“Gerry!” She came to her feet. “It’s Gerry, now!”
* * * *
He spun the volume control knob and asked: “Gerry Cross?”
“Yes,” her brother answered, an undertone of tenseness to his reply. “The bad news—what is it?”
She answered for him, standing close behind him and leaning down a little toward the communicator, her hand resting small and cold on his shoulder.
“Hello, Gerry.” There was only a faint quaver to betray the careful casualness of her voice. “I wanted to see you—”
“Marilyn!” There was sudden and terrible apprehension in the way he spoke her name. “What are you doing on that EDS?”
“I wanted to see you,” she said again. “I wanted to see you, so I hid on this ship—”
“You hid on it?”
“I’m a stowaway…I didn’t know what it would mean—”
“Marilyn!” It was the cry of a man who calls hopeless and desperate to someone already and forever gone from him. “What have you done?”
“I…it’s not—” Then her own composure broke and the cold little hand gripped his shoulder convulsively. “Don’t, Gerry—I only wanted to see you; I didn’t intend to hurt you. Please, Gerry, don’t feel like that—”
Something warm and wet splashed on his wrist and he slid out of the chair, to help her into it and swing the microphone down to her own level.
“Don’t feel like that—Don’t let me go knowing you feel like that—”
The sob she had tried to hold back choked in her throat and her brother spoke to her. “Don’t cry, Marilyn.” His voice was suddenly deep and infinitely gentle, with all the pain held out of it. “Don’t cry, Sis—you mustn’t do that. It’s all right, Honey—everything is all right.”
“I—” Her lower lip quivered and she bit into it. “I didn’t want you to feel that way—I just wanted us to say good-by because I have to go in a minute.”
“Sure—sure. That’s the way it will be, Sis. I didn’t mean to sound the way I did.” Then his voice changed to a tone of quick and urgent demand. “EDS—have you called the Stardust? Did you check with the computers?”
“I called the Stardust almost an hour ago. It can’t turn back, there are no other cruisers within forty light-years, and there isn’t enough fuel.”
“Are you sure that the computers had the correct data—sure of everything?”
“Yes—do you think I could ever let it happen if I wasn’t sure? I did everything I could do. If there was anything at all I could do now, I would do it.”
“He tried to help me, Gerry.” Her lower lip was no longer trembling and the short sleeves of her blouse were wet where she had dried her tears. “No one can help me and I’m not going to cry any more and everything will be all right with you and Daddy and Mama, won’t it?”
“Sure—sure it will. We’ll make out fine.”
Her brother’s words were beginning to come in more faintly and he turned the volume control to maximum. “He’s going out of range,” he said to her. “He’ll be gone within another minute.”
“You’re fading out, Gerry,” she said. “You’re going out of range. I wanted to tell you—but I can’t, now. We must say good-by so soon—but maybe I’ll see you again. Maybe I’ll come to you in your dreams with my hair in braids and crying because the kitten in my arms is dead; maybe I’ll be the touch of a breeze that whispers to you as it goes by; maybe I’ll be one of those gold-winged larks you told me about, singing my silly head off to you; maybe, at times, I’ll be nothing you can see but you will know I’m there beside you. Think of me like that, Gerry; always like that and not—the other way.”
Dimmed to a whisper by the turning of Woden, the answer came back:
“Always like that, Marilyn—always like that and never any other way.”
“Our time is up, Gerry—I have to go now. Good—” Her voice broke in mid-word and her mouth tried to twist into crying. She pressed her hand hard against it and when she spoke again the words came clear and true:
“Good-by, Gerry.”
Faint and ineffably poignant and tender, the last words came from the cold metal of the communicator:
“Good-by, little sister—”
* * * *
She sat motionless in the hush that followed, as though listening to the shadow-echoes of the words as they died away, then she turned away from the communicator, toward the air lock, and he pulled the black lever beside him. The inner door of the air lock slid swiftly open, to reveal the bare little cell that was waiting for her, and she walked to it.
She walked with her head up and the brown curls brushing her shoulders, with the white sandals stepping as sure and steady as the fractional gravity would permit and the gilded buckles twinkling with little lights of blue and red and crystal. He let her walk alone and made no move to help her, knowing she would not want it that way. She stepped into the air lock and turned to face him, only the pulse in her throat to betray the wild beating of her heart.
“I’m ready,” she said.
He pushed the lever up and the door slid its quick barrier between them, inclosing her in black and utter darkness for her last moments of life. It clicked as it locked in place and he jerked down the red lever. There was a slight waver to the ship as the air gushed from the lock, a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing, then there was nothing and the ship was dropping true and steady again. He shoved the red lever back to close the door on the empty air lock and turned away, to walk to the pilot’s chair with the slow steps of a man old and weary.
Back in the pilot’s chair he pressed the signal button of the normal-space transmitter. There was no response; he had expected none. Her brother would have to wait through the night until the turning of Woden permitted contact through Group One.
It was not yet time to resume deceleration and he waited while the ship dropped endlessly downward with him and the drives purred softly. He saw that the white hand of the supplies closet temperature gauge was on zero. A cold equation had been balanced and he was alone on the ship. Something shapeless and ugly was hurrying ahead of him, going to Woden where its brother was waiting through the night, but the empty ship still lived for a little while with the presence of the girl who had not known about the forces that killed with neither hatred nor malice. It seemed, almost, that she still sat small and bewildered and frightened on the metal box beside him, her words echoing hauntingly clear in the void she had left behind her:
I didn’t do anything to die for—I didn’t do anything—
* * * *
Copyright © 1954 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.
ZENNA HENDERSON
(1917–1983)
Not all 1950s science fiction was spaceships and physicists. Writers like L. Sprague de Camp and Clifford D. Simak and Zenna Henderson looked at science fiction through the lens of the social sciences, with how people (in several senses of the word) learn and teach being a key foundation to Henderson’s writing. Never a prolific writer, most of Henderson’s stories would be collected in two slender collections of her work, The Anything Box (1965) and Holding Wonder (1971). Until Mark and Priscilla Olson of NESFA press published Ingathering: The Complete People Stories (1995) very little of Henderson’s writing remained in print. In recent years her work has gotten more attention; atypical as her fiction was in the 1950s, it looked forward to some profound changes in the field (which means her stories remain very readable today). Nor did very many women SF writers use their own names in the 1950s, as Henderson did.
A science fiction reader from a very early age, Henderson graduated from Arizona State University in 1940 with a BA in education. She worked as a teacher for most of her life; one of her first teaching jobs profoundly influenced her: teaching Japanese-American children imprisoned at a Sacaton, Arizona relocation camp during World War II. Aliens and alienated children would figure prominently in her work.
Henderson published her firs
t story, “Come on, Wagon!” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1951. The following year came “Ararat,” the first of The People stories for which she is best-known. They tell the story of a group of psychic aliens who have been stranded on Earth. One of the People stories, “Captivity,” was nominated for a Hugo in 1959.
Henderson largely stopped writing after the early 1970s. She died of cancer at age sixty-five in 1983.
LOO REE, by Zenna Henderson
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1953
Lots of children have imaginary playmates. You probably had one yourself if you were an only child or a lonesome one. Or if you didn’t, you’ve listened to stories about children who cried because Daddy shut the door on Jocko’s tail or Mommie stepped right in the middle of Mr. Gepp while he was napping on the kitchen floor. Well, being a first-grade teacher, I meet some of these playmates occasionally, though they stay home more often than not. After all, when you start to school, you aren’t alone or lonesome any more. I’ve seldom known such a playmate to persist at school for more than a week or so. And yet—there was Loo Ree.
Of course I didn’t see Loo Ree. I didn’t even know Loo Ree was there when Marsha came to register the Saturday before school began. Marsha and her mother sat down across the cafeteria table from me as I reached for the registration material stacked in front of me in anticipation of the morning rush.
I said, “Good morning,” to the nervous parent and smiled at the wide-eyed eager little girl who sat a seat removed from her mother.
“Wouldn’t you like to move over closer?” I asked.
“No, thank you.” Marsha sighed a sigh of resigned patience. “Loo Ree doesn’t like to be crowded.”
“Marsha!” Her mother shook a warning head.
“Oh?” I said inanely, trying to read mother’s eyebrows and Marsha’s eyes and the birth certificate in front of me all at the same time. “Well! So Marsha’s six already. That’s nice. We like them that old. They usually do better.”
As casual as that was the advent of Loo Ree to my classroom. But it didn’t stay casual for long. In fact, the second day, as the children lined up to come in at noon, I heard the spat of an open-handed blow and a heart-broken five-and-a-half-year-old wail.
“What’s the matter, Stacy? What happened?” I knelt beside the pigtailed, blue-ginghamed little girl who was announcing to high heaven her great grief.
“She hit mel” An indignant tear-wet finger was jabbed at Marsha.
“Why, Marsha!” I applied Kleenex vigorously to Stacy’s eyes and nose. “We don’t hit each other. What’s wrong?”
“She crowded in where Loo Ree was supposed to be.”
“Loo Ree?” I searched the faces around me. After all, I had thirty-four faces to connect with thirty-four names, among which were Bob, Bobby, Bobette, Karen, Carol, Carolyn, and Carl.
“Yes.” Marsha’s arm curved out in a protective gesture to the empty air beside her. “Loo Ree’s supposed to be by me.”
“Even so, Marsha, you shouldn’t have hit Stacy. In the first place, she’s smaller than you and then hitting is no way to settle anything. Stacy didn’t know Loo Ree was there, did you, Stacy?”
“No.” Stacy edged away from Marsha warily.
“Did Loo Ree tell you to hit Stacy?” I asked, because it was so very real to Marsha.
Marsha shook her head and looked at her bent arm questioningly. Then shamed color swept up her face. “No, ma’am, and Loo Ree says I wasn’t nice. I’m supposed to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Stacy.”
“Well, that’s the way polite children talk. Now, where’s our straight lines so we can come in?”
As the boy line and the girl line clattered past me into the room, I heard Bob, skidding in his new shoes, mutter to Bobby, barefooted and ragged, “I don’t see no Loo Ree. Do you?”
“School’s funny,” reminded Bobby.
“Oh,” said Bob.
* * * *
In the weeks that followed, Loo Ree did not fade out as other imaginary playmates have done in the past. Rather, Loo Ree became quite a fixture in our room. Bob was taught, the hard way, to respect Marsha’s good right fist and Loo Ree’s existence when Marsha bloodied his nose all down the front of his Hopalong Cassidy shirt for saying Loo Ree was a lie. And poor little Bobby—he of the rusty, bare feet, the perpetually runny nose, the pinched blue look of chronic hunger and neglect—he sat all one morning staring at the chair where Marsha said Loo Ree was sitting. I saw the sunrise in his face when he suddenly leaned over and smoothed one grimy hand apparently down Loo Ree’s hair and smiled shyly.
“Loo Ree,” he stated to the room and, for an astonishing minute, looked fed and cared-for and loved.
The children learned—by, I fear, punching, poking and many heated words from Marsha—not to sit down on Loo Ree in the chair by the corner table where crayons and paper were kept. They learned so well that once, when a visiting mother lowered her not inconsiderable bulk into the chair, the concerted horrified gasp from the room turned to relieved smiles only when Marsha finally nodded. Loo Ree had slipped out from under in time. So the children slowly accepted Loo Ree and out on the playground, they solemnly turned the jumping rope, chanting the jumping rhyme for Loo Ree and Loo Ree never missed.
Loo Ree was as real and immediate to them as Santa Claus or Roy Rogers and far less exotic than Batman or Tarzan. One Monday morning when the week’s paper monitors were being appointed, the children even insisted that it was Loo Ree’s turn to be monitor of row five. There were the makings of a small riot until Marsha stood up and said bluntly, “Loo Ree isn’t any monitor. Loo Ree is—is something special.” And that settled that.
It was toward the end of the first six weeks of school that Marsha came up to my desk, her left hand trailing behind her, leading Loo Ree. She leaned on the corner of my desk.
“Loo Ree wants to know when we’re going to start reading,” she said.
“Well, Loo Ree should know that we have been doing a lot of reading already. But if she means when will we start in our books, tell her that as soon as your group learns the word cards, we’ll get our little red books.”
Marsha looked disturbed. “But, Teacher, I don’t have to tell Loo Ree. You already did.”
“I’m sorry, Marsha. Remember, I can’t see Loo Ree. Is Loo Ree a boy or a girl?”
Marsha inspected the air at her left thoughtfully.
“Loo Ree’s got long, gold hair. Well, not exactly hair. But it’s real gold like Mommie’s ring. Loo Ree’s got a long dress. Well, not exactly a dress—” Marsha stopped, baffled. “Loo Ree, which are you?” Her eyes focused about a foot away. Then she wrinkled her forehead. “Loo Ree says she isn’t either one, but we can say she’s a girl because she stays mostly with me.”
“Good,” I said, my head whirling in perfect figures of eight. “Well, then, as soon as we know our words, we’ll get our books. Now you go back to your seat and draw me a picture of Loo Ree so I’ll know what she looks like.”
I forgot about the picture until just before lunch. Marsha came up with a piece of manila paper.
“Teacher, I couldn’t do it very good because Loo Ree doesn’t look the same all the time.”
I looked at her picture. There were wavering lines of yellow and orange and round little circles of blue, vaguely face-like in arrangement. “I suppose it would be hard,” I said. “What’s that other one?”
“Loo Ree drew it with her finger. She says you’ll have to look fast because your eyes will make it go away.” She gave the paper to me and went to her seat.
I glanced down, expecting some more of Marsha’s unformed figures, but instead, my eyes dazzled and contracted before a blinding flare of brightness. I blinked and caught the after-brightness behind my eyelids. All I had distinguished was a half-halo of brilliance and a feeling of—well, I almost said “awe.” I looked at the paper again and there was nothing on it. I rubbed my hand across it and felt a fading war
mth against my palm.
* * * *
It was the next day, after the dismissal bell had rung and the thirty-four restless occupants of my room exploded out the door and into the buses, that the next chapter of Loo Ree began.
I was trying to straighten our my front desk drawer into which I dump or cram anything and everything all day long, when I heard, “I want to learn to read.”
“Why of course you do,” I said automatically, not looking up. “It’s fun and that’s why we come to school. But you scoot now or the bus will go off without you.”
“I want to learn to read now.”
I sorted out six thumb tacks, a hair ribbon, a piece of bubble gum and three marbles before I looked up.
“It takes time—”
I stopped. No one was in the room. Nothing was there except the late sun slanting across the desks and showing up the usual crushed Crayolas on the floor around Bob’s desk. I rubbed one grimy hand across my forehead. Now wait a minute. I know I’ve been teaching for a quite a spell, but heavens to Hannah, not that long. Hearing voices is just about the last stop before the genteel vine-covered barred window. I took a deep breath and bent to my task again.
“Teacher, I must learn to read.”
My hands froze on the tangled mass of yo-yo strings and Red Cross buttons. The voice was unmistakable. If this was hallucination, then I’d gone too far to come back. I was afraid to raise my eyes. I spoke past my choked throat
“Who are you?”
There was a soft, musical laugh. “I drew my picture for you. I’m Loo Ree.”
“Loo Ree?” My palsied fingers plucked at the matted strings. “Then if I look, I can’t see you?”
“No, probably not. Your eyes are limited, you know.” The voice had nothing childish about it, but it sounded very young—and very wise.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 215