ballet…
Raeder bit his lip sharply. He wanted to live. There had to be a way.
He rolled onto his stomach and surveyed the dingy cold-water apartment into which the killers had driven him. It was a perfect little one-room coffin. It had a door, which was watched, and a fire escape, which was watched. And it had a tiny windowless bathroom.
He crawled to the bathroom and stood up. There was a ragged hole in the ceiling, almost four inches wide. If he could enlarge it, crawl through in
to the apartment above…
He heard a muffled thud. The killers were impatient. They were beginning to break down the door.
He studied the hole in the ceiling. No use even considering it. He could never enlarge it in time.
They were smashing against the door, grunting each time they struck. Soon the lock would tear out, or the hinges would pull out of the rotting wood. The door would go down, and the two blank-faced men would enter, dusting off their jackets…
But surely someone would help him! He took the tiny television set from his pocket. The picture was blurred, and he didn’t bother to adjust it. The audio was clear and precise.
He listened to the well-modulated voice of Mike Terry addressing his vast audience.
“…terrible spot,” Terry was saying. “Yes, folks, Jim Raeder is in a truly terrible predicament. He had been hiding, you’ll remember, in a third-rate Broadway hotel under an assumed name. It seemed safe enough. But the bellhop recognized him, and gave that information to the Thompson gang.”
The door creaked under repeated blows. Raeder clutched the little television set and listened.
“Jim Raeder just managed to escape from the hotel! Closely pursued, he entered a brownstone at one fifty-six West End Avenue. His intention was to go over the roofs. And it might have worked, folks, it just might have worked. But the roof door was locked. It looked like the end.... But Raeder found that apartment seven was unoccupied and unlocked. He entered…”
Terry paused for emphasis, then cried: “—and now he’s trapped there, trapped like a rat in a cage! The Thompson gang is breaking down the door! The fire escape is guarded! Our camera crew, situated in a nearby building, is giving you a close-up now. Look, folks, just look! Is there no hope for Jim Raeder?”
Is there no hope, Raeder silently echoed, perspiration pouring from him as he stood in the dark, stifling little bathroom, listening to the steady thud against the door.
“Wait a minute!” Mike Terry cried. “Hang on, Jim Raeder, hang on a little longer. Perhaps there is hope! I have an urgent call from one of our viewers, a call on the Good Samaritan Line! Here’s someone who thinks he can help you, Jim. Are you listening, Jim Raeder?”
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2 Page 8