Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  “Here,” Old Man Henderson said. “Take these, now, and sit down, boy, over there. In the comfortable chair.”

  Joey took the cookies without saying anything and sat down.

  Old Man Henderson sat down in another chair and studied Joey for a bit, trying to think of something to say; always, at first, words came hard to him, and it was difficult for him to keep conversation alive.

  “How are things going with my little man?” he finally asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine, eh? Well, well . . .”

  Old Man Henderson looked down at his feet and then looked up again, waiting for Joey to say something else. When it became apparent that Joey had no intention of saying anything, Old Man Henderson reopened the conversation.

  “You know,” he began, “when you came in just a minute ago, I was sitting here thinking . . . I was remembering back years and years ago. Must have been ’50, ’51. Yes, ’51, I believe: that was the year of the big earthquake in Missouri. Well, one time, and I wasn’t much older than you, then, just a little tad . . .” He didn’t think Joey was listening very attentively. “Well,” he finished lamely, “never mind about all that.”

  Old Man Henderson realized, dimly, that the long ago of his youth was not as real and vivid as yesterday’s sunset except to himself, and that growing boys do not like to listen to an old man ramble about his childhood. What they like, he told himself, are adventure stories, tales of drama and excitement. He recalled how, in his own youth, he had listened spellbound to story after story of the Great Wars.

  He peered at Joey.

  Let’s see, he reflected, have I told this lad? . . . He tried not to bore people with the story, not that it wasn’t a tremendously exciting story, ideal to tell to children, just the kind they would love to hear time after time, but on general principles. Nothing is worse, he frequently told himself, than an old man who harps continually on a single theme.

  But after a moment’s study, he was sure that he had never told this boy. Still, he didn’t want to rush things. He would wait for a point at which the story would fall naturally into the conversation so that it wouldn’t seem he was trying to force it on the boy.

  For the first time (his eyes were not as good as they once were) Old Man Henderson noticed the strange animal that had entered with Joey. Less out of curiosity (of late he had ceased to care very much about the strange new things in the outside world) and more as a topic for conversation, he said, “Well, ah-ah . . . And what’s that you’ve got there?”

  “Huh? Oh. Just Jasper.”

  “Jasper, eh? Well, well.”

  Joey had finished the cookies—he ate very fast—and now he felt more expansive. “Yes, Daddy brought him back from Venus.” Joey scratched Jasper’s head. “He’s very intelligent and affectionate. And an ideal pet for children.” Then he added, emphatically, as if Old Man Henderson had disagreed, “Daddy says so!”

  “Why-why, now, that’s fine. That’s mighty fine. Well, well . . . Come here, Jasper.”

  Jasper peered up at Joey as if for permission, and then scampered across the room.

  Absently, Old Man Henderson reached down and ruffled Jasper’s feathers. “I’ve sure never seen anything like this one.”

  Jasper hopped into his lap.

  “My!” he said, beginning, for the first time, to take other than a conversational interest in the creature, for he always had a soft spot for affectionate animals. “Well, well. How do you like Old Mr. Henderson?”

  Jasper nuzzled his hand and then looked up to study his face for a long moment. “Kweeeet,” he said. He liked Old Mr. Henderson well enough.

  “You should be very nice to him,” the old man said.

  “I am,” Joey answered. “Except once in a while. When he’s mean.”

  “Ah-ah, yes,” Old Man Henderson said.

  Jasper had been following the conversation with his eyes, and now, in the silence, he looked across at Joey.

  At length the old man said, “Ah-ah,” half to himself. “Hummm. Well. Venus, you say?”

  “Yes,” Joey agreed. “We have to import food, and that’s very expensive, but Daddy says it’s worth it if I like him.”

  “Ah-ah. Seems to me I remember reading about them—whatever-you-call-’ems—now that I come to think of it.”

  Joey narrowed his eyes. Just last week his mother had said, “It’s a pity Old Man Henderson’s too old to read, any more, with so many exciting things happening every day, things he’s always dreamed of seeing happen.”

  “All right, then,” Joey demanded, deleting an “if you know so much” at the last moment, “how do Kweets manage to live on Earth, where the air’s so different?”

  Old Man Henderson opened and shut his mouth. He was suddenly confused. He tried to remember about that article—it was just the other day when he was reading it, wasn’t it?—but he could not. “Why-whv,” he said. “Ahhh—ahhhhhh—”

  “See there! You don’t know!” Joey said triumphantly.

  Old Man Henderson had been looking at the boy. Now he looked away. He studied the back of his heavy, veined hand as it glided over Jasper’s soft, green feathers; there was a puzzled, half-frightened look on his face.

  “So your Daddy gave him to you, eh?” he said at last, and his voice was unsteady. “And where is your Daddy now?”

  Joey’s voice started very soft and grew loud and harsh. “He’s on Mars, doing engineering on the new Dome. I’ll bet I’ve told you that a hundred times!” Old Man Henderson blinked twice as if someone had slapped him almost hard enough to bring tears. “Of course, of course,” he said hastily. “I remember, now. Mars, you say. I . . . I . . . I . . . ah-ah . . . Mars? . . . Hummm.”

  He rubbed his withered hand along his leg.

  “You know,” he said, “when I was twenty years old, there hadn’t ever been a man to the Moon. No, sir, not one, would you believe it?” Already, he could feel his confidence return. He had told the story quite a few times in the last fifty, seventy-five years. And he knew, too, that this young one would be sure to want to hear it, and that would make everything all right. “A couple of people had tried, but nobody ever made it.”

  “Well, well,” Joey said.

  No one had addressed him in that tone for years and years; people were always nice to him, and listened so politely. Now he could not quite understand it. He looked down at Jasper for reassurance.

  “Ah-ah, yes. There hadn’t been a single man to the Moon . . . Well,” he said, “you see that silver and gold plaque over the mantel, there?”

  Joey did not turn to see.

  But Old Man Henderson fell to studying it; and his eyes grew bright with the long ago and far away; for a moment, he was silent with the memory. Idly, one of his hands stroked Jasper’s sleek feathers.

  “Do you know who gave that to me?” he asked.

  The question was rhetorical. It was merely a dramatic part of the oft told Story, and it had a contextual rather than an immediate meaning.

  “Yes,” Joey said, and his voice was a lethal whisper. “The President of the United States gave it to you.”

  Slowly, Old Man Henderson’s mind drifted back to the room. That had been his sentence, and it sounded harsh to hear it coming from young lips, in a voice twisting all the glory of it into ashes. He could scarcely believe that he had heard correctly.

  “Yes, yes, that’s right,” he heard his voice tell the boy, and it sounded weary and dry with disappointment.

  “And I’ll tell you why you got it,” Joey said loudly. There was a queer excitement alive and throbbing in his body. He knew that the old man sitting before him was helpless before his words. He knew, also, that the old man would never protest to his mother. Not about this. It made him feel very big to be in a position to hurt Old Man Henderson without danger to himself.

  “You got it because you were the first man to go to the Moon!”

  Old Man Henderson felt ice form somewhere below his heart. He quit petting the Kweet
and sat unseeing, listening, in spite of himself, to his own words come twisting back at him in a cruel burlesque.

  “I’ve heard that story I’ll bet a hundred times. Now let me tell yon about it. How it felt when you first saw the long steel ship—” Joey began to mimic the reedy voice of Old Man Henderson—“ ‘glistening in the New Mexican sunlight.’ ”

  Old Man Henderson gestured weakly and wanted to ask the boy, please, to stop. Joey did not give him the chance.

  “And how it felt when you took off, gravity pushing you back in your seat. And how it felt when you first saw the Moon right there almost under your feet . . . ‘It felt funny, and my heart seemed to get bigger and bigger until I wanted to cry.’

  “And the celebration they gave you when you got back, and how the President gave you that—that thing up there with his own two hands, and how he said—”

  “Please, please. I meant no harm.”

  Joey had stopped for breath. He was almost incoherent with excitement.

  “And how you went a second time again. And how you had Faith . . .” Again his voice went to the upper register. “ ‘I always had faith, even when I was a little tyke, that Man couldn’t be kept on Earth, that he was bound for the Moon, and then the planets, and then the stars. I always had faith!’

  “Nobody wants to listen to your silly old story any more. Can’t you see that! Nobody wants to listen! You’ve told it and told it until we’re all sick and tired of hearing it!

  “When they see you coming down the street, they say, ‘Here comes Old Man Henderson and his Story,’ and they laugh at you when your back’s turned!”

  Joey had to stop for breath.

  Old Man Henderson made no sound.

  In his excitement, Joey waved his arms wildly. He upset the cookie dish and it shattered on the floor. Joey began again, and it was almost a scream.

  “You don’t seem to realize that nobody wants to hear about how you went to the Moon. Why, anybody could go to the Moon! I’ve been there twice and Daddy and Mommy both have been to Venus and Daddy’s on Mars putting up a Dome right now so people can live on it and it’s going to be a bigger Dome than the one on Venus, and all you talk about is how you went to the Moon!”

  Joey was crying now.

  “And you don’t even know what a Kweet is, and you don’t even know nothing about what we’re doing!”

  He turned and ran to the door. There, he stopped and looked back. He saw Old Man Henderson sitting very still, not saying anything, and suddenly he didn’t feel glad any more.

  “Come on, Jasper,” he screamed. “I’m getting out of here, away from that crazy old man!”

  Jasper looked at Joey and said nothing. Then he turned his mute eyes to Old Man Henderson. He did not move.

  For a moment, Joey did not know what to do; he began to feel the first rustlings of fear inside of his mind. He turned and slammed the door behind him and began to run.

  Jasper lay quietly in Old Man Henderson’s lap. Fie looked up into the old face, the old face of loose folds of dry skin, but the face with the astonishingly bright eyes that brimmed with tears.

  After a long time, Old Man Henderson put Jasper on the carpet, stood up, and walked to Joey’s chair. He got down on his knees and began to pick up pieces of the broken cookie dish.

  Jasper waddled over. “Kweet?” he asked, very, very softly.

  YES AND NO

  A Venusian girl couldn’t just up and marry an Earth man. The legislature had to pass a bill first. And the legislature was the Greatest Deliberate Body the universe had ever known . . .

  CHAPTER I

  THE HOT SUN came down, baking the desert capital of the Federation. Wheels rolled toward it, wheels rolled away from it. Ships roared upward. The communication channels chattered information, gossip, rumor, speculation, fabrication, and local color to the whole of the system. The cogs of government, after lunch, meshed.

  There they sat, row on row: the lame, the halt, the senile, the—in short, the Greatest Deliberative Body the universe had ever known. Vegetating placidly until they were called upon to deliberate.

  Which would occur just as soon as the Speaker could discover what was the order of business for the day. A clerk finally reminded him that it was Every-Other-Thursday, the day on which they turned from normal Federation business to act as steering committee for Janitors’ Local Number Four.

  The Speaker cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he said.

  Instantly a representative, was on his feet. “Can’t trust them damn foreigners!” he roared.

  A colleague dragged him down. “Shut up! That’s for tomorrow.”

  When quiet (comparative) resumed, the Speaker said, “We seem to have three separate pieces of legislation today in regard to the Janitors’ Local.”

  In the foyer, a drunken representative, imagining himself at a cocktail party, muttered endless obscenities.

  The Administration goad arose. “First,” he said, “before we take up that . . .”

  He was immediately drowned out by anguished wails of “Politics, politics, politics,” from the floor, and one thin voice piping above all the rest, “Where in hell’s the money coming from?”

  Behind the Speaker, the as yet incompleted voting-tote peered down at the assembly with its multiple recording eyes. It represented the second great impact of technology upon the Elected; the first had been the electric light . . .

  Three days out from Venus to Earth, the liner, Snowbird, chuffed along through space. She carried six passengers and a cargo hole full of Venusian pears.

  The passengers lolled discontentedly in the recreation area. A business man from Vega kept alternating his attention between a trade journal and the deck head. Two female teachers sat together, next to him, each studying travel folders about where they had spent their vacation. One, gleefully recognizing a picture, nudged the other, “Oh, look! Here’s Zeabaum. You remember Zeabaum?” The other, looking skeptical, bent to deny, but, after a moment, her expression changing to one of self satisfaction, verified, “That’s Zeabaum, all right!” A fourth passenger, returning. to Earth for the sake of his health, stood staring morosely at the fading bulkhead murals.

  The two remaining passengers, a Venusian girl of perhaps twenty-five and an Earth man some ten or twelve years her senior, sat apart from the rest, whispering to themselves; once the man laughed hoarsely.

  After a while, the young man left off with the murals and drifted over to their chairs. “Excuse me,” he said. “I wonder if I might join you?”

  The man furrowed his brow and frowned in instant annoyance, and the girl smiled, vaguely puzzled.

  “It gets lonely, not having anybody to talk with,” he amplified. He put his hands in his pockets and inclined his head forward awkwardly. “You know what I mean? I thought you were both from Meizque, my home city, from your accents, and . . .”

  “I don’t own the chair,” the man said, jerking his head in its direction. “Sit down.”

  The Venusian girl turned to him. “That’s not very polite, Roger. You can at least be polite, can’t you?”

  Roger growled under his breath.

  The young man straightened up. His ears getting red. “I didn’t intend to seem like a bore.”

  “Skip it. Sit down,” Roger said uncivilly.

  The young man’s lips twitched. “Thanks,” he said. “I think I’d rather not.” He turned and stalked back to the murals.

  He put his hands in his pockets, hunched his head forward again. He shifted uncomfortably. His ears were still red. He looked like he wanted to whistle. He yawned and blinked his eyes. He shuffled a few steps to get a better view of the left end of the painting.

  From behind him, he heard the clip-clop of feet. He felt an arm touch lightly on his shoulder. The hands came out of his pockets, and he whirled around.

  “I’m sorry about Roger,” the girl said. “I want to apologize for him.”

  “It’s all right,” he mumbled.

  �
�I knew you just wanted to be friendly,” she said. “Sometimes Roger’s short tempered like that. He really doesn’t mean it. If you knew him, you’d know that.”

  “I shouldn’t have tried to butt in.”

  “I didn’t really mind. We weren’t talking about anything important. Won’t you join us, now? I sent him below for some drinks. He’s getting you one. After he thought it over a minute, he was sorry.”

  “All . . . I mean, if you’re sure it’s all right.”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling.

  She led him across the room to the deck chairs. “You sit here,” she said, and then she settled into the next chair.

  “My name’s Sela,” she said.

  “I’m Jack. Jack Poley.”

  She laughed lightly at the odd, Earth name. “How long did you live in Meizque?”

  “Almost ten years. My father’s a colonel in the army stationed there.

  I went to the University, and then I started working for the Federation government. But I’m going back to Earth, because of my health.”

  The man named Roger was crossing the small room toward them; he carried a tray of drinks, balanced professionally. “I hope you like laqori. I brought you one.” He handed Jack the frosty glass.

  “Thanks . . . uh . . . I don’t usually drink, but when I do, it’s my favorite.”

  “Sela gave me hell for snapping at you,” Roger said. He smiled. “She was right, of course. I hope you’ll forget it?”

  “I shouldn’t have tried to butt in,” he said.

  “No. That was all right. Really.”

  Sela accepted the drink. “Roger’s worrying about a business deal. It always makes him touchy. By the way, Roger: this is Jack Poley. Jack, Roger Croy.”

  “How do you do,” Jack said politely.

  Roger sat down to the right of the Venusian girl. “So you’re from Meizque?” Roger said.

  “Roger’s the head of Trans-Planet, there. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

  Jack Poley set the glass of laqori down carefully. “The president of Trans-Planet?” he asked in astonishment.