Foundations of Fear

by David G. Hartwell

  The phone rang while I was still in the shower. When I sat down to eat Mother told me she’d just gotten a phone call and that a lot of other cops had caught some sort of weird ten-day flu from a bunch of Australian wine growers here for a convention and that she was going to have to be filling in for all sorts of people and that everyone’s hours were going to be messed up even worse than usual for a long time and she wasn’t going to be able to come home very often for the next few weeks. I wasn’t sure but I thought she was lying to us and that she had somewhere else she wanted to go for a while, maybe up to Lake Tahoe again with her mess sergeant. I asked her whether she’d found out anything about James Patrick Dubic for me yet and she said she’d forgotten again and that she was sorry but she was going to be too busy to check for me for a while now, and why was I so interested all of a sudden? I told her I’d found all the old newspaper clippings while I was cleaning my room and she seemed to think that answered her question because she didn’t ask me any more about it.

  Father said something about liberal judges and parole boards and how you sometimes had to exaggerate the truth a little because otherwise they’d ignore half of what a criminal’d really done and let him out when he was dangerous and should be kept in jail for a lot longer. Mother agreed with him and they talked about police work for a while. Then they talked a while about getting him a new TV, the kind with the videotape built into it, so he could record his favorite programs and movies and stuff that was on after he wanted to go to sleep, and we all thought that was a good idea even though Mother said we’d have to wait a while to get enough money to pay for it because she already owed too much right now.

  She finished her coffee and we wheeled him into the living room in front of the TV, then I set up his reader so he could use it if he wanted to and made sure the switch to change from the TV to the reader was where he liked it on his shoulder and strapped on tight enough so it wouldn’t slip back where he couldn’t get at it if he nudged it too hard with his chin. I still had a little time before I had to go to school but I wanted to wait until dark before I opened the shed again so I could see if the duck had done any more changing or moving around in the dark after I’d shut the door. So what I did is I took the binoculars down to the lake and watched the ducks through them for a while to make sure there wasn’t another robot duck there already to replace the one I’d taken, and at the same time I checked to make sure there wasn’t anybody else down at the lake looking for the duck the same way I was, or anyone who looked like James Patrick Dubic. But there wasn’t anybody else looking and there didn’t seem to be anything special happening with the ducks on the lake, so I went to school. After school I checked again but there still wasn’t anything worth looking at happening.

  Father was asleep in his chair. I closed all the curtains so he couldn’t see out to the backyard, then went back and tied my string to the shed door again and unlocked it and pushed it open.

  The duck had changed in the dark this time, but just a little. It was still in almost the same place but something had started to push out where its neck and tail were going to be and it looked a little different where its wings were going to be. It was starting to look like a real duck or one of those wooden decoys, but all covered with mud. But it was too late in the day and the sun wasn’t coming directly in through the door anymore so it didn’t do any more changing.

  I heard the telephone ringing and yanked the door to the shed shut by pulling on the string real hard but didn’t have time to lock it before I ran back into the house. It was Mother, saying she wasn’t going to be home that night or all the next day and asking me if I had everything I needed and if there was enough food in the refrigerator and freezer. I checked and told her there was and she said if I ran out of anything or needed help to come down to the station and one of her friends there would take care of it for me, she’d tell them I might be coming in so it would be all right. I said OK and she hung up.

  I was really tired because I’d been getting up so early for so long so I set the alarm clock to wake me up in time to fix dinner for Father and took a nap. When I got up I made him macaroni and cheese with tuna fish in it then stayed up and watched television with him until it was time to put him to bed. He said it was a good thing I was superstrong for my age and not just tall and skinny when I was getting him into the tub, because even though he was still mainly skinny he was awful flabby and he’d be getting fat pretty soon, so moving him would be getting to be a lot of work before I was much older. I told him the exercise was good for me and anyway all I had to do was wheel his chair from one room to another every now and then and then help him in and out of the bath and anyway I was used to it. He said, thank you for saying that Julie, but I know how hard it is on you and your Mother with me like this, and then he started talking about how wonderful Mother had been before the accident, when she hadn’t had to take care of him all the time, and that made me feel bad for him again and at the same time like Mother a little more, even though I knew that half the reason he was telling me all this was because even though he knew it was true he wanted me to tell him it wasn’t so he could pretend to himself it wasn’t his fault.

  Wednesday morning when the sun came in through the door and hit the thing and its lily pads it finally finished changing all the way back into a duck. The head and the tail and the wings pushed their way out from inside until the duck was the right shape, even though it still didn’t have any legs and was all smooth and brown, like one of those pottery ducks people use for sugar bowls.

  It started reeling the lily pads in. The stems got shorter and shorter and at the same time the lily pads themselves were closing up like flowers that had been open going back to being buds, only they were even tighter than that, like rolled up pieces of paper, so that by the time the stems had been reeled all the way back into the duck they weren’t any bigger around than the stems had been and they just followed them into the duck.

  And while the duck had been reeling in the stems its skin had been changing. First all over its surface a lot of things like tiny doors had opened, only none of them were much bigger than the lead in a pencil and they were all over the surface, everywhere, so it was like the whole duck was a Venetian blind that somebody had opened. Then the doors all closed again, but on the other side, so what had been on the back of them and hidden inside the duck before was now on the outside where you could see it and you could see that the duck had what looked like feathers again.

  And then the orange legs came pushing out from the bottom of the duck and it started to try to swim. It wasn’t trying to stand up or anything like a real duck on land, it was trying to swim like it thought it was underwater and had to get to the surface.

  A few seconds later it stopped making swimming motions, either because it thought it had made it to the surface or because it had figured out it wasn’t in the water. I couldn’t tell which. But it still wasn’t standing or lying like a duck on land, it had its feet sticking out backwards under it so it was tilted forward a bit with its tail in the air. That didn’t seem to bother it, though, and it started preening itself like it always did after it came up out of the mud in the morning even though there wasn’t any mud on it.

  When it finished preening itself it looked all around just like a real duck deciding what direction it wanted to swim in, only it was still tilted forward like a wheelbarrow. It kept looking around for a long time and I wondered what it thought about being in the shed, if it knew there was anything wrong or what to do about it. Then it started swimming for the door, out into the light, only it wasn’t using its wings to help it and it wasn’t walking, just paddling its legs, but even so that pushed it slowly across the floor so that maybe ten minutes later it came to the doorsill and then it hopped over the sill just like a duck in the water hopping over something even though it went back to trying to swim as soon as it was outside in the backyard.

  It looked around again as soon as it was out of the shed and then changed its direction, paddl
ing across the grass to the center of the yard as far away from the fence and the shed and the house as it could get, with its chest still pointing down and its legs sticking out behind it and its tail up, so it looked more like it was trying to dig its way into the lawn than like it was walking. But it got to the center of the yard finally and stayed there, all stiff and fake-looking now that it was out of the water.

  I was way back at the other end of the yard, maybe thirty feet away from it, but since the sun was shining bright I knew it wouldn’t attack me if I got closer to it, so I came forward a bit, until I was maybe twenty feet away from it, and then a little more, until I was fifteen feet away from it, then ten, but I was afraid to get any closer right then and I went back to the toolshed and closed the door, then went in and got Father up and fixed his breakfast for him, then put him in the living room with the TV and his detective novel. I had him facing away from the window and I had the curtains closed anyway, so there was no way he could see what I was doing in the backyard.

  I told him I wasn’t feeling very well and didn’t want to go to school today and he said, OK, if the school called just give him the phone and he’d say I was sick and he wouldn’t tell Mother. It was the only thing he was really ever able to do for me and he did it whenever he could, even though Mother sometimes got real mad at him for it and yelled at him and even hit him.

  It was still bright out so I went back out into the yard and tried coming close to the duck again. I came up behind it and got maybe ten feet away from it again but it still didn’t seem to notice me, even when I circled around so I was beside it and then in front of it where a real duck would have been able so see me.

  Then I thought about those old men and women you see with their metal detectors looking for money people’ve dropped on beaches so I went back into the shed and got the hoe out and came at the duck with the metal end, real slowly. I got a lot closer than fifteen feet, maybe even less than a foot away from it before it started to try to get away, and then I spent a while just chasing it around the yard, but always making sure I kept it out of the bright sunlight and away from the shade near the house and fence and under the trees, even though it looked so clumsy and pompous and stupid, even stupider than a real duck. When I finally quit chasing it it worked its way back into the middle of the yard.

  Only that wasn’t good enough because out in the lake I’d watched it go away from two or three rowboats made out of wood. So maybe it had two systems, some sort of metal detector and some sort of thing to keep it away from wood. (And a third system, too, to find the ducks and swans with.) I tried it with the wooden end of the hoe and it wouldn’t do anything until I actually touched it with the wooden end of the hoe, and then it just tried to move a few feet away before it stopped, just far enough so that if the hoe’d been a branch the duck wouldn’t have gotten snagged on it.

  Maybe it had some sort of radar or sonar system to keep it from getting too close to big objects, like boats or piers. So I tried to use the metal end of the hoe to herd it close to the side of the fence that was still in the sun, but it wouldn’t go close to the fence, when it was maybe ten feet away from it the duck would start to go off at an angle sideways so it never got any closer.

  The phone rang. I ran inside and got it and took it into the living room and held it up to Father’s ear and mouth without saying anything. It was the school, asking why I wasn’t there. But we had an agreement, even though we’d never come right out and talked about it. He said I was sick, some sort of flu, that it probably wasn’t serious but that even so I wouldn’t be able to come in until at least tomorrow or maybe the day after and that, no, I hadn’t been to a doctor and I wouldn’t have a doctor’s excuse because he was my father and it was his decision to make whether or not he let me go to school, he knew perfectly well what a flu was like and what you had to do to get better from one and he wasn’t going to pay a doctor just to write me a note and say that there was a lot of that going around so not to worry, and, no, he wasn’t going to write a note for me either, because my mother was away working for a few days and he happened to be paralyzed from the neck down, but if they wanted to send somebody out to make sure he really was my father and that he really was sitting in his wheelchair paralyzed they could go right ahead, but it would be easier if they just looked at their records or talked to someone who knew what he was talking about there at the school. The school said, No, we’re sorry to have bothered you, Mr. Matson, to him and he had me hang up. I kissed him and went back out to the yard.

  The duck was still out in the middle of the yard sunbathing. I wanted to push it into the shade from the house and see if it would attack me even if I was bigger than a swan and wasn’t a bird at all. It wouldn’t be very dangerous because as long as I stayed in the sunlight the duck would stop attacking as soon as it got back out into the sun with me. But I didn’t want to be too close to it when it came at me in case it came at me a lot faster than it moved when it was trying to paddle around as if it was still in the water. So I took one of the pieces of the bamboo fishing rod and tied it to the handle of the hoe to make it long enough so I’d be further away from the duck when I herded it into the shade.

  I pushed the duck as far away from me into the shade as I could with the metal end of the hoe, so it was maybe almost ten feet out of the direct sunlight before I stopped. That took almost ten minutes. Then I started to back away from it.

  As soon as I took the hoe away it moved its head like it was looking for something then started coming at me, paddling as fast as it could and ripping up the lawn a little but even with the way it was kicking it was still just inching and sliding its way across the grass slower than I could have moved on my hands and knees. It wasn’t trying to use its wings like I’d been pretty sure it wouldn’t, it only used its wings when it made its other kind of attack, the one it did with the scissors that came out of its mouth when the sun was going down. I stayed just on the bright side of the shadow’s edge but I moved away up towards the side fence so that I could watch the duck chase me some more. It was so slow and stupid-looking and I was in the sun, so I wasn’t very worried. Besides, I wanted to see what it would try to do to me when it came time for it to try to dive under to grab me.

  What it did was when I let it get about two or three feet away from me it stuck its head down under its body, pushing it in under its puffed-up chest which made it look even sillier because of the way its chest was already resting on the grass so that with its two legs sticking out behind it looked like some sort of crazy toy wheelbarrow. Then it kicked off with its legs like it was trying to dive straight down to the bottom of the lake but all that happened was that it fell back into the same sort of wheelbarrow position again. But it didn’t even seem to notice it wasn’t underwater, because then it pulled its head out from under its chest and stuck it straight at me and paddled as fast as it could at me until it was just almost to the edge of the shadow, then it suddenly arched its head and neck and body backwards and did something with its wings real fast so it fell over on its back. I moved away a little further down the shadow line so it could come after me without getting in the sun. Now that it was over on its back it was using its wings to try to swim at me like they were the oars of a rowboat and that was working a little better than the paddling had because the grass was very smooth there but even so the wings could sort of catch in it and slide the duck along. I stood where I was this time and when it got closer to me—it was about two feet away from me now, just before where the shadow ended—its legs moved away from each other and turned around sideways so its feet where facing each other like it wanted to clap them together. Big steel claws like meat hooks that must have been hidden somewhere in its hollow legs came out of its feet very fast and its belly opened up and something like a long rotary file and a drill and a buzzsaw all at the same time came out and started whirling so fast it was just a blur even though it didn’t make any noise like a drill or a buzzsaw usually would.

  The duck had finally gotte
n to just at the edge of the dividing line between the shadow and the sunlight and I knew that if it came any further it would be out in the sun and just go back to being a fake duck, so I used the bamboo stick that I’d tied to the hoe to turn it around facing the other way so I could see what it would do. But it just used one wing and not the other to turn itself around in a circle so it was coming at me again and this time I let it get itself out into the sunlight so it would turn itself off.

  As soon as its head was out in the sun the claws went back into its feet and the drill-thing stopped turning and started to go back into its stomach. I got a better look at it this time, and it was all covered with little barbs like fish hooks and other little knives of all sorts that looked like they turned around on their own, not always in the same direction as the whole thing, but before I could get a better look at what it was like its stomach closed up again to where they should be so it was just a fake duck lying on its back again.

  It couldn’t seem to turn itself back over so I used the bamboo end of the hoe to tip it back into the right position.

  I sat down in one of the lawn chairs and watched it struggle back to the center of the yard.

  It was too slow and clumsy in the daytime to be any use if I just left it in the backyard, especially because it wouldn’t come near metal and all but one of the lawn chairs had metal frames. I was sorry we didn’t have a swimming pool and tried to think of a way I could get to use Beth’s pool but I couldn’t think of one that would be any good. But even though I couldn’t see any way to make the duck work right except maybe just by throwing it on somebody it was still good to know that the duck would chase things and try to kill them even if they were people and not other other birds.