Baby Is Three (3 page)

“Well?”

“Thank you, Mommy Gwen.” He began to eat with the teaspoon he had found hilt-deep in the grey-brown mess. There was no sugar on it.

“I suppose you expect me to fetch you some sugar,” she said after a time.

“No’m,” he said truthfully, and then wondered why her face went all angry and disappointed.

“What have you been doing all day?”

“Nothing. Playin’. Then I was asleep.”

“Little sluggard.” Suddenly she shouted at him, “What’s the matter with you? Are you too stupid to be afraid? Are you too stupid to ask me to let you come downstairs? Are you too stupid to cry? Why don’t you cry?”

He stared at her, round-eyed. “You wouldn’t let me come down if I ast you,” he said wonderingly. “So I didn’t ast.” He scooped up some oatmeal. “I don’t feel like cryin’, Mommy Gwen, I don’t hurt.”

“You’re bad and you’re being punished and it should hurt,” she said furiously. She turned off the light with a vicious swipe of her hard straight hand, and went out, slamming the door.

Bobby sat still in the dark and wished he could go into the shadow country, the way he always dreamed he could. He’d go there and play with the butterflies and the fuzz-edged, blunt-toothed dogs and giraffes, and they’d stay and he’d stay and Mommy Gwen would never be able to get in, ever. Except that Daddy wouldn’t be able to come with him, or Jerry either, and that would be a shame.

He scrambled quietly out of bed and stood for a moment looking at the wall by the door. He could almost for-sure see the flickering thing that lived there, even in the dark. When there was light on the wall, it flickered a shade darker than the light. At night it flickered a shade lighter than the black. It was always there, and Bobby knew it was alive. He knew it without question, like “my name is Bobby” and “Mommy Gwen doesn’t want me.”

Quietly, quietly, he tiptoed to the other side of the room where there was a small table lamp. He took it down and laid it carefully on the floor. He pulled the plug out and brought it down under the lower rung of the table so it led straight across the floor to the wall-receptacle, and plugged it in again. Now he could move the lamp quite far out into the room, almost to the middle.

The lamp had a round shade that was open at the top. Lying on its side, the shade pointed its open top at the blank wall by the door. Bobby, with the sureness of long practice, moved in the darkness to his closet and got his dark-red flannel bathrobe from a low hook. He folded it once and draped it over the large lower end of the lamp shade. He pushed the button.

On the shadow country wall appeared a brilliant disk of light, crossed by just the hints of the four wires that held the shade in place. There was a dark spot in the middle where they met.

Bobby looked at it critically. Then, squatting between the lamp and the wall, he put out his hand.

A duck. “Quackle-ackle,” he whispered.

An eagle. “Eagle—eagle—eagle—eagle,” he said softly.

An alligator. “Bap bap,” the alligator went as it opened and closed its long snout.

He withdrew his hands and studied the round, cross-scarred light on the wall. The blurred center shadow and its radiating lines looked
a little like a waterbug, the kind that can run on the surface of a brook. It soon dissatisfied him; it just sat there without doing anything. He put his thumb in his mouth and bit it gently until an idea came to him. Then he scrambled to the bed, underneath which he found his slippers. He put one on the floor in front of the lamp, and propped the other toe-upward against it. He regarded the wall gravely for a time, and then lay flat on his stomach on the floor. Watching the shadow carefully, he put his elbows together on the carpet, twined his forearms together and merged the shadow of his hands with the shadow of the slipper.

The result enchanted him. It was something like a spider, something like a gorilla. It was a brand-new something that no one had ever seen before. He writhed his fingers and then held them still, and now the thing’s knobby head had triangular luminous eyes and a jaw that swung, gaping. It had long arms for reaching and a delicate whorl of tentacles. He moved the least little bit, and it wagged its great head and blinked at him. Watching it, he felt suddenly that the flickering thing that lived in the high corner had crept out and down toward the beast he had made, closer and closer to it until—whoosh!—it noiselessly merged with the beast, an act as quick and complete as the marriage of raindrops on a windowpane.

Bobby crowed with delight. “Stay, stay,” he begged. “Oh, stay there! I’ll pet you! I’ll give you good things to eat! Please stay,
please!”

The thing glowered at him. He thought it would stay, but he didn’t chance moving his hands away just yet.

The door crashed open, the switch clicked, the room filled with an explosion of light.

“What are you doing?”

Bobby lay frozen, his elbows on the carpet in front of him, his forearms together, his hands twisted oddly. He put his chin on his shoulder so he could look at her standing there stiff and menacing. “I was—was just—”

She swooped down on him. She snatched him up off the floor and plumped him down on the bed. She kicked and scattered his slippers. She snatched up the lamp, pulling the cord out of the wall with the motion. “You were not to have any toys,” she said in the
hissing voice. “That means you were not to make any toys. For this you’ll stay in here for—what are you staring at?”

Bobby spread his hands and brought them together ecstatically, holding tight. His eyes sparkled, and his small white teeth peeped out so that they could see what he was smiling at. “He stayed, he did,” said Bobby. “He stayed!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about and I will not stay here to find out,” snapped Mommy Gwen. “I think you’re a mental case.” She marched to the door, striking the high switch.

The room went dark—except for that blank wall by the door.

Mommy Gwen screamed.

Bobby covered his eyes.

Mommy Gwen screamed again, hoarsely this time. It was a sound like a dog’s bark, but drawn out and out.

There was a long silence. Bobby peeped through his fingers at the dimly glowing wall. He took his hands down, sat up straight, drew his knees up to his chest and put his arms around them. “Well!” he said.

Feet pounded up the stairs. “Gwen! Gwen!”

“Hello, Daddy.”

Daddy ran in, turning on the light. “Where’s Mommy Gwen, Bob boy? What happened? I heard a—”

Bobby pointed at the wall. “She’s in there,” he said.

Daddy couldn’t have understood him, for he turned and ran out the door calling “Gwen! Gwen!”

Bobby sat still and watched the fading shadow on the wall, quite visible even in the blaze of the overhead light. The shadow was moving, moving. It was a point-down triangle thrust into another point-down triangle which was mounted on a third, and underneath were the two hard sticks of legs. It had its arms up, its shadow-fists clenched, and it pounded and pounded silently on the wall.

“Now I’m never going into the shadow country,” said Bobby complacently.
“She’s
there.”

So he never did.

E
VERY FEW YEARS
someone thinks to call me Charon. It never lasts. I guess I don’t look the part. Charon, you’ll remember, was the somber ferryman who steered the boat across the River Styx, taking the departed souls over to the Other Side. He’s usually pictured as a grim, taciturn character, tall and gaunt
.

I get called Charon, but that’s not what I look like. I’m not exactly taciturn, and I don’t go around in a flapping black cloak. I’m too fat. Maybe too old, too
.

It’s a shrewd gag, though, calling me Charon. I do pass human souls Out, and for nearly half of them, the stars are indeed the Styx—they will never return
.

I have two things I know Charon had. One is that bitter difference from the souls I deal with. They have lost only one world; the other is before them. But I’m rejected by both
.

The other thing has to do with a little-known fragment of the Charon legend. And that, I think, is worth a yarn
.

It’s Judson’s yarn, and I wish he was here to tell it himself—which is foolish; the yarn’s about why he isn’t here. “Here” is Curbstone, by the way—the stepping-off place to the Other Side. It’s Earth’s other slow satellite, bumbling along out past the Moon. It was built 7800 years ago for heavy interplanetary transfer, though of course there’s not much of that left any more. It’s so easy to synthesize anything nowadays that there’s just no call for imports. We make what we need from energy, and there’s plenty of that around. There’s plenty of everything. Even insecurity, though you have to come to Curbstone for that, and be someone like Judson to boot.

It’s no secret—now—that insecurity is vital to the Curbstone project. In a cushioned existence on a stable Earth, volunteers for
Curbstone are rare. But they come in—the adventurous, the dissatisfied, the yearning ones, to man the tiny ships that will, in due time, give mankind a segment of space so huge that even mankind’s voracious appetite for expansion will be glutted for millennia. There is a vision that haunts all humans today—that of a network of force-beams in the form of a tremendous sphere, encompassing much of the known universe and a great deal of the unknown—through which, like thought impulses through the synaptic paths of a giant brain, matter will be transmitted instantly, and a man may step from here to the depths of space while his heart beats once. The vision frightens most and lures a few, and of those few, some are chosen to go out. Judson was chosen.

I knew he’d come to Curbstone. I’d known it for years, ever since I was on Earth and met him. He was just a youngster then, thirty or so, and boiling around under that soft-spoken, shockproof surface of his was something that had to drive him to Curbstone. It showed when he raised his eyes. They got hungry. Any kind of hunger is rare on Earth. That’s what Curbstone’s for. The ultimate social balance—an escape for the unbalanced.

Don’t wince like that when I say ‘unbalanced.’ Plain talk is plain talk. You can afford to be mighty plain about social imbalance these days. It’s rare and it’s slight. Thing is, when a man goes through fifteen years of primary social—childhood, I’m talking about—with all the subtle tinkering that involves, and still has an imbalance, it’s a thing that sticks with him no matter how slight it is. Even then, the very existence of Curbstone is enough to make most of ’em quite happy to stay where they are. The handful that do head for Curbstone do it because they have to. Once here, only about half make the final plunge. The rest go back—or live here permanently. Whatever they do, Curbstone takes care of the imbalance.

When you come right down to it, misfits are that way either because they lack something or because they have something
extra
. On Earth there’s a place for everything and everything’s in its place. On Curbstone you find someone who has what you lack, or who has the same extra something you have—or you leave. You go back feeling that
Earth’s a pretty nice safe place after all, or you go Out, and it doesn’t matter to anyone else, ever, whether you’re happy or not.

I was waiting in the entry bell when Judson arrived on Curbstone. Judson had nothing to do with that. Didn’t even know he was on that particular shuttle. It’s just that, aside from the fact that I happen to be Senior Release Officer on Curbstone, I like to meet the shuttles. All sorts of people come here, for all sorts of reasons. They stay here or they don’t for all sorts of other reasons. I like to look at the faces that come down that ramp and guess which ones will go which way. I’m pretty good at it. As soon as I saw Judson’s face I knew that this boy was bound Out. I recognized that about him even before I realized who it was.

There was a knot of us there to watch the newcomers come in. Most were there just because it’s worth watching them all, the hesitant ones, the damn-it-alls, the grim ones. But two Curbstoners I noticed particularly. Hunters both. One was a lean, slick-haired boy named Wold. It was pretty obvious what he was hunting. The other was Flower. It was just as obvious what she had her long, wide-spaced eyes out for, but it was hard to tell why. Last I had heard, she had been solidly wrapped up in an Outbounder called Clinton.

I forgot about the wolf and the vixen when I recognized Judson and bellowed at him. He dropped his kit where he stood and came bounding over to me. He grabbed both my biceps and squeezed while I thumped his ribs. “I was waiting up for you, Judson,” I grinned at him.

“Man, I’m glad you’re still here,” he said. He was a sandy-haired fellow, all Adam’s apple and guarded eyes.

“I’m here for the duration,” I told him. “Didn’t you know?”

“No, I—I mean …”

“Don’t be tactful, Jud,” I said. “I belong here by virtue of the fact that there’s nowhere else for me to go. Earth isn’t happy about men as fat and funny-looking as I am in the era of beautiful people. And I can’t go Out. I have a left axis deviation. I know that sounds political; actually it’s cardiac.”

“I’m sorry.” He looked at my brassard. “Well, you’re Mr. Big around here, anyway.”

“I’m just big around
here
,” I said, swatting my belt-line. “There’s Coordination Office and a half-squad of Guardians who ice this particular cake. I’m just the final check on Outbounders.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You don’t rate. Much. The whole function of this space station waits on whether you say yes to a departure.”

“Shecks now,” I said, exaggerating my embarrassment to cover up my exaggerated embarrassment. “Whatever, I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you. I could be wrong—we’ll have to run some more tests on you—but if ever I saw an Outbounder, it’s you.”

“Hi,” said a silken voice. “You already know each other. How nice.”

Flower.

There was something vaguely reptilian about Flower, which didn’t take a thing from her brand of magnetism. Bit by bit, piece by piece, she was a so-so looking girl. Her eyes were too long, and so dark they seemed to be all pupil and the whites too white. Her nose was a bit too large and her chin a bit too small, but so help me, there never was a more perfect mouth. Her voice was like a cello bowed up near the bridge. She was tall, with a fragile-in-the-middle slenderness and spring-steel flanks. The overall effect was breathtaking. I didn’t like her. She didn’t like me either. She never spoke to me except on business, and I had practically no business with her. She’d been here a long time. I hadn’t figured out why, then. But she wouldn’t go Out and she wouldn’t go back to Earth—which in itself was all right; we had lots of room.