“Gone—?” He left the word stranded in mid-air as he read Mrs. Klevity’s note.
The paper fluttered down. He yanked a dresser drawer open and snatched out spool-looking things, both hands full. Then he practically dived under the bed, his elbows thudding on the floor, to-hurt hard. And there was only a wiggle or two and his shoes slumped away from each other.
I pulled his cast-aside from under the bed and crawled under it myself. I saw the tiny picture frame—bright, bright, but so small.
I crept close to it, knowing I couldn’t go through it. I saw the tiny perfection of the road, the landscape, the people—the laughing people who crowded around the two new rejoicing figures—the two silvery, lovely young creatures who cried out in tiny voices as they danced. The girl-one threw a kiss outward before they all turned away and ran up the winding white road together.
The frame began to shrink, faster, faster, until it squeezed to a single bright bead and then blinked out.
All at once the house was empty and cold. The upsurge was gone. Nothing was real any more. All at once the faint ghost of the smell of eggs was frightening. All at once I whimpered, “My lunch money!”
I scrambled to my feet, tumbling Mrs. Klevity’s clothes into a disconnected pile. I gathered up my jammas and leaned across the table to get my sweater. I saw my name on a piece of paper. I picked it up and read it.
Everything that is ours in this house now belongs to Anna-across-the-court, the little girl that’s been staying with me at night.
—Ahvlaree Klevity
I looked from the paper around the room. All for me? All for us? All this richness and wonder of good things? All this and the box in the bottom drawer, too? And a paper that said so, so that nobody could take them away from us.
A fluttering wonder filled my chest and I walked stiffly around the three rooms, visualizing everything without opening a drawer or door. I stood by the stove and looked at the frying pan hanging above it. I opened the cupboard door. The paper bag of eggs was on the shelf. I reached for it, looking back over my shoulder almost guiltily.
The wonder drained out of me with a gulp. I ran back over to the bed and yanked up the spread. I knelt and hammered on the edge of the bed with my clenched fists. Then I leaned my forehead on my tight hands and felt my knuckles bruise me. My hands went limply to my lap, my head drooping.
I got up slowly and took the paper from the table, bundled my jammas under my arm and got the eggs from the cupboard. I turned the lights out and left.
I felt tears wash down from my eyes as I stumbled across the familiar yard in the dark. I don’t know why I was crying—unless it was because I was homesick for something bright that I knew I would never have, and because I knew I could never tell Mom what really happened.
Then the pale trail of light from our door caught me and I swept in on an astonished Mom, calling softly, because of the sleeping kids, “Mom! Mom! Guess what!”
Yes, I remember Mrs. Klevity because she had eggs for breakfast! Every day! That’s one of the reasons I remember her.
IN THE HOUSE, ANOTHER
by Joseph Whitehill
I said somewhere earlier that this was the year for Other Creatures: extraterrestrials most of all, but by no meant all. Again and again the underlying theme in the most thoughtful stories—be they careful science-fictional extrapolations, or the wildest flights of fantastic imaginings—is the daily more urgent need to learn the means and modes of communication with All Those Others.
What is an Other? We have had (besides a variety of e-t’s) dopplegangers and gremlins, computers and communists, apes, ants, and A. Snowman (or woman), a tele-path, a tribal chief, a Holy man, and the unclassifiable flora of Pogoland.
Now Mr. Whitehill, an engineer as well as an author (“The Angers of Spring,” and “Able, Baker, and Others”) offers a description with lab-report conciseness, accuracy, and attention to detail.
The Other had remained unseen in the house for hours. Hunching its dorsal structure and tilting its hairy skull sideways, it peered out into the dining room through the crack in the kitchen door. Its dark motionless eyes were fixed on the back of the man finishing his supper. Unaware of its presence, the man pushed back his chair, belched lightly, and stood up. The Other shuddered in disgust at the obscenity. The man stirred the boxer at his feet until it awoke and yawned with wet curled tongue, and stretched itself to its feet. The man took a scrap from his plate and tossed it to his dog, gathered his pipe and tobacco pouch from the sideboard, and, with the stiff walk of a full man, ambled out of sight into the living room. At his whistle, the dog followed. Though its neighborhood reputation was one of vicious aggression toward strangers, the dog, too, seemed unaware of the presence of the Other in the house.
The Other remained in the kitchen, slumped in frustration against the refrigerator. Patience. There was time enough. No need yet to advance upon this man they called the Thinker. The Other crossed its freckled forepaws over its thorax, distorting the two spongy bags hanging there. This distortion, was habitual, and went unmarked. The Other waited, its conchoidal hearing organs alert to the sounds from the living room. All were homely sounds; the thump of another log added to the fire... the ringing rapping of the Thinker’s pipe on the metal ash tray... his sensual groan as he settled into the big deep chair before the fire... the scratching of the match and the spasmodic wheezy gurgling of the pipe as the Thinker drew it alive.
... Wait... wait. Not now. Later. Plenty of time. The Other sensed the first diffusion of the powerful tar esters of the tobacco smoke. Its sensitive olfactory neuro-termini rebelled, and its triangular proboscis twitched involuntarily.
The Thinker began to think. Mechanically, his hand sought out the dog’s occiput, and he soothed both himself and the dog with his symbiotic scratching. Required, said his brain, a stable amplifier capable of measurement of uni-potential electrostatic charges of minimal magnitude. For purposes of discussion, assume a design point of five microvolt D.C. registration....
Twenty minutes passed. The dog had fallen asleep again, and the Thinker’s pipe required relighting. He ignored it. Direct amplification is out of the question, because random grid bias variation alone may reach five hundred microvolts.
The Other moved quietly into the dining room, walking with a liquid lateral sway. It looked around the arched opening of the living room and gazed intently at the immobile form sunk in the chair. Dancing firelight played over his strong hard face, softening it almost to a boy’s. The dog raised its head and looked at the Other, clinging there to the door jamb, then dropped his muzzle again between his fore-paws. The Thinker did not stir. Thus, a comparator must be devised which will convert applied D.C. potential into a proportional A.C. signal....
An inchoate wave of hunger swept over the observing Other. Its red claws indented the soft wood of the door jamb, and in a somatic wrench of restraint, it turned and climbed the stairs. In its climbing it made a distinctly audible swishing sound, and under its weight a loose stair tread skirled loudly. In the living room, the sleeping dog’s ear flicked at the sound of the squeaking board, but the Thinker thought on.
He was a skilled concentrator, with his brain an obedient assistant. His ears had heard the sounds of the moving Other, but their alerting message had been silenced at his thalamic switchboard. The ratiocination must not be intruded upon. Currently available D.C. to A.C. converters are either synchronous switches or synchronously exited capacity diaphrams....