Ingathering

by Zenna Henderson

  Shortly after the jar was opened and the roasty smell of peanuts spread, Mr. Kroginold and another fellow drifted casually over to us. I preferred to ignore the fact that they actually drifted—no steps on the floor. The other fellow was introduced as Jemmy. The Old One? Not so old, it seemed to me. But then “old” might mean “wise” to these people. And on that score he could qualify. He had none of the loose ends that I can often sense in people. He was—whole.

  “Ron is lifting,” said Mr. Kroginold through a mouthful of peanut butter and crackers. He nodded at the center of the room, where another fellow sat looking intently at a square, boxy-looking thing.

  “That’s the amplifier,” Jemmy said, as though that explained anything. “It makes it possible for one man to manage the craft.”

  Something buzzed on a panel across the room. “There!” Mr. Kroginold was at the window, staring intently. “There it is! Good work, Ron!”

  At that moment Vincent cried out, his arms going up in their protesting posture. Mrs. Kroginold pushed him over to his father, who drew him in the curve of his shoulder to the window, coaxing down the tense arms.

  “See? There’s the craft! It looks odd. Something’s not right about it.”

  “Can—can we take off the unlight now?” asked Vincent, jerkily. “So he can see us? Then maybe he won’t feel so bad—”

  “Jemmy?” Mr. Kroginold called across the craft. “What do you think? Would the shock of our appearance be too much?”

  “It could hardly be worse than the hell he’s in now,” said Jemmy. “So—”

  “Oh!” cried Vincent. “He thinks he just now died. He thinks we’re the Golden Gates!”

  “Rather a loose translation.” Jemmy flung a smiling glance at us. “But he is wondering if we are the entrance to the afterworld. Ron, can we dock?”

  Moments later, there was a faint metallic dick and a slight vibration through our craft. Then we three extras stood pressed to the window and watched Mr. Kroginold and Jemmy leave our craft. They were surrounded, it’s true, by their shields that caught light and slid it rapidly around, but they did look so unguarded—no, they didn’t! They looked right at home and intent on their rescue mission. They disappeared from the sight of our windows. We waited and waited, not saying anything—not aloud, anyway. I could feel a clanking through the floor under me. And a scraping. Then a long nothing again.

  Finally they came back in sight, the light from our window glinting across a mutual protective bubble that enclosed the two of them and a third inert figure between them.

  “He still thinks he’s dead,” said Vincent soberly. “He’s wondering if he ought to try to pray. He wasn’t expecting people after he died. But mostly he’s trying not to think.”

  They brought him in and laid him on the floor. They eased him out of his suit and wrapped him in my blanket. We three gathered around him looking at his quiet, tight face. So young! I thought. So young! Unexpectedly his eyes opened, and he took us in, one by one. At the sight of Vincent, his mouth dropped open and his eyes fled shut again.

  “What’d he do that for?” asked Vincent, a trifle hurt.

  “Angels,” said his mother firmly, “are not supposed to have peanut butter around the mouth!”

  The three men consulted briefly. Then Mr. Kroginold prepared to leave our craft again. This time he took a blanket from the Rescue Pack they had brought in the craft.

  “He can manage the body alone,” said Jemmy, being our intercom. A little later—“He has the body out, but he’s gone back—” His forehead creased, then cleared. “Oh, the tapes and instrument packets,” he explained to our questioning glances. “He thinks maybe they can study them and prevent this happening again.”

  He turned to Mrs. Kroginold. “Well, Lizbeth, back when all of you were in school together in the canyon, I wouldn’t have given a sandwiched quarter for the chances of any Kroginold ever turning out well. I sprinkle repentant ashes on my bowed head. Some good can come from Kroginolds!”

  And Vincent screamed!

  Before we could look his way, there was a blinding flash that exploded through every window as though we had suddenly been stabbed through and through. Then we were all tumbled in blinded confusion from one wall of our craft to another until, almost as suddenly, we floated in a soundless blackness. “Jake! Oh, Jake!” I heard Mrs. Kroginold’s whispering gasp. Then she cried out, “Jemmy! Jemmy! What happened? Where’s Jake?”

  Light came back. From where, I never did know. I hadn’t known its source even before.

  “The retro-rockets—” I felt more of his answer than I heard. “Maybe they finally fired. Or maybe the whole capsule just blew up. Ron?”

  “Might have holed us.” A voice I hadn’t heard before answered. “Didn’t. Capsule’s gone.”

  “But—but—” The enormity of what had happened slowed our thoughts. “Jake!” Mrs. Kroginold screamed. “Jemmy! Ron! Jake’s out there!”

  And, as suddenly as the outcry came, it was cut off. In terror I crouched on the floor, my arms up defensively, not to my ears as Vincent’s had gone—there was nothing to hear—but against the soundless, aimless tumbling of bodies above me. Jemmy and Vincent and Mrs. Kroginold were like corpses afloat in some invisible sea. And Vincent, burrowed into a corner, was a small, silent, humped-up bundle.

  I think I would have gone mad in the incomprehensible silence if a hand hadn’t clutched mine. Startled, I snatched my hand away, but gave it back, with a sob, to our shipwrecked stranger. He accepted it with both of his. We huddled together, taking comfort in having someone to cling to.

  Then I shook with hysterical laughter as I suddenly realized. “ ‘A sort of telepathy’!” I giggled. “They are not dead, but speak. Words are slow, you know.” I caught the young man’s puzzled eyes. “And of very little use in a situation like this.”

  I called to Ron where he crouched near the amplifier box, “They are all right, aren’t they?”

  “They?” His head jerked upward. “Of course. Communicating.”

  “Where’s Mr. Kroginold?” I asked. “How can we ever hope to find him out there?”

  “Trying to reach him,” said Ron, his chin flipping upward again. “Don’t feel him dead. Probably knocked out. Can’t find him unconscious.”

  “Oh.” The stranger’s fingers tightened on mine. I looked at him. He was struggling to get up. I let go of him and shakily, on hands and knees, we crawled to the window, his knees catching on the blanket. For a long moment, the two of us stared out into the darkness. I watched the lights wheel slowly past until I reoriented, and we were the ones wheeling. But as soon as I relaxed, again it was the lights wheeling slowly past. I didn’t know what we were looking for. I couldn’t get any kind of perspective on anything outside our craft. Any given point of light could have been a dozen light-years away—or could have been a glint inside the glass—or was it glass?—against which I had my nose pressed.

  But the stranger seemed to know what he was looking for. Suddenly I cried out and twisted my crushed fingers to free them. He let go and gestured toward the darkness, saying something tentative and hopeful.

  “Ron!” I called, trying to see what the man was seeing. “Maybe—maybe he sees something.” There was a stir above me and Jemmy slid down to the floor beside me.

  “A visual sighting?” he whispered tensely.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back. “Maybe he—”

  Jemmy laid his hand on the man’s wrist, and then concentrated on whatever it was out in the void that had caught the stranger’s attention.

  “Ron—” Jemmy gestured out the window and—well, I guess Ron gestured with our craft—because things outside swam a different way until I caught a flick or a gleam or a movement.

  “There, there, there,” crooned Jemmy, almost as though soothing an anxious child. “There, there, there. Lizbeth!”

  And all of us except Ron were crowded against the window, watching a bundle of some sort tumbling toward us. “Shield intact,”
whispered Jenny. “Praise the Power!”

  “Oh, Daddy, Daddy!” choked Vincent against his whitened knuckles. Mrs. Kroginold clung to him wordlessly.

  Then Jemmy was gone, streaking through our craft, away outside from us. I saw the glint of his shield as he rounded our craft. I saw him gather the tumbling bundle up and disappear with it. Then he was back in the craft again, kneeling—unglinted—beside Mr. Kroginold as he lay on the floor. Mrs. Kroginold and Vincent launched themselves toward them.

  Our stranger tugged at his half-shed blanket. I shuffled my knees off it and he shivered himself back into it.

  They had to peel Mr. Kroginold’s arms from around the instrument packet before they could work on him—in their odd, undoing way of working. And the stranger and I exchanged wavery smiles of congratulations when Mr. Kroginold finally opened his eyes.

  So that was it. After it was all over, I got the deep, breath-drawing feeling I get when I have finished a most engrossing book, and a sort of last-page-flipping feeling, wistfully wishing there were more—just a little more!

  Oh, the loose ends? I guess there were a few. They tied themselves quite casually and briskly in the next few days.

  It was only a matter of moments after Mr. Kroginold had sat up and smiled a craggy smile of satisfaction at the packet he had brought back with him that Ron said, “Convenient.” And we spiraled down—or so it felt to me—to the Earth beneath while Jemmy, fingers to our stranger’s wrist, communicated to him in such a way that the stranger’s eyes got very large and astonished and he looked at me—at me!—questioningly. I nodded. Well, what else could I do? He was asking something, and, so far, every question around these People seemed to have a positive answer!

  So it was that we delivered him, not to the FBI in Washington, but to his own doorstep at a launching base somewhere deep in his own country. We waited, hovering under our unlight and well flowed, until the door swung open and gulped him in, instrument packet, my blanket, and all.

  Imagination boggles at the reception there must have been for him! They surely knew the capsule had been destroyed in orbit. And to have him walk in—!

  And Mr. Kroginold struggled for a couple of days with “Virus X” without benefit of the company doctor, then went back to work.

  A couple of weeks later they moved away to another lab, half across the country, where Mr. Kroginold could go on pursuing whatever it is he is pursuing.

  And a couple of days before they left, I quite unexpectedly gave Vincent a going-away gift.

  That morning Vincent firmed his lips, his cheeks coloring, and shook his head. “I can’t read it,” he said, and began to close the book.

  “That I don’t believe,” I said firmly, my flare of exasperation igniting into sudden inspiration. Vincent looked at me, startled. He was so used to my acceptance of his reading block that he was shaken a bit.

  “But I can’t,” he said patiently.

  “Why not?” I asked bluntly.

  “I have a block,” he said as flatly.

  “What triggers it?” I probed.

  “Why—why, Mother says anything that suggests unhappy compulsion—”

  “How do you know this story has any such thing in it?” I asked. “All it says in the title is a name—Stickeen.”

  “But I know,” he said miserably, his head bent as he flicked the pages of the story with his thumb.

  “I’ll tell you how you know,” I said. “You know because you’ve read the story already.”

  “But I haven’t!” Vincent’s face puckered. “You only brought this book today!”

  “That’s true,” I said. “And you turned the pages to see how long the story was. Only then did you decide you wouldn’t read it—again!”

  “I don’t understand—” Wonder was stirring in his eyes.

  “Vincent,” I said, “you read this whole story in the time it took you to turn the pages. You gulped it page by page and that’s how you know there’s unhappy compulsion in it. So, you refuse to read it—again.”

  “Do—do you really think so?” asked Vincent in a hopeful half whisper. “Oh, Teacher, can I really read after all? I’ve been so ashamed! One of the People, and not able to read!”

  “Let’s check,” I said, excited, too. “Give me the book. I’ll ask you questions—” And I did. And he answered every single one of them!

  “I can read!” He snatched the book from me and hugged it to him with both arms. “Hey! Gene! I can read!”

  “Big deal!” said Gene, glancing up from his labor on the butcher paper spread on the floor. He was executing a fanciful rendition, in tempera, of the Indians greeting Columbus in a chartreuse, magenta, and shriek-pink jungle. “I learned to read in the first grade. Which way do a crocodile’s knees bend?”

  “All you have to remember,” I said to a slightly dashed Vincent, “is to slow down a bit and be a little less empathetic.” I was as pleased as he was. “And to think of the time I wasted for both of us, making you sound out your words—”

  “But I need it,” he said. “I still can’t spell for sour apples!”

  Vincent gave me a going-away present the Friday night that the Kroginolds came to say good-by. We were sitting in the twilight on the school porch. Vincent, shaken by having to leave Rinconcillo and Gene, and still thrilling to knowing he could read, gave me one of his treasures. It was a small rock, an odd crystalline formation that contrived at the same time to be betryoidal. In the curve of my palm it even had a strange feeling of resilience, though there was no yielding in it when I pressed my thumb to it.

  “Daddy brought it to me from the moon,” he told me, and deftly fielded it as my astonishment let it fall. “I’ll probably get another one, someday,” he said as he gave it back to me. “But even if I don’t, I want you to have it.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Kroginold and I talked quietly for a while with no reference to parting. I shook them a little with, “Why do you suppose that stranger could send his thoughts to Vincent? I mean, he doesn’t pick up distress from everyone, very apparently. Do you suppose that man might be from People like you? Are there People like you in that part of the world?”

  They looked at each other, startled. “We really don’t know!” said Mr. Kroginold. “Many of our People were unaccounted for when we arrived on Earth, but we just assumed that all of them were dead except for the groups around here—”

  “I wonder if it ever occurred to Jemmy,” said Mrs. Kroginold thoughtfully.

  After they left, disappearing into the shadows of the hillside toward MEL, I sat for a while longer, turning the moon-pebble in my hands. What an odd episode! In a month or so it would probably seem like a distant dream, melting into my teaching years along with all the other things past. But it still didn’t seem quite finished to me. Meeting people like the Kroginolds and the others, makes an indelible impression on a person. Look what it did for that stranger—

  What about that stranger? How was he explaining? Were they giving him a hard time? Then I gulped. I had just remembered. My name and address were on a tape on the corner of that blanket of mine he had been wrapped in. If he had discovered it—! And if things got too thick for him—

  Oh, gollee! What if some day there comes a knock on my door and there—!

  Katie-Mary’s Trip

  See—we’ve got this pad, like—you know?—an old farmhouse with a broad porch all around it. The local yokels call it the hippy-joint, and when the local fuzz need something to fill out a shift, they cruise up and down in front of the place and make like busy.

  Now, I know it’s not for real—this hippy bit. Not here. Lots of dudes and chicks stop here on their way to the Coast where the Real is. But they never stay here—not the McCoy. They all drift on in a day or two except the ones that can’t or won’t conform. They can’t buy the whole bit and so they drop out—too individual. Listen, if you think conforming is for squares or the establishment—think twice. You conform to the hippy thing or, brother, you’re out!

  Take
the language, for one. I’ve had drop-ins wrinkle foreheads at me, trying to understand me. So once I listened to myself for a while and found that I’m pretty much of a polyglot. Any form of language that pleases me, I adopt it. Warum nicht? But if you don’t have the vocabulary of a movement—you aren’t with it. You know?

  No, the ones that stay on here for any time at all are the individualists—the loners who have no pack to run with, who are looking for something and think maybe if they stay in one place long enough, like here where the stream of transients flows, whatever they’re looking for will come by.

  And me? I’ve been waiting here the longest. It hasn’t come by yet. Or maybe that’s what passed me by.

  I started this joint. Unintentionally. When I first found this place—way back there when I was still struggling, thinking maybe that was the way—I walked through its empty, echoing, dust-cloud-spawning rooms. Nothing—lovely nothing—all around, bracketed by walls and floor and roof to italicize this particular bit of nothing. I looked out the windows. On three sides—nothing, to the edge of the sky. No hills or mountains to hold up the sky, and so the peak of the roof was all that kept the sky from being flat to the ground. On the other side, the barnyards and beyond—the beginning of town. I wouldn’t need to look that way.

  So I square-pointed the silt out of the rooms, swept the dust out, then mopped down to the bare boards. I straightened the stove pipe and lighted a fire in the potbelly. Then, for a long, satisfying evening, I sat on my bedroll on the floor and watched the fire flicker and glow behind the splintery isinglass in the cast-iron door.

  I don’t know who or what started it, but a couple of months later, people began drifting in to doss down on my floor. I never bothered with furniture. There were a few empty apple boxes around to put our lights on, or if someone had to sit high. I finally put up a couple more potbellied stoves and got the kitchen range—Kalamazoo Direct to You—in working order, the water reservoir and all, and nailed a slotted box inside by the front door. If someone wanted to drop a bit of bread in it as they drifted in or out—okay. If not, Ça ne fait rien.