Molly leaned her elbows on the edge of the seat and stretched her little neck so she could see, too. Mewhu brushed against her head and her hat fell off. He bent to pick it up and bumped his own head on the dashboard, and the glove compartment flew open. His strange pupils narrowed, and the nicitating membranes flickered over his eyes as he reached inside. The next thing Molly knew, he was out of the car and running over the parking area, leaping high in the air, mouthing strange noises, and stopping every few jumps to roll and beat with his good hand on the ground.
Horrified, Molly Garry left the car and ran after him. “Mewhu!” she cried. “Mewhu, come back!”
He cavorted toward her, his arms outspread. “W-r-r-row-w!” he shouted, rushing past her. Lowering one arm a little and raising the other like an airplane banking, he ran in a wide arc, leaped the little tarmac retaining wall, and bounded out onto the hangar area.
Molly, panting and sobbing, stopped and stamped her foot. “Mewhu!” she croaked helplessly. “Daddy said—”
Two mechanics standing near the idling Cub looked around at a sound like a civet-cat imitating an Onondaga war whoop. What they saw was a long-legged, silver-gray apparition, with a silver-white mustache and slotted eyes, dressed in a scarlet robe that turned to indigo. Without a sound, moving as one man, they cut and ran. And Mewhu, with one last terrible shriek of joy. leaped to the plane and disappeared inside.
Molly put her hands to her mouth and her eyes bugged. “Oh, Mewhu,” she breathed. “Now, you’ve done it.” She heard pounding feet, turned. Her father was racing toward her, with Mr. Zinsser waddling behind. “Molly! Where’s Mewhu?”
Wordlessly she pointed at the Cub, and as if it were a signal the little ship throttled up and began to crawl away from the hangar.
“Hey! Wait! Wait!” screamed Jack Garry uselessly, sprinting after the plane. He leaped the wall but misjudged it because of his speed. His toe hooked it and he sprawled slitheringly, jarringly on the tarmac. Zinsser and Molly ran to him and helped him up. Jack’s nose was bleeding. He whipped out a handkerchief and looked out at the dwindling plane. “Mewhu!”
The little plane waddled across the field, bellowed suddenly with power. The tail came up, and it scooted away from them—cross-wind, across the runway. Jack turned to speak to Zinsser and saw the fat man’s face absolutely stricken. He followed Zinsser’s eyes and there was the other plane, the big six-place cabin job, coming in.
He had never felt so helpless in all his life. Those planes were going to collide. There was nothing anyone could do about it. He watched them, unblinking, almost detachedly. They were hurtling but they seemed to creep; the moment lasted forever. Then, with a twenty-foot altitude. Mewhu cut his gun and dropped a wing. The Cub slowed, leaned into the wind, and side-slipped so close under the cabin ship that another coat of paint on either craft would have meant disaster.
Jack didn’t know how long he had been holding that breath, but it was agony when he let it out.
“Anyway, he can fly,” breathed Zinsser.
“Of course he can fly,” snapped Jack. “A prehistoric thing like an airplane would be child’s play for him.”
“Oh, Daddy, I’m scared.”
“I’m not,” said Jack hollowly.
“Me, too,” said Zinsser with an unconvincing laugh. “The plane’s insured.”
The Cub arrowed upward. At a hundred feet it went into a skidding turn, harrowing to watch, suddenly winged over, and came shouting down at them. Mewhu buzzed them so close that Zinsser went flat on his face. Jack and Molly simply stood there, wall-eyed. An enormous cloud of dust obscured everything for ninety interminable seconds. When they next saw the plane it was wobbling crazily at a hundred and fifty.
Suddenly Molly screamed piercingly and put her hands over her face
“Molly! Kiddo. what is it?”
She flung her arms around his neck and sobbed so violently that he knew it was hurting her throat. “Stop it!” he yelled; and then, very gently, he asked, “What’s the matter, darling?”
“He’s scared. Mewhu’s terrible, terrible scared,” she said brokenly.
Jack looked up at the plane. It yawed, fell away on one wing.
Zinsser shouted, his voice cracking. “Gun her! Gun her!
Throttle up, you idiot!”
Mewhu cut the gun.
Dead stick, the plane winged over and plunged to the ground. The impact was crushing.
Molly said quite calmly, “All Mewhu’s pictures have gone out now,” and slumped unconscious to the ground.
They got him to the hospital. It was messy, all of it, picking him up, carrying him to the ambulance—
Jack wished fervently that Molly had not seen; but she had sat up and cried as they carried him past. He thought worriedly as he and Zinsser crossed and re-crossed in their pacing of the waiting-room that he would have his hands full with the child when this thing was all over.
The resident physician came in, wiping his hands. He was a small man with a nose like a walnut meat. “Who brought that plane-crash case in here—you?”
“Both of us,” said Zinsser.
“What—who is he?”
“A friend of mine. Is he...will he live?”
“How should I know?” snapped the doctor impatiently. “I have never in my Experience—” He exhaled through his nostrils. “The man has two circulatory systems. Two closed circulatory systems, and a heart for each. All his arterial blood looks veinous—it’s purple. How’d he happen to get hurt?”
“He ate half a box of aspirin out of my car,” said Jack. “Aspirin makes him drunk. He swiped a plane and piled it up.”
“Aspirin makes him—” The doctor looked at each of them in turn. “I won’t ask if you’re kidding me. Just to see that...that thing in there is enough to kid any doctor. How long has that splint been on his arm?”
Zinsser looked at Jack and Jack said “About eighteen hours.”
“Eighteen hours?” The doctor shook his head. “It’s so well knitted that I’d say eighteen days.” Before Jack could say anything he added. “He needs a transfusion.”
“But you can’t! I mean, his blood—”
“I know. Took a sample to type it. I have two technicians trying to blend chemicals into plasma so we can approximate it. Both of ’em called me a liar. But he’s got to have the transfusion. I’ll let you know.” He strode out of the room.
“There goes one bewildered medico.”
“He’s O.K.” said Zinsser. “I know him well. Can you blame him?”
“For feeling that way? Gosh no. Harry, I don’t know what I’ll do if Mewhu checks out.”
“That fond of him?”
“Oh, it isn’t only that. But to come so close to meeting a new culture, and then have it slip from our fingers like this, it’s too much.”
“That jet—Jack, without Mewhu to explain it, I don’t think any scientist will be able to build another. It would be like...like giving a Damascus sword-smith some tungsten and asking’ him to draw it into filaments. There the jet would be, hissing when you shove it toward the ground, sneering at you.”
“And that telepathy—what J. B. Rhine wouldn’t give to be able to study it!”
“Yeah, and what about his origin?” Zinsser asked excitedly. “He isn’t from this system. It means that he used an interstellar drive of some kind, or even that space-time warp the boys write about.”
“He’s got to live,” said Jack. “He’s got to, or there ain’t no justice. There are too many things we’ve got to know, Harry! Look—he’s here. That must mean that some more of his people will come some day.”
“Yeah. Why haven’t they come before now?”
“Maybe they have. Charles Fort—”
“Aw, look,” said Zinsser, “don’t let’s get this thing out of hand.”
The doctor came back. “I think he’ll make it.”
“Really?”
“Not really. Nothing real about that character. But from all indications, he’
ll be O.K. Responded very strongly. What does he eat?”
“Pretty much the same as we do, I think.”
“You think. You don’t seem to know much about him.”
“I don’t. He only just got here. No—don’t ask me where from,” said Jack. “You’ll have to ask him.”
The doctor scratched his head. “He’s out of this world. I can tell you that. Obviously adult, but every fracture but one is a green-stick break; kind of thing you see on a three-year old. Transparent membranes over his—What are you laughing at?” he asked suddenly.
Jack had started easily, with a chuckle, but it got out of control. He roared.
Zinsser said, “Jack! Cut it out. This is a hosp—”
Jack shoved his hand away. “I got to,” he said helplessly and went off on another peal.
“You’ve got to what?”
“Laugh,” said Jack, gasping. He sobered, he more than sobered. “It has to be funny, Harry. I won’t let it be anything else.”
“What the devil do you—”
“Look, Harry. We assumed a lot about Mewhu, his culture, his technology, his origin. We’ll never know anything about it!”
“Why? You mean he won’t tell us?”
“He won’t tell us. I’m wrong. He’ll tell us plenty. But it won’t do any good. Here’s what I mean. Because he’s our size, because he obviously arrived in a space ship, because he brought a gadget or two that’s obviously the product of a highly advanced civilization, we believe that he produced the civilization, that he’s a superior individual in his own place.”
“Well, he must be.”
“He must be? Harry, did Molly invent the automobile?”
“No, but—”
“But she drove one through the back of the garage.”
Light began to dawn on Zinsser’s moon face. “You mean—”
“It all fits! Remember when Mewhu figured out how to carry that heavy trap door of mine on the jet stick, and then left the problem half-finished? Remember his fascination with Molly’s yo-yo? What about that peculiar rapport he has with Molly? Doesn’t that begin to look reasonable? Look at Iris’ reaction to him—almost maternal, though she didn’t know why.”
“The poor little fellow,” breathed Zinsser. “I wonder if he thought he was home when he landed?”
“Poor little fellow—sure,” said Jack, and began to laugh again. “Can Molly tell you how an internal combustion engine works? Can she explain laminar flow on an airfoil?” He shook his head. “You wait and see. Mewhu will be able to tell us the equivalent of Molly’s ‘I rode in the car with Daddy and we went sixty miles an hour.’”
“But how did he get here?”
“How did Molly get through the back of my garage?”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders helplessly. “His biological reactions do look like those of a child—and if he is a child, then his rate of tissue restoration will be high, and I’ll guarantee he’ll live.”
Zinsser groaned. “Much good will it do us—and him, poor kid. With a kid’s faith in any intelligent adult, he’s probably been sure we’d get him home somehow. Well, we haven’t got what it takes, and won’t have for a long, long time. We don’t even know enough to start duplicating that jet of his—and that was just a little kid’s toy on his world.”
HURRICANE TRIO
YANCEY, WHO HAD ONCE BEEN KILLED, lay very still with his arm flung across the pillow, and watched the moonlight play with the color of Beverly’s hair. Her hair was spilled over his shoulder and chest, and her body pressed against him, warm. He wondered if she was asleep. He wondered if she could sleep, with that moon-swept riot of surf and wind going on outside the hotel. The waves blundered into the cliff below, hooting through the sea-carved boulders, frightening great silver ghosts of spray out and up into the torn and noisy air. He wondered if she could sleep with her round, gentle face so near his thumping heart. He wished the heart would quiet itself—subside at least to the level of the storm outside, so that she might mistake it for the same storm. He wished he could sleep. For two years he had been glad he did not sleep. Now he wished he could; it might quiet his heart.
Beverly, Beverly, he cried silently, you don’t deserve this! He wished the bed were larger, so that he might ease away from her and be but a shriek among shrieks, melting into the hiss and smash and ugly grumble of the sea’s insanity.
In the other bed, Lois shifted restlessly under the crisp sheet. Yancey looked at her without turning his head. She was a thing of long lines under the dim white, her face and hair two kinds of darkness on the pillow. She was lean and somber. Beverly was happy and open and moved about like the brightly colored bouncing ball which used to lead the singing at theaters, leaping along the lyrics. Lois walked as if she did not quite touch the floor, and the tones of her voice were like the tones of her skin and the clothes she favored—dark and smooth. Her eyes were long and secret and her face was a floe. Her nostrils, and the corners of her mouth, and sometimes the slightest concerted movement of a shoulder and an eyebrow, hinted at a heat submerged and a strength relaxed and aware, not asleep, not a sleep. Lois...a synthesis of subtleties, of mysteries, of delicate scents and soft puzzling laughter.
Lois moved again. He knew that she too was staring tensely up into the mottled darkness. The spume-flecked moonlight was intolerant of detail, but Yancey had memorized her face. He knew of the compression of her lips, and that the corners of her mouth were softly turned despite the tension. He was deeply troubled by the sound of the sheet as she moved, for if he could hear that over the storm, how could Beverly miss the throb of his heart?
Then he all but smiled: of course Beverly did not hear as he did, nor see, nor feel, nor think with all her mind. Poor Beverly. Poor bright, sweet, faithful bird, more wife than woman, how can you compete with one who is more woman than...anyone?
Better, this was better than the fearful joy that was like rage. His heart began to obey him, and he turned his cheek slightly to touch her hair. Pity, he thought, is a sharing sort of thing—you can feel the helplessness of the unarmed—whereas rage, like passion, stands apart from its object and is a lonesome thing.
He settled himself now, and without moving he went limp in the thundering night, giving himself up to the glimmer and shift of his thoughts. More than anyone else on earth, he was sure, he enjoyed being alive, and his perpetual delight was in being alive altogether, awake and aware, conscious of his body and how it lay, and where, and at the same time afloat like a gull on the wind of his thought, yielding, controlled. Perhaps he enjoyed the dark part of his unending day the most, camouflaged by a coverlet and the closing of eyes. In the day he lived with that which, if he wished, he could command; at night he lived with that which he did command. He could call a symphony to heel, and make a syllogism stand and wait. He could cut a stack of places, fan a hand of faces, choose his pleasure of them and discard the rest. His recall was pinpoint perfect back and back to the point where he had been dead; before that, only excellent. He used it now as a measure against his heart’s rebellion, so that Beverly could sleep, and, sleeping, not know.
And because the idea of Lois, here, was unbearable, he let his mind take him back to Lois when she was only a secret. She had been an explosion within him, a pressure and a kind of guilt; but all the things she had been were things he could contain, and no one knew. So back he went, to his renascence; back through the time he had been dead, and still farther to Lois-first-seen, to a time when a man with a job and a wife and a settled gray life found this special astonishment.
There was a lake, and small cheap cabins crouched in a row to sip its shores. There was a “lodge” with its stilted forefeet in the water and its rump on a hillside. There were boats and a float, a splintery dance floor and a bar which purveyed beverages all the way up to beer.
Yancey, with little money and only two weeks’ time, had rented a cottage here sight unseen. He expected little of it, being resigned to the truism that a change of surroundings const
itutes a vacation all by itself. He expected little of anything in those days. His life had reached a plateau—a long, narrow, slightly downgraded plateau where the horizons were close and the going easy. His job was safe and, by the chemistry of paternalism, would increase in value as it aged, for all a large business requires of the bulk of its employees is that they stay just as they are.
He had been married for seven years to the blithe and patient Beverly, who was content with him. There had been a time when they interrupted one another in the rush to share themselves, and a longer time when there seemed very little to say, which made them both vaguely unhappy, and they lived with a mild and inexpressible sense of loss. And at last they had discovered that coded communication devised by most folk with their unexciting familiars: small talk, half-finished sentences, faint interrogative and exclamatory sounds, and present—as opposed to absent—silences. Life for Yancey and his wife was not dull—it was too unplanned for that—but its pulse beat between comfortable limits.
This unplanned quality (for why make plans when life is basically so certain?) was responsible for their late arrival at the lake. Last year’s map did not include the dozens of roads closed by the Thruway; somehow Yancey had never gotten around to having the spare fixed, so of course they had a flat; then they had to drive back for the checkbook Yancey had forgotten; and naturally it rained. It had rained all the previous night and all day, and when they turned into the lake road it was past eleven at night and still raining. They pulled up beside the lodge, where a glistening faded sign proclaimed OFFICE, and Yancey turned up his jacket collar and plunged out into the rain and floundered up the wooden steps. When there was no answer to his knock he noticed a soggy pasteboard stuck between the doorframe and a loose pane. He tried to read it and could not. He went to the head of the steps and called, “Bev! Turn the spotlight up here!”
Beverly, between the loose-valved clacking of the motor and the drumming of rain on the car roof, heard a voice but no words. She turned off the ignition and rolled the window down. “What?”
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