A Treasury of Great Science Fiction 1

by Anthony Boucher (ed)

  “I’m afraid it’s come, my dear. This is it,” he said.

  He got up and went round the table to her. He put his arms round her, bent down and kissed her. Tears stood in her eyes.

  “Oh, Johnny, dear. Why are you so sweet to me, when all I’ve brought you is—?” He stopped that with another kiss.

  They looked steadily into each other’s eyes for a moment, then, without a word, they both turned to look at Sophie.

  Mrs. Wender became her usual self again. She went briskly to a cupboard, took out some food, and put it on the table.

  “Wash first, you dirty things,” she told us. “Then eat this up. Every bit of it.”

  While I washed I put the question I had wanted to ask often before.

  “Mrs. Wender, if it’s just Sophie’s toes, couldn’t you have cut them off when she was a little baby? I don’t expect it would have hurt her much then, and nobody need have known.”

  “There’d have been marks, David, and when people saw them they’d know why. Now hurry up and eat that supper,” she told me, and went busily off into the other room.

  “We’re going away,” Sophie confided to me presently, through a mouthful of pie.

  “Going away?” I repeated blankly.

  She nodded. “Mummy said we’d have to go if anybody ever found out. We nearly did when you saw them.”

  “But—you mean, right away? Never come back?” I asked, in dismay.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  I had been hungry, but I suddenly lost my appetite. I sat fiddling with the food on my plate. The sounds of bustling and bumping elsewhere in the house took on an ominous quality. I looked across the table at Sophie. In my throat there was a lump that wouldn’t be swallowed.

  “Where?” I asked, unhappily.

  “I don’t know—a long way, though,” she told me.

  We sat on. Sophie prattled between mouthfuls; I found it hard to swallow because of the lump. Everything was abruptly bleak to the horizon, and beyond. Nothing, I knew, was going to be quite the same ever again. The desolation of the prospect engulfed me. I had to struggle hard to keep back tears.

  Mrs. Wender brought in a series of satchels and packs. I watched glumly as she dumped them close to the door, and went away again. Mr. Wender came in from outside and collected some of them. Mrs. Wender reappeared and took Sophie away into the other room. The next time Mr. Wender came for some more of the packs I followed him out.

  The two horses, Spot and Sandy, were standing there patiently with some bundles already strapped onto them. I was surprised not to see the cart, and said so.

  John Wender shook his head.

  “A cart keeps you to the tracks; with packhorses you go where you like,” he told me.

  I watched him strapping more bundles on while I gathered courage.

  “Mr. Wender,” I said, “Please can’t I come too?”

  He stopped what he was doing, and turned to look at me. We faced one another for some moments, then slowly, regretfully, he shook his head. He must have seen that tears were close behind my eyes, for he put his hand on my shoulder, and let it rest there.

  “Come along inside, Davie,” he said, leading the way back to the house.

  Mrs. Wender was back in the living room, standing in the middle of the floor, and looking round as if for things forgotten.

  “He wants to come with us, Martie,” said Mr. Wender.

  She sat down on a stool, and held her arms out to me. I went to her, unable to speak. Looking over my head she said:

  “Oh, Johnny. That awful father! I’m afraid for him.”

  Close to her like that I could catch her thoughts. They came faster, but easier to understand than words. I know how she felt, how she genuinely wished I could go with them, how she leaped on, without examining the reasons, to knowing that I could not and must not go with them. I had the complete answer before John Wender had put the first sentence of his reply into ordinary words.

  “I know, Martie. But it’s Sophie I’m afraid for—and you. If we were to be caught we’d be charged with kidnaping as well as concealment.”

  “If they take Sophie nothing could make things worse for me, Johnny.”

  “But it’s not just that, dear. Once they are satisfied that we are out of the district we’ll be someone else’s responsibility, and they’ll not bother much more about us. But if Strorm were to lose his boy there’d be hue and cry for miles around, and I doubt whether we’d have a chance of getting clear. They’d have posses out everywhere looking for us. We can’t afford to increase the risk to Sophie, can we?”

  Mrs. Wender was silent for some moments. I could feel her fitting the reasons into what she had known already. Presently her arm tightened round me.

  “You do understand that, don’t you, David? Your father would be so angry if you came with us that we’d have much less chance of getting Sophie away safely. I want you to come, but for Sophie’s sake we daren’t do it. Please be brave about it, David. You’re her only friend, and you can help her by being brave. You will, won’t you?”

  The words were like a clumsy repetition. Her thoughts had been much clearer, and I had already had to accept the inevitable decision. I could not trust myself to speak. I nodded dumbly, and let her hold me to her in a way my own mother never did.

  The packing was finished a little before dusk. When everything was ready Mr. Wender took me aside.

  “Davie,” he said, man to man, “I know how fond you are of Sophie. You’ve looked after her like a hero, but now there’s one more thing you can do to help her. Will you?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “What is it, Mr. Wender?”

  “It’s this. When we’ve gone don’t go home at once. Will you stay here till tomorrow morning? That’ll give us more time to get her safely away. Will you do that?”

  “Yes,” I said, reliably.

  We shook hands on it. It made me feel stronger and more responsible—rather like I had on that first day when she twisted her ankle.

  Sophie held out her hand with something concealed in it as we came back.

  “This is for you, David,” she said, putting it into my hand.

  I looked at it. A curling lock of brown hair tied with a piece of yellow ribbon. I was still staring at it when she flung her arms around my neck and kissed me, with more determination than judgment. Her father picked her up and swung her high on top of the leading horse’s load.

  Mrs. Wender bent to kiss me, too.

  “Good-by, David, dear.” She touched my bruised cheek with a gentle forefinger. “We’ll never forget,” she said, and her eyes were shiny.

  They set off. John Wender led the horses, with his gun slung across his back, and his left arm linked in his wife’s. At the edge of the woods they paused and turned to wave. I waved back. They went on. The last I saw of them was Sophie’s arm waving as the dusk beneath the trees swallowed them up.

  The sun was getting high and the men were long ago out in the fields when I reached home. There was no one in the yard, but the Inspector’s pony stood at the hitching post near the door, so I guessed my father would be in the house.

  I hoped that I had stayed away long enough. It had been a bad night. I started it with a determinedly stout heart, but in spite of my resolutions it weakened somewhat when darkness fell. I had never before spent a night anywhere but in my own room at home. There, everything was familiar, but the Wenders’ empty house seemed full of queer sounds. I managed to find some candles and light them, and when I had blown up the fire and put some more wood on, that, too, helped to make the place less lonely—but only a little less. Odd little noises kept occurring inside and outside the house.

  The night stretched out before me in a prospect of terrors, yet nothing actually happened. The sounds like creeping footsteps never brought anything into view, the tapping was no prelude to anything at all, nor were the occasional dragging noises. They were beyond explanation, but also, luckily, apparently beyond manifestation, too, and at length, in spi
te of them all I found my eyes blinking as I swayed on my stool. I summoned up courage and dared to move, very cautiously, across to the bed. I scrambled across it, and very thankfully got my back to a wall again. For a time I lay watching the candles and the uneasy shadows they cast in the corners of the room, and wondering what I should do when they were gone, when, all of a sudden, they were gone—and the sun was shining in.

  I had found some bread for my breakfast in the Wenders’ house, but I was hungry again by the time I reached home. That, however, could wait. My first intention was to get to my room unseen, with the very thin hope that my absence might not have been noticed, so that I would be able to pretend that I had merely overslept, but my luck was not running; Mary caught sight of me through the kitchen window as I was slipping across the yard. She called out:

  “You come here at once. Everybody’s been looking all over for you. Where’ve you been?” And then, without waiting for an answer, she added: “Father’s on the rampage. Better go to him before he gets worse.”

  My father and the Inspector were in the seldom used, rather formal room at the front. I seemed to have arrived at a crucial time. The Inspector looked much as usual, but my father was thunderous.

  “Come here!” he snapped, as soon as I appeared in the doorway.

  I went nearer, reluctantly.

  “Where’ve you been?” he demanded. “You’ve been out all night. Where?”

  I did not answer.

  He fired half a dozen questions at me, looking fiercer every second when I did not answer them.

  “Come on now. Sullenness isn’t going to help you. Who was this child—this Blasphemy—you were with yesterday?” he shouted.

  I still did not reply. He glared at me. I had never seen him angrier. I felt sick with fright.

  The Inspector intervened then. In a quiet, ordinary voice he said to me:

  “You know, David, concealment of a Blasphemy—not reporting a human deviation—is a very, very serious thing. People go to prison for it. It is everybody’s duty to report any kind of Offense to me, even if they aren’t sure, so that I can decide. It’s always important, and very important indeed if it is a Blasphemy. And in this case there doesn’t seem to be any doubt about it, unless young Ervin was mistaken. Now he says this child you were with has six toes. Is that true?”

  “No,” I told him.

  “He’s lying,” said my father.

  “I see,” said the Inspector calmly. “Well, then if it isn’t true, it can’t matter if we know who she is, can it?” he went on in a reasonable tone.

  I made no reply to that. It seemed the safest way. We looked at one another.

  “Surely, you see that’s so? If it is not true—” he was going on persuasively, but my father cut him short.

  “I’ll deal with this. The boy’s lying.” To me he added: “Go to your room.”

  I hesitated. I knew well enough what that meant, but I knew, too, that with my father in his present mood it would happen whether I told or not. I set my jaw, and turned to go. My father followed, picking up a whip from the table as he came.

  “That,” said the Inspector curtly, “is my whip.”

  My father seemed not to hear him. The Inspector stood up.

  “I said, that is my whip,” he repeated, with a hard, ominous note in his voice.

  My father checked his step. With an ill-tempered gesture he threw the whip back on the table. He glared at the Inspector, and then turned to follow me.

  I don’t know where my mother was, perhaps she was afraid of my father. It was Mary who came, and made little comforting noises as she dressed my back. She wept a little as she helped me into bed, and then fed me some broth with a spoon. I did my best to put up a brave show in front of her, but when she had gone my tears soaked into my pillow. By now it was not so much the bodily hurts that brought them—it was bitterness, self-contempt, and abasement. In wretchedness and misery I clutched the yellow ribbon and the brown curl tight in my hand.

  “I couldn’t help it, Sophie,” I sobbed. “I couldn’t help it.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  In the evening, when I grew calmer, I found that Rosalind was trying to talk to me. Some of the others were anxiously asking what was the matter, too. I told them about Sophie. It wasn’t a secret any more now. I could feel that they were shocked. I tried to explain that a person with a deviation—a small deviation, at any rate—wasn’t the monstrosity we had been told. It did not really make any difference—not to Sophie, at any rate.

  They received that very doubtfully indeed. The things we had all been taught were against their acceptance, though they knew well enough that what I was telling them must be true to me. You can’t lie when you talk with your thoughts. They wrestled with the novel idea that a Deviation might not be disgusting and evil—not very successfully. In the circumstances they could not give me much consolation, and I was not sorry when one by one they dropped out and I knew that they had fallen asleep.

  I was tired out myself, but sleep was a long time coming. I lay there, picturing Sophie and her parents plodding their way southward toward the dubious safety of the Fringes, and hoping desperately that they would be far enough off now for my betrayal not to hurt them.

  And then when sleep did come it was full of dreams. Faces and people moved restlessly through it; scenes, too. Once more there was the one where we all stood round in the yard while my father disposed of an Offense which was Sophie, and I woke up hearing my own voice shouting to him to stop. I was afraid to go to sleep again, but I did, and that time it was quite different. I dreamt again of the great city by the sea, with its houses and streets, and the things that flew in the sky. It was years since I had dreamt that one, but it still looked just the same, and in some quite obscure way it soothed me.

  My mother looked in in the morning, but she was detached and disapproving. Mary was the one who took charge, and she decreed that there was to be no getting up that day. I was to lie on my front, and not wriggle about, so that my back would heal more quickly. I took the instruction meekly for it was certainly more comfortable to do as she said. So I lay there and considered what preparation I should have to make for running away, once I was about again and the stiffness had worn off. It would, I decided, be much better to have a horse, and I spent most of the morning concocting a plan for stealing one and riding away to the Fringes.

  The Inspector looked in in the afternoon, bringing with him a bag of buttery sweets. For a moment I thought of trying to get something out of him—casually, of course—about the real nature of the Fringes. After all, as an expert on Deviation he might be expected to know more about them than anyone else. On second thought, however, I decided it might be impolitic.

  He was sympathetic and kindly enough, but he was on a mission. He put his questions in a friendly way. Munching one of the sweets himself, he asked me:

  “How long have you known that the Wender child—what is her name, by the way?”

  I told him, there was no harm in that now.

  “How long have you known that Sophie deviates?”

  I didn’t see that telling the truth could make things much worse.

  “Quite a long time,” I admitted.

  “And how long would that be?”

  “About six months, I think,” I told him.

  He raised his eyebrows, and then looked serious.

  “That’s bad, you know,” he said. “It’s what we call abetting a concealment. You must have known that was wrong, didn’t you?”

  I dropped my gaze. I wriggled uncomfortably under his straight look, and then stopped because it made my back twinge.

  “It sort of didn’t seem like the things they say in church,” I tried to explain. “Besides, they were awfully little toes.”

  The Inspector took another sweet and pushed the bag back to me.

  “ ‘—And each foot shall have five toes,’ ” he quoted.

  “You remember that?”

  “Yes;” I admitted, unhappily
.

  “Well, every part of the definition is as important as any other; and if a child doesn’t come within it, then it isn’t human, and that means it doesn’t have a soul. It is not in the image of God, it is an imitation, and in the imitations there is always some mistake. Only God produces perfection. Although Deviations may look like us in many ways, they cannot be really human. They are something quite different.”

  I thought that over.

  “But Sophie isn’t really different—not in any other way,” I told him.

  “You’ll find it easier to understand when you are older, but you do know the definition, and you must have realized Sophie deviated. Why didn’t you tell your father or me about her?”

  I explained about my dream of my father treating Sophie as he did one of the farm Offenses. The Inspector looked at me thoughtfully for some seconds, then he nodded:

  “I see,” he said. “But Blasphemies are not treated the same way as Offenses.”

  “What happens to them?” I asked.

  But he evaded that. He went on:

  “You know, it’s really my duty to include your name in my report. However, as your father has already taken action, I may be able to leave it out. All the same, it is a very serious matter. The Devil sends Deviations among us to weaken us and tempt us away from Purity. Sometimes he is clever enough to make a nearly perfect imitation, so we have always to be on the lookout for the mistake he has made, however small, and when we see one it must be reported at once. You’ll remember that in future, won’t you?”

  I avoided his eye. The Inspector was the Inspector, and an important person; all the same I could not believe that the Devil had sent Sophie. I found it hard to see how the very small toe on each foot could make that much difference. “Sophie’s my friend,” I said. “My best friend.”

  The Inspector kept on looking at me, then he shook his head, and sighed.

  “Loyalty is a great virtue, but there is such a thing as misplaced loyalty. One day you will understand the importance of a greater loyalty. The Purity of the Race—” He broke off as the door opened. My father came in.