“Out cold,” he said.
Molly said in a strange, quiet voice, “No, Daddy. He’s lookin’ at dreams.”
“Dreams?”
“A place with a or’nge sky,” said Molly. He looked up sharply. Her eyes were closed. “Lots of Mewhus. Hundreds an’ hundreds—big ones. As big as Mr. Thorndyke.” (Thorndyke was an editor whom they knew in the city. He was six feet seven.) “Round houses, an’ big airplanes with...sticks fer wings.”
“Molly, you’re talking nonsense,” her mother said worriedly. Jack shushed her. “Go on, baby.”
“A place, a room. It’s a...Mewhu is there and a bunch more. They’re in...in lines. Rows. There’s a big one with a yella hat. He keeps them in rows. Here’s Mewhu. He’s outa the line. He’s jumpin’ out th’ window with a flyin’ belt.” There was a long silence. Mewhu moaned.
“Well?”
“Nothin’, Daddy...wait! It’s...all...fuzzy. Now there’s a thing, a kinda summarine. Only on the ground, not in the water. The door’s open. Mewhu is...is inside. Knobs, and clocks. Pull on the knobs. Push a—Oh. Oh! It hurts!” She put her fists to her temples.
“Molly!”
Molly opened her eyes and said quite calmly, “Oh, I’m all right, Mommy. It was a thing in the dream that hurt, but it didn’t hurt me. It was all a bunch of fire an’...an’ a sleepy feeling, only bigger. An’ it hurt.”
“Jack, he’ll harm the child!”
“I doubt it,” said Jack.
“So do I,” said Iris wonderingly, and then, almost inaudibly, “Now, why did I say that?”
“Mewhu’s asleep,” said Molly suddenly.
“No more dreams?”
“No more dreams. Gee. That was—funny.”
“Come and have some lunch,” said Iris. Her voice shook a little. They went into the house. Jack looked down at Mewhu, who was smiling peacefully in his sleep. He thought of putting the strange creature to bed, but the day was warm and the grass was thick and soft where he lay. He shook his head and went into the house.
“Sit down and feed,” Iris said.
He looked around. “You’ve done wonders in here,” he said. The litter of lath and plaster was gone, and Iris’ triumphant antimacassars blossomed from the upholstery. She curtsied. “Thank you, m’lord.”
They sat around the card table and began to do damage to tongue sandwiches. “Jack.”
“Mm-m?”
“What was that—telepathy?”
“Think so. Something like that. Oh, wait’ll I tell Zinsser! He’ll never believe it.”
“Are you going down to the airfield this afternoon?”
“You bet. Maybe I’ll take Mewhu with me.”
“That would be a little rough on the populace, wouldn’t it?
Mewhu isn’t the kind of fellow you can pass off as your cousin Julius.”
“Heck, he’d be all right. He could sit in the back seat with Molly while I talked Zinsser into coming out to have a look at him.”
“Why not get Zinsser out here?”
“You know that’s silly. When we see him in town he’s got time off. Out here he’s tied to that airport almost every minute.”
“Jack, do you think Molly’s quite safe with that creature?”
“Of course. Are you worried?”
“I...I am, Jack. But not about Mewhu. About me. I’m worried because I think I should worry more, if you see what I mean.”
Jack leaned over and kissed her. “The good old maternal instinct at work,” he chuckled. “Mewhu’s new and strange and might be dangerous. At the same time Mewhu’s hurt, and he’s inoffensive, so something in you wants to mother him, too.”
“There you really have something,” Iris said thoughtfully. “He’s as big and ugly as you are, and unquestionably more intelligent. Yet I don’t mother you.”
Jack grinned. “You’re not kiddin’.” He gulped his coffee and stood up. “Eat it up, Molly, and go wash your hands and face. I’m going to have a look at Mewhu.”
“You’re going into the airport, then?” asked Iris.
“If Mewhu’s up to it. There’s too much I want to know, too much I haven’t the brains to figure out. I don’t think I’ll get all the answers from Zinsser, by any means; but between us we’ll figure out what to do about this thing. Iris, it’s big!”
Full of wild speculation, he stepped out on the lawn. Mewhu was sitting up, happily contemplating a caterpillar.
“Mewhu.”
“Dew?”
“How’d you like to take a ride?”
“Hubilly grees. Jeek?”
“I guess you don’t get the idea. C’mon,” said Jack, motioning toward the garage. Mewhu very, very carefully set the caterpillar down on a blade of grass and rose to follow; and just then the most unearthly crash issued from the garage. For a frozen moment no one moved, and then Molly’s voice set up a hair-raising reiterated screech. Jack was pounding toward the garage before he knew he had moved.
“Molly! What is it?”
At the sound of his voice the child shut up as if she were switch-operated.
“Molly!”
“Here I am, Daddy,” she said in an extremely small voice. She was standing by the car, her entire being concentrated in her protruding, faintly quivering lower lip. The car was nose-foremost through the back wall of the garage.
“Daddy, I didn’t mean to do it; I just wanted to help you get the car out. Are you going to spank me? Please, Daddy, I didn’t—”
“Quiet!”
She was quiet immediately. “Molly, what on earth possessed you to do a thing like that? You know you’re not supposed to touch the starter!”
“I was pretending, Daddy, like it was a summarine that could fly, the way Mewhu did.”
Jack threaded his way through this extraordinary shambles of syntax. “Come here,” he said sternly. She came, her paces half-size, her feet dragging, her hands behind her where her imagination told her they would do the most good. “I ought to whack you, you know.”
“Yeah,” she answered tremulously, “I guess you oughta. Not more’n a couple of times, huh, Daddy?”
Jack bit the insides of his cheeks for control, but couldn’t make it. He grinned. You little minx, he thought. “Tell you what,” he said gruffly, looking at the car. The garage was fortunately flimsy, and the few new dents on hood and fenders would blend well with the old ones. “You’ve got three good whacks coming to you. I’m going to add those on to your next spanking.”
“Yes, Daddy,” said Molly, her eyes big and chastened. She climbed into the back seat and sat, very straight and small, away back out of sight. Jack cleared away what wreckage he could, and then climbed in, started the old puddle-vaulter, and carefully backed out of the damaged shed.
Mewhu was standing well clear, watching the groaning automobile with startled silver eyes. “Come on in,” said Jack, beckoning. Mewhu backed off.
“Mewhu!” cried Molly, putting her head out the rear door. Mewhu said, “Yowk,” and came instantly. Molly opened the door and he climbed in, and she shouted with laughter when he crouched down on the floor, and pulled at him until he got up on the seat. Jack drove around the house, stopped, picked up Mewhu’s jet rod, blew a kiss through the window to Iris and they were off.
Forty minutes later they wheeled up to the airport after an ecstatic ride during which Molly had kept up a running fire of descriptive commentary on the wonders of a terrestrial countryside. Mewhu had goggled and ogled in a most satisfactory fashion, listening spellbound to the child—sometimes Jack would have sworn that the silver man understood everything she said—and uttering shrieks, exclamatory mewings, and interrogative peeps.
“Now,” said Jack, when he had parked at the field boundary, “you two stay in the car for a while. I’m going to speak to Mr. Zinsser and see if he’ll come out and meet Mewhu. Molly, do you think you can make Mewhu understand that he’s to stay in the car, and out of sight? You see, if other people see him, they’ll want to ask a lot of silly q
uestions, and we don’t want to embarrass him, do we?”
“No, Daddy. I’ll tell him. Mewhu,” she said, turning to the silver man. She held his eyes with hers. His mustache swelled, rippled. “You’ll be good, won’t you, and stay out of sight?” “Jeek,” said Mewhu. “Jeek mereedy.”
“He says you’re the boss.”
Jack laughed, climbing out. “He does, eh?” Did the child really know, or was it mostly a game? “Be good, then. See you soon, Mewhu.” Carrying the jet rod, he walked into the building.
Zinsser, as usual, was busy. The field was not large, but it did a great deal of private-plane business, and as traffic manager Zinsser had his hands full. He wrapped one of his pudgy, flexible hands around the phone he was using. “Hi, Garry! What’s new out of this world?” he grated cheerfully. “Siddown. With you in a minute.” He bumbled cheerfully into the telephone, grinning at Jack as he talked. Jack made himself as comfortable as patience permitted and waited until Zinsser hung up.
“Well, now,” said Zinsser, and the phone rang again.
Jack closed his open mouth in annoyance. Zinsser hung up and another bell rang. He picked up a field telephone from its hook on the side of his desk. “Zinsser. Yes—”
“Now that’s enough,” said Jack to himself. He rose, went to the door, and closed it softly, so that he was alone with the manager. He took the jet rod and, to Zinsser’s vast astonishment, stood on his desk, raised the rod high over his head, and stepped off. A hurricane screamed out of the jets. Jack, hanging by his hands from the rod as it lowered him gently through the air, looked over his shoulder. Zinsser’s face looked like a red moon in a snow flurry, surrounded as it was by every interoffice memo for the past two weeks.
Anyway, the first thing he did when he could draw a breath was to hang up the phone.
“Thought that would do it,” said Jack, grinning.
“You...you...what is that thing?”
“It’s a dialectical polarizer,” said Jack, alighting. “That is, it makes conversations possible with airport managers who won’t get off the phone.”
Zinsser was out of his chair and around the desk, remarkably light on his feet for a man his size. “Let me see that.”
Jack handed it over and began to talk.
“Look, Mewhu! Here comes a plane!”
Together they watched the Cub slide in for a landing, and squeaked at the little puffs of dust that were thrown up by the tires and flicked away by the slipstream.
“And there goes another one. It’s gonna take off!” The little blue low-wing coupe taxied across the field, braked one wheel, swung in its own length, and roared down toward them, lifting to howl away into the sky far over their heads.
“Eeeeeyow,” droned Molly, imitating the sound of the motor as it passed overhead.
“S-s-s-s-sweeeeee!” hissed Mewhu, exactly duplicating the whine of control surfaces in the prop blast.
Molly clapped her hands and shrieked with delight. Another plane began to circle the field. They watched it avidly.
“Come on out and have a look at him,” said Jack.
Zinsser looked at his watch. “I can’t. All kidding aside, I got to stick by the phone for another half hour at the very least. Will he be all right out there? There’s hardly anyone around.”
“I think so. Molly’s with him, and as I told you, they get along beautifully together. That’s one of the things I want to have investigated—that telepathy angle.” He laughed suddenly. “That Molly...know what she did this afternoon?” He told Zinsser about Molly’s driving the car through the wrong end of the garage.
“The little hellion,” chuckled Zinsser. “They’ll all do it, bless ’em. My brother’s kid went to work on the front lawn with his mother’s vacuum cleaner the other day.” He laughed. “To get back to what’s-his-name—Mewhu—and this gadget of his. Jack, we’ve got to hang on to it. Do you realize that he and his clothes and this thing are the only clues we have as to what he is and where he came from?”
“I sure do. But listen, he’s very intelligent. I’m sure he’ll be able to tell us plenty.”
“You can bet he’s intelligent,” said Zinsser. “He’s probably above average on his planet. They wouldn’t send just anyone on a trip like that. Jack, what a pity we don’t have his ship!”
“Maybe it’ll be back. What’s your guess as to where he comes from?”
“Mars, maybe.”
“Now, you know better than that. We know Mars has an atmosphere, but it’s mighty tenuous. An organism the size of Mewhu would have to have enormous lungs to keep him going. No; Mewhu’s used to an atmosphere pretty much like ours.”
“That would rule Venus out.”
“He wears clothes quite comfortably here. His planet must have not only pretty much the same atmosphere, but the same climate. He seems to be able to take most of our foods, though he’s revolted by some of them—and aspirin sends him high as a kite. He gets what looks like a laughing drunk when he takes it.”
“You don’t say. Let’s see, it wouldn’t be Jupiter, because he isn’t built to take a gravity like that. And the outer planets are too cold, and Mercury is too hot.” Zinsser leaned back in his chair and absently mopped his bald head. “Jack, this guy doesn’t even come from this solar system!”
“Gosh. I guess you’re right. Harry, what do you make of this jet gadget?”
“From the way you say it cuts wood...can I see that, by the way?” Zinsser asked.
“Sure.” Garry went to work on the jet. He found the right studs to press simultaneously. The casing opened smoothly. He lifted out the active core of the device, and, handling it gingerly, sliced a small corner off Zinsser’s desk top.
“That is the strangest thing I have ever seen,” said Zinsser. “May I see it?”
He took it and turned it over in his hands. “There doesn’t seem to be any fuel for it,” he said musingly.
“I think it uses air,” said Jack.
“But what pushes the air?”
“Air,” said Jack. “No, I’m not kidding. I think that in some way it disintegrates part of the air, and uses the energy released to activate a small jet. If you had a shell around this jet, with an intake at one end and a blast tube at the other, it would operate like a high-vacuum pump, dragging more air through.”
“Or like an athodyd,” said Zinsser. Garry’s blood went cold as the manager sighted down into the jet orifice. “For heaven’s sake don’t push that button.”
“I won’t. Say—you’re right. The tube’s concentric. Now, how on earth could a disruption unit be as small and light as that?”
Jack Garry said, “I’ve been chewing on that all day. I have one answer. Can you take something that sounds really fantastic, so long as it’s logical?”
“You know me,” grinned Zinsser, waving at a long shelf of back-number science-fiction magazines. “Go ahead.”
“Well,” said Jack carefully. “You know what binding energy is. The stuff that holds the nucleus of an atom together. If I understand my smattering of nuclear theory properly, it seems possible to me that a sphere of binding energy could be produced that would be stable.”
“A sphere? With what inside it?”
“Binding energy—or maybe just nothing...space. Anyhow, if you surround that sphere with another, this one a forcefield which is capable of penetrating the inner one, or of allowing matter to penetrate it, it seems to me that anything entering that balance of forces would be disrupted. An explosive pressure would be bottled up inside the inner sphere. Now if you bring your penetrating field in contact with the binding-energy sphere, the pressures inside will come blasting out. Incase the whole rig in a device which controls the amount of matter going in one side of the sphere and the amount of orifice allowed for the escape of energy, and incase that further in an outside shell which will give you a stream of air induced violently through it—like the vacuum pump you mentioned—and you have this,” and he rapped on the little jet motor.
“M
ost ingenious,” said Zinsser, wagging his head. “Even if you’re wrong, it’s an ingenious theory. What you’re saying, you know, is that all we have to do to duplicate this device is to discover the nature of binding energy and then find a way to make it stay stably in spherical form. After which we figure out the nature of a field which can penetrate binding energy and allow any matter to do likewise—one way.” He spread his hands. “That’s all. Just learn to actually use the stuff that the longhair boys haven’t thought of theorizing about yet, and we’re all set.”
“Shucks,” said Garry. “Mewhu will give us all the dope.”
“I hope so, Jack. This can revolutionize the entire industrial world.”
“You’re understanding,” grinned Jack.
The phone rang. Zinsser looked at his watch again. “There’s my call.” He sat down, answered the phone, and while he went on at great length to some high-powered character at the other end of the line, about bills of lading and charter service and interstate commerce restrictions, Jack lounged against the cut-off corner of the desk and dreamed. Mewhu—a superior member of a superior race, come to Earth to lead barbaric humanity out of its struggling, wasteful ways. He wondered what Mewhu was like at home among his strange people. Young, but very mature, he decided, and gifted in many ways; the pick of the crop, fit to be ambassador to a new and dynamic civilization like Earth’s. And what about the ship? Having dropped Mewhu, had it and its pilot returned to the mysterious corner of the universe from which they had come? Or was it circling about somewhere in space, anxiously awaiting word from the adventurous ambassador?
Zinsser cradled his instrument and stood up with a sigh. “A credit to my will power,” he said. “The greatest thing that’s ever happened to me, and I stuck by the day’s work in spite of it. I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve. Let’s go have a look at him.”
“Wheeeeyouwow!” screamed Mewhu as another rising plane passed over their heads. Molly bounced joyfully up and down on the cushions, for Mewhu was an excellent mimic.
The silver man slipped over the back of the driver’s seat in a lithe movement, to see a little better around the corner of a nearby hangar. One of the Cubs had been wheeled into it, and was standing not far away, its prop ticking over.
A Way Home Page 11