Ruth immediately agreed, but her face was drawn, and he didn't learn until it was too late that she had finally contributed her own request. It was a Saturday morning when he backfired into the driveway and saw the sleek and gleaming automobile parked in front of the house. In the kitchen, Ruth was crying at the table. Confused, since there didn't seem to be any company in the house, he cradled her softly while she explained that she could no longer stand the daily wait for the call from the police saying he and their twelve-year-old car had died in the traffic.
"I thought about Syd, Gerry, and I was scared, but I put a note in, and this morning this man comes up with a receipt saying we won this car, and we have to pay the taxes but we have a week from this Monday, and I wish it was gone because I'm frightened."
Ridiculous, Gerry thought, coincidence. But nevertheless, he went to bed early and set the alarm for an hour before dawn, thinking the hell with the charm if it was going to do this to his wife.
In not entirely unpleasant contrast to the daylight's enervating heat, the morning was cold, and a residue wind from an evening thunderstorm hunted through the neighborhood for wood to creak and leaves to sail. Silently dressing in the clothes he'd left in the kitchen, Gerry sipped on hot coffee and rubbed his arms briskly. A groan from Sandy's sleep made him motionless, then he slipped a blanket over his shoulders and carefully opened the front door, picking out a chair on the far end of the porch where he could watch the walk that wound round the house to the back. He lighted a cigarette when he was settled, and he was startled by the flare of the match and shook it out quickly. He listened and heard nothing, watched and saw only the dark. The air was still damp, and he hugged himself tightly but would not walk, knowing the floorboards made near as much noise as the children playing in the afternoon. Finally, he tried to count gorillas to pass the time, and when he awakened, the sun was full in his eyes, and blinding.
Ruth was standing over him, smiling sadly. "Big brave watchdog," she said, offering him a steaming cup. "What were you going to do, sprinkle garlic over his horns or tackle him like the football star you thought you were?"
"Knock it off," Gerry said, feeling bad enough that his soap opera plan had failed without his wife telling him how foolish he looked wrapped in a blanket in the middle of August. "Did he leave anything?"
"Nothing."
"Well, damnit, he must have magicked me to sleep, or something. And I asked for a hundred dollars."
"Maybe he figures you were testing him," she said, leaning against the railing and huddling her arms under her breasts. "Maybe he doesn't like testing."
Gerry, suddenly angry because he was more than afraid, stood abruptly and started pacing. "You know, I should have listened to you, because you were right from the beginning. This guy is up to no good. I think I'll cancel the contract, and we can get our milk from the store from now on." Then he glared because his wife was laughing. "Well, what's so funny, damnit? I spent a miserable time out here, I could have maybe even caught double pneumonia, and you think that's funny?"
Shaking her head, Ruth pressed into his arms and quieted. "No, dear, I don't think it's funny. In fact, I think it's kind of sad. Things are just so different out here, I can't really explain it. The city was bad, but at least we knew where we stood. Here, we get a little boost from an invisible milkman and we go into melodramatic hysterics. Maybe country rules are different, I don't know, but there's something wrong with us."
"What?" Gerry said.
"I'm not sure," she said. "But this isn't right."
A short exclamation from Ruth and a dry flurry dragged him reluctantly back to the present where the world appeared to be turning black at the edges of his vision. Feeling a shudder from Ruth, he looked down and saw a praying mantis disappearing over the side of the steps with what looked like the remains of a spider in its jaws.
"Do you want to change before we go out?" he asked quietly, wondering what was taking his son so long. Ruth shook her head slowly, and he was dismayed at the ridges of darkened skin beneath her eyes, cursing himself for not noticing her condition sooner. To adjust from the city's frantic years had been difficult enough when she was the proliferation of little girls Hawthorne Street had spawned, but the addition of the pregnancy in the century's worst summer was draining her of laughter; she had been claiming since the beginning that the baby hadn't felt right, and no amount of persuasion from husband or doctor could change her mind. And if I told her about the milkman, Gerry thought, she might literally kill me. Finally he eased a solicitous arm about her shoulders and drew from her a melancholy smile.
"I spoke with Syd on the golf course this morning," he said after calling for Sandy to get a move on. "We've decided to confront the dairy company—"
"Please, Gerry, I don't want to hear it."
"Oh, come on, Ruth, let's not start again, please? This milkman business is getting all out of hand. I don't see why you're letting it get to you like this. I mean, no one else is all that bothered."
"Well, maybe nobody else cares whether or not they're doing the morally right thing by letting this farce continue the way it has," she said angrily, shrugging away his arm. "I told you before, I don't want that man, beast, whatever the hell he is, coming to my house anymore. Suppose Sandy starts sneaking notes to him? Suppose the other kids find out this isn't a game? Suppose …" She turned to him, and he flinched at the hardened lines destroying her mouth. "Suppose one of you big brave men gets tired of his wife and asks for a new one? What happens then?" Her hands went protectively across her stomach, accusing him with their barrier, and he realized that she suspected what he had done.
Suddenly angry to camouflage his fear, he paced to the sidewalk and back, his hands fisted in his pockets. "What the hell are you talking about," he demanded as slowly and flatly as he could. "A few ties, a few shirts, one lousy set of golf clubs, and everyone—no, you go flying off the goddamned handle. Tell me, do you see anyone else on this block worried? Do you see the place crumbling in moral decay just because a milkman runs a shoddy little business on the side?"
"What about Syd's promotion and the new car?"
Gerry spun around, frustration at his wife's persistence threatening to erupt in shouting. "Syd has been with that firm for fifteen years, and a promotion was just plain due. I won that bloody car in a raffle at the office, and what the hell more explanation do you want anyway, Ruth?"
"The hundred dollars."
"For crying out loud, I didn't get it."
"Yes," she said. "Yes, you did."
Gerry stopped just as Sandy ran out the front door and flopped next to his mother, grinning. "Well?" he said. "We going or not?"
"In a minute," Gerry said to him before turning back to Ruth. "What are you talking about, Ruth? What hundred dollars?"
Ruth obviously did not want to continue the argument in front of their son, but Gerry's face, in an uncontrollable sneer, forced her to ignore him. "In the mail, while you were out with your precious friends on that precious golf course. A check from the insurance company. Overpayment."
Gerry froze, the sun suddenly chilling as he loosened and began waving his hands impotently in the air. "Nonsense," he said. "Pure nonsense."
"Then what about this baby?" she said, throwing the question like scalding water into his face. She stood then, swaying, crying silently, her head shaking away what answers he might have had. Sandy gaped before reaching up to her, but she only cried out and ran into the house.
"Dad?"
Gerry fumbled in his hip pocket, pulling out his wallet from which he yanked the first bill his fingers could grip. "Here," he said hoarsely, extending the money blindly, "take the bike and grab some hamburgers or something. I …" He looked helplessly at his son, who nodded and left without a word. When he returned with his bike, Gerry looked at him. "Your sister," he started but could not finish.
"I know, Dad," he said. "Today should have been her birthday, right?"
Gerry nodded mutely and stared as his son wheel
ed into the street and vanished around the corner; the boy seemed so old. He watched the empty sidewalks until his legs began to tremble; then he shuffled to the porch and sought out his chair in the far corner, remembering the night he had waited and slept, and the morning when Ruth had smiled and laughed at him. Though he didn't see how it was possible, he was positive Ruth knew he had asked the milkman for a daughter to replace a daughter. He had done it, he told himself every evening in freeflowing nightmares, because she needed it, because the two of them had been too afraid to try again only to renew the pain.
"Insane," he muttered to a hovering bee.
And did she know, he wondered, that Casper Waters had asked for his freedom and had found his wife naked in bed with Fritz Foster?
"Insane."
"I'll tell you," Syd had whispered confidentially at the course that morning, "If I had the nerve, I'd dump Aggie in a minute for a twenty-year-old girl without ten tons of fat."
Perversely, the temperature climbed as the sun fell, and perspiration on his neck trickled warmly to his chest and back. Cicadas passed him a childhood warning of the next day's heat, and he dozed, fitfully, swiping flies in his sleep, flicking a spider from his shoulder. Up the street there was music, and Sandy drifted back for permission to accept a last-minute invitation to a block party over the hill. Inside, the house was dark though he had heard Ruth stumble once in the living room.
Embryos floating through ink and white blood, their faces not his, not hers, blank and unfilled and waiting for a wish from unarmed despair.
There was a rattling far back in his dreams that twisted his head until he snapped awake and heard the footsteps on the walk.
"Hey," he said sleepily, and the footsteps halted. "I, uh, was just kidding about the daughter bit, you know." He shook his head but remained groggy and nodding, his speech slurred though he heard himself clearly. "I mean, let's face it, shirts are one thing, a kid's another, you know what I mean? Hey, you know what I mean?"
There was a silence before the clinking resumed and Gerry slept on, dreaming pink and white lace, until he awakened, the sun barely rising, to Sandy's shouts for help and Ruth's hysterical screaming.
The End
© 1974 by Charles L. Grant. Reprinted by permission of the author. First published in The Little Magazine Spring 1974.
High Weir
Samuel R. Delany
I
"What do you know!" Smith, from the top of the ladder.
"What is it?" Jones, at the bottom.
And Rimkin thought desperately: Boiled potatoes! My God, boiled potatoes! If I took toothpicks and stuck them in boiled potatoes, then stuck one on top of the other, made heads, arms, legs—like little snowmen—they would look just like these men in spacesuits on Mars.
"Concaved!" Smith called down. "You know those religious pictures they used to have back home, in the little store windows, where the eyes followed you down the street? The faces were carved in reverse relief like this."
"Those faces aren't carved in reverse relief!" Mak, right next to Rimkin, shouted up. "I can see that from here."
"Not the whole face," Smith said. "Just the eyes. That's why they had that funny effect when we were coming across the sand."
Mak, Rimkin thought. Mak. Mak. What distinguishes that man besides the k in his name?
"They are handsome up there." That from Hodges. "A whole year of speculation over whether those little bits of purple stone were carved or natural—and suddenly here it all is, right on High Weir. The answer. Look at it: It means intelligence. It means culture. It means an advanced culture at least on the level of the ancient Greeks, too. Do you realize the spaces between these temple columns lead to a whole new branch of anthropology?"
"We don't know that this thing's a temple," Mak grunted.
"A whole new complex of studies!" Hodges reiterated. "We're all of us Sir Arthur Evanses unearthing the great staircase at Knossos. We're Schliemanns digging up the treasures of Atreus."
I don't know where any of them are, Rimkin thought. Their voices come through the rubber-ringed grills inside my helmet. All these boiled-potato figures against the grainy rust; that one there, who I think is Hodges; the sun blinds out the faceplate. And for all I know, behind the plastic is a grotesquerie as deformed as those domed heads along the architrave above us.…
"Hey, Rimkin, you're the linguist. Why aren't you poking around for something that looks like writing?"
"Huh …?" And as he said it, without hearing their laughter, he knew that inside their onion helmets they were smiling and shaking their heads. Jones said:
"Here we are on Mars, and Rimky is still in another world. Is there any writing or hen-scratching up there where you are, Smith?"
"Nothing up here. But look at the surface of this eye, the way it's carved out!"
"What about it?"
And then Jimmi—Rimkin could always tell Jimmi because her suit was a head and a half shorter than any of the others—climbed up the rough stone foundation blocks and, with a beautiful "Martian lope" and a wake of russet dust, crossed the flooring, then turned back. "Look!" He could always tell her voice, no matter the static and distortion of the radios (long range; no fidelity). "Here's one that fell!"
"Here!" Rimkin said. "Let me see." They mustn't think he wasn't interested.
Her soft voice said in his ear: "I can't very well move it. You'll have to come up here, Rimky."
But he was already climbing. "Yes, yes. Of course. I'm coming." And there was the sound of somebody trying not to snicker, position concealed by lack of stereo.
The carving had fallen. And it had cracked on the stone flags.
He walked up to Jimmi. The top of her helmet came to the middle of his upper arm.
"It's so funny," she said with that oddness to her laughter the radio couldn't mask. "It looks just like a Martian."
"What?"
She looked up at him, small brown face behind the white frame. The movements of her laughter were displaced from the sound in his ear. "Just look." She turned back. "The great, high forehead, the big beady eyes, and hardly any chin. Wouldn't you have guessed? Martians would turn out to look just like a nineteen-fifties s-f film."
"Maybe …" A third of the face had fallen away. The crack went through the left eye. What remained of the mouth leered with prune-puckered lips. "Maybe it's all a joke. Perhaps some of the military people from Bellona came here and set this whole thing up like an elaborate stage-set. Just to play a joke on us. They would, you know! This is absurd, just the five of us taking the skimmer on a routine scouting trip across High Weir plateau, not sixty-five miles from the base, and coming across—"
"—across a structure as big as the Parthenon! Hell, bigger than the Temple of Zeus!" Hodges exploded. "Come off it, Rimky! You can't just sneak off in the morning and erect an entire stone ruin. Not one like this."
"Yes, but it's so—"
"Hey! You people!" Again, the voice came from Smith. "Somebody come up here and take a look at the eyes. Are they the same stone as the rest of the building, just very highly polished? Or are they some different material set in? I can't tell from here."
Jimmi bent awkwardly and ran her glove over the broken surface. She who is dark and slender and the definition of all grace, Rimkin thought, muffled against the blazing ruin beneath deep turquoise skies.
"It's an inset, Dr. Smith." She made a blunted gesture, and Rimkin bent to see.
The eyes were cylinders of translucent material, perhaps nine inches in diameter and a foot long. They were set flush into the face, and the front surfaces ground to shimmering concavities.
"Lots of them are different colors," Mak noted.
Rimkin himself had noticed that the great row of eyes gave off an almost day-glow quality from across the dunes; up close, they were mottled.
"What are they made of?" Hodges asked.
"The building's that marsite stuff," Jones said. The light, purplish rock "marsite" had been found as soon as the mil
itary base at Bellona had grown larger than a single bubble-hut. Rimkin, there with the Inter-Nal University group, had spent much time looking at the worn fragments, playing after-dinner games with the military men (who barely tolerated the contingent of scholars) speculating as to whether they were carved or natural. The purple shards could have been Martian third cousins to the Venus of Willendorf, or they could have simply been eroded fragments tossed for millennia by the waterless waves.
"What are the eyes made of?" Hodges demanded. "Semiprecious stone? Is it something smelted, or synthetic? That opens up a whole world of possibilities about the culture."
"I can chip some off this broken one to take back—"
"Rimkin! No!" Hodges shouted, and in a moment the bumpy air suit had scrambled over the foundation. Hodges swayed on bloated feet. "Rimkin … look, wake up! We've just had the first incontrovertible proof that there is—or at any rate, at one time there was—intelligent life beside us in the universe. In the solar system! And you want to start chipping. Sometimes you come on like one of those brass-decked thick skulls back at the base!"
"Oh, Hodges, cut it out!" Jimmi snapped. "Leave him alone. It's bad enough trying to put up with those thick-skulls you're talking about. If we start this sort of bickering—"
"Stop trying to protect him, Jimmi," Hodges countered. "All right, perhaps he's a brilliant linguist in a library cubicle. But he's absolute dead weight on this expedition. He spends all his time either completely uninterested in what's going on, or worse, making absurd suggestions like breaking up the most important archaeological discovery in human history with a sledgehammer!"
"I wasn't going to break up—"
Then: "Oh my—God.… No! This is—"
And Rimkin thought: Which one is it? Jesus, with all this distortion, I can't tell what direction the voices are coming from. I can place any accent on Earth, but I can't even recognize their individual voices any more! Which one?
Sci Fiction Classics Volume 3 Page 2