Love,
Maggie
May 26
Hank dear,
You should see her now—and you shall. I’m sending along a reel of color movie. My mother sent her those nighties with drawstrings all over. I put one on, and right now she looks like a snow-white potato sack with that beautiful, beautiful flower-face blooming on top. Is that me talking? Am I a doting mother? But wait till you see her!
July 10
…Believe it or not, as you like, but your daughter can talk, and I don’t mean baby talk. Alice discovered it—she’s a dental assistant in the WACs, you know—and when she heard the baby giving out what I thought was a string of gibberish, she said the kid knew words and sentences, but couldn’t say them clearly because she has no teeth yet. I’m taking her to a speech specialist.
September 13
…We have a prodigy for real! Now that all her front teeth are in, her speech is perfectly clear and—a new talent now—she can sing! I mean really carry a tune! At seven months! Darling, my world would be perfect if you could only get home.
November 19
…At last. The little goon was so busy being clever, it took her all this time to learn to crawl. The doctor says development in these cases is always erratic…
SPECIAL SERVICE TELEGRAM
December 1, 1953
08:47 LK59F
From: Tech. Lieut. H. Marvell X47-016 GCNY
To: Mrs. H. Marvell, Apt. K-17, 504 E. 19 St., N.Y. N.Y.
WEEK’S LEAVE STARTS TOMORROW STOP WILL ARRIVE AIRPORT TEN OH FIVE STOP DON’T MEET ME STOP LOVE LOVE LOVE HANK
* * * *
Margaret let the water run out of the bathinette until only a few inches were left, and then loosed her hold on the wriggling baby.
“I think it was better when you were retarded, young woman,” she informed her daughter happily. “You can’t crawl in a bathinette, you know.”
“Then why can’t I go in the bathtub?” Margaret was used to her child’s volubility by now, but every now and then it caught her unawares. She swooped the resistant mass of pink flesh into a towel, and began to rub.
“Because you’re too little, and your head is very soft, and bathtubs are very hard.”
“Oh. Then when can I go in the bathtub?”
“When the outside of your head is as hard as the inside, brainchild.” She reached toward a pile of fresh clothing. “I cannot understand,” she added, pinning a square of cloth through the nightgown, “why a child of your intelligence can’t learn to keep a diaper on the way other babies do. They’ve been used for centuries, you know, with perfectly satisfactory results.”
The child disdained to reply; she had heard it too often. She waited patiently until she had been tucked, clean and sweet-smelling, into a white-painted crib. Then she favored her mother with a smile that inevitably made Margaret think of the first golden edge of the sun bursting into a rosy pre-dawn. She remembered Hank’s reaction to the color pictures of his beautiful daughter, and with the thought, realized how late it was.
“Go to sleep, puss. When you wake up, you know, your Daddy will be here.”
“Why?” asked the four-year-old mind, waging a losing battle to keep the ten-month-old body awake.
Margaret went into the kitchenette and set the timer for the roast. She examined the table, and got her clothes from the closet, new dress, new shoes, new slip, new everything, bought weeks before and saved for the day Hank’s telegram came. She stopped to pull a paper from the facsimile, and, with clothes and news, went into the bathroom, and lowered herself gingerly into the steaming luxury of a scented tub.
She glanced through the paper with indifferent interest. Today at least there was no need to read the national news. There was an article by a geneticist. The same geneticist. Mutations, he said, were increasing disproportionately. It was too soon for recessives; even the first mutants, bom near Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1946 and 1947 were not old enough yet to breed. But my baby’s all right. Apparently, there was some degree of free radiation from atomic explosions causing the trouble. My baby’s fine. Precocious, but normal. If more attention had ben paid to the first Japanese mutations, he said…
There was that little notice in the paper in the spring of ‘47. That was when Hank quit at Oak Ridge. “Only two or three per cent of those guilty of infanticide are being caught and punished in Japan today…” But MY BABY’S all right.
She was dressed, combed, and ready to the last light brush-on of lip paste, when the door chime sounded. She dashed for the door, and heard, for the first time in eighteen months the almost-forgotten sound of a key turning in the lock before the chime had quite died away.
“Hank!”
“Maggie!”
And then there was nothing to say. So many days, so many months, of small news piling up, so many things to tell him, and now she just stood there, staring at a khaki uniform and a stranger’s pale face. She traced the features with the finger of memory. The same high-bridged nose, wide-set eyes, fine feathery brows; the same long jaw, the hair a little farther back now on the high forehead, the same tilted curve to his mouth. Pale…Of course, he’d been underground all this time. And strange, stranger because of lost familiarity than any newcomer’s face could be.
She had time to think all that before his hand reached out to touch her, and spanned the gap of eighteen months. Now, again, there was nothing to say, because there was no need. They were together, and for the moment that was enough.
* * * *
“Where’s the baby?”
“Sleeping. She’ll be up any minute.”
No urgency. Their voices were as casual as though it were a daily exchange, as though war and separation did not exist. Margaret picked up the coat he’d thrown on the chair near the door, and hung it carefully in the hall closet. She went to check the roast, leaving him to wander through the rooms by himself, remembering and coming back. She found him, finally, standing over the baby’s crib.
She couldn’t see his face, but she had no need to.
“I think we can wake her just this once.” Margaret pulled the covers down, and lifted the white bundle from the bed. Sleepy lids pulled back heavily from smoky brown eyes.
“Hello.” Hank’s voice was tentative.
“Hello.” The baby’s assurance was more pronounced.
He had heard about it, of course, but that wasn’t the same as hearing it. He turned eagerly to Margaret. “She really can—?”
“Of course she can, darling. But what’s more important, she can even do nice normal things like other babies do, even stupid ones. Watch her crawl!” Margaret set the baby on the big bed.
For a moment young Henrietta lay and eyed her parents dubiously.
“Crawl?” she asked.
“That’s the idea. Your Daddy is new around here, you know. He wants to see you show off.”
“Then put me on my tummy.”
“Oh, of course.” Margaret obligingly rolled the baby over.
“What’s the matter?” Hank’s voice was still casual, but an undercurrent in it began to charge the air of the room. “I thought they turned over first.”
“This baby,” Margaret would not notice the tension, “this baby does things when she wants to.”
This baby’s father watched with softening eyes while the head advanced and the body hunched up, propelling itself across the bed.
“Why the little rascal,” he burst into relieved laughter. “She looks like one of those potato-sack racers they used to have on picnics. Got her arms pulled out of the sleeves already.” He reached over and grabbed the knot at the bottom of the long nightie. “I’ll do it, darling.” Margaret tried to get there first. “Don’t be silly, Maggie. This may be your first baby, but I had five kid brothers.” He laughed her away, and reached with his other hand for the string that closed one sleeve. He opened the sleeve bow, and groped for an arm.
“The way you wriggle,” he addressed his child sternly, as his hand touched a moving
knob of flesh at the shoulder, “anyone might think you were a worm, using your tummy to crawl on, instead of your hands and feet.”
Margaret stood and watched, smiling. “Wait till you hear her sing, darling—”
His right hand traveled down from the shoulder to where he thought an arm would be, traveled down, and straight down, over firm small muscles that writhed in an attempt to move against the pressure of his hand. He let his fingers drift up again to the shoulder. With infinite care, he opened the knot at the bottom of the night gown. His wife was standing by the bed, saying, “She can do ‘Jingle Bells,’ and—”
His left hand felt along the soft knitted fabric of the gown, up towards the diaper that folded, flat and smooth, across the bottom end of his child. No wrinkles. No kicking. No…
“Maggie.” He tried to pull his hands from the neat fold in the diaper, from the wriggling body. “Maggie.” His throat was dry; words came hard, low and grating. He spoke very slowly, thinking the sound of each word to make himself say it. His head was spinning, but he had to know before he let it go. “Maggie, why…didn’t you…tell me?”
“Tell you what, darling?” Margaret’s poise was the immemorial patience of woman confronted with man’s childish impetuosity. Her sudden laugh sounded fantastically easy and natural in that room; it was all clear to her now. “Is she wet? I didn’t know.”
She didn’t know. His hands, beyond control, ran up and down the soft-skinned baby body, the sinuous, limbless body. Oh God, dear God—his head shook and his muscles contracted, in a bitter spasm of hysteria. His fingers tightened on his child—Oh, God, she didn’t know…
* * * *
Copyright © 1948, 1976 by Judith Merril; first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction; from HOMECALLING AND OTHER STORIES: THE COMPLETE SOLD SHORT SF OF JUDITH MERRIL; reprinted by permission of the author’s Estate and the Estate’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
(1923-1996)
Walter Miller’s career has largely been overshadowed by the only novel he was able to complete in his lifetime, the astonishing study of post-apocalyptic monasticism and religious doubt, A Canticle for Leibowitz.
A college student (and atheist) at the outset of World War II, Miller left school to serve in the U.S. Army Air Force, where he participated in bombing missions as a B-25 crew member. On one of those missions, he helped to destroy the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino, filled with war refugees at the time. His wartime actions profoundly affected Miller.
After the war he married and had four children, and converted to Catholicism in 1947. Although he returned to college for engineering, Miller never graduated. Beginning around 1950 he turned to writing, and produced about forty stories in the next decade, often both beautifully written and searingly painful to read. He won a Hugo for “The Darfstellar” in 1957, and again in 1961 for Canticle, a fix-up of earlier stories.
Years of depression and writer’s block followed. When he shot himself in 1996, Miller left behind a partial sequel to Canticle, later finished by Terry Bisson and published as St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman.
DEATH OF A SPACEMAN, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
First published in Amazing Stories, March 1954
Old Donegal was dying. They had all known it was coming, and they watched it come—his haggard wife, his daughter, and now his grandson, home on emergency leave from the pre-astronautics academy. Old Donegal knew it too, and had known it from the beginning, when he had begun to lose control of his legs and was forced to walk with a cane. But most of the time, he pretended to let them keep the secret they shared with the doctors—that the operations had all been failures, and that the cancer that fed at his spine would gnaw its way brainward until the paralysis engulfed vital organs, and then Old Donegal would cease to be. It would be cruel to let them know that he knew. Once, weeks ago, he had joked about the approaching shadows.
“Buy the plot back where people won’t walk over it, Martha,” he said. “Get it way back under the cedars—next to the fence. There aren’t many graves back there yet. I want to be alone.”
“Don’t talk that way, Donny!” his wife had choked. “You’re not dying.”
His eyes twinkled maliciously. “Listen, Martha, I want to be buried face-down. I want to be buried with my back to space, understand? Don’t let them lay me out like a lily.”
“Donny, please!”
“They oughta face a man the way he’s headed,” Donegal grunted. “I been up—way up. Now I’m going straight down.”
Martha had fled from the room in tears. He had never done it again, except to the interns and nurses, who, while they insisted that he was going to get well, didn’t mind joking with him about it.
Martha can bear my death, he thought, can bear pre-knowledge of it. But she couldn’t bear thinking that he might take it calmly. If he accepted death gracefully, it would be like deliberately leaving her, and Old Donegal had decided to help her believe whatever would be comforting to her in such a troublesome moment.
“When’ll they let me out of this bed again?” he complained.
“Be patient, Donny,” she sighed. “It won’t be long. You’ll be up and around before you know it.”
“Back on the moon-run, maybe?” he offered. “Listen, Martha, I been planet-bound too long. I’m not too old for the moon-run, am I? Sixty-three’s not so old.”
That had been carrying things too far. She knew he was hoaxing, and dabbed at her eyes again. The dead must humor the mourners, he thought, and the sick must comfort the visitors. It was always so.
But it was harder, now that the end was near. His eyes were hazy, and his thoughts unclear. He could move his arms a little, clumsily, but feeling was gone from them. The rest of his body was lost to him. Sometimes he seemed to feel his stomach and his hips, but the sensation was mostly an illusion offered by higher nervous centers, like the “ghost-arm” that an amputee continues to feel. The wires were down, and he was cut off from himself.
* * * *
He lay wheezing on the hospital bed, in his own room, in his own rented flat. Gaunt and unshaven, gray as winter twilight, he lay staring at the white net curtains that billowed gently in the breeze from the open window. There was no sound in the room but the sound of breathing and the loud ticking of an alarm clock. Occasionally he heard a chair scraping on the stone terrace next door, and the low mutter of voices, sometimes laughter, as the servants of the Keith mansion arranged the terrace for late afternoon guests.
With considerable effort, he rolled his head toward Martha who sat beside the bed, pinch-faced and weary.
“You ought to get some sleep,” he said.
“I slept yesterday. Don’t talk, Donny. It tires you.”
“You ought to get more sleep. You never sleep enough. Are you afraid I’ll get up and run away if you go to sleep for a while?”
She managed a brittle smile. “There’ll be plenty of time for sleep when…when you’re well again.” The brittle smile fled and she swallowed hard, like swallowing a fish-bone. He glanced down, and noticed that she was squeezing his hand spasmodically.
There wasn’t much left of the hand, he thought. Bones and ugly tight-stretched hide spotted with brown. Bulging knuckles with yellow cigaret stains. My hand. He tried to tighten it, tried to squeeze Martha’s thin one in return. He watched it open and contract a little, but it was like operating a remote-control mechanism. Goodbye, hand, you’re leaving me the way my legs did, he told it. I’ll see you again in hell. How hammy can you get, Old Donegal? You maudlin ass.
“Requiescat,” he muttered over the hand, and let it lie in peace.
Perhaps she heard him. “Donny,” she whispered, leaning closer, “won’t you let me call the priest now? Please.”
He rattled a sigh and rolled his head toward the window again. “Are the Keiths having a party today?” he asked. “Sounds like they’re moving chairs out on the terrace.”
“Please, Donny, the priest?”
He let his head roll aside and closed his eyes, as if asleep. The bed shook slightly as she quickly caught at his wrist to feel for a pulse.
“If I’m not dying, I don’t need a priest,” he said sleepily.
“That’s not right,” she scolded softly. “You know that’s not right, Donny. You know better.”
Maybe I’m being too rough on her? he wondered. He hadn’t minded getting baptized her way, and married her way, and occasionally priest-handled the way she wanted him to when he was home from a space-run, but when it came to dying, Old Donegal wanted to do it his own way.
* * * *
He opened his eyes at the sound of a bench being dragged across the stone terrace. “Martha, what kind of a party are the Keiths having today?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said stiffly. “You’d think they’d have a little more respect. You’d think they’d put it off a few days.”
“Until—?”
“Until you feel better.”
“I feel fine, Martha. I like parties. I’m glad they’re having one. Pour me a drink, will you? I can’t reach the bottle anymore.”
“It’s empty.”
“No, it isn’t, Martha, it’s still a quarter full. I know. I’ve been watching it.”
“You shouldn’t have it, Donny. Please don’t.”
“But this is a party, Martha. Besides, the doctor says I can have whatever I want. Whatever I want, you hear? That means I’m getting well, doesn’t it?”
“Sure, Donny, sure. Getting well.”
“The whiskey, Martha. Just a finger in a tumbler, no more. I want to feel like it’s a party.”
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 234