13 Above the Night Read online

  “Good, I’d really like to take those pictures,” Tom said. “Incidentally, who did the carvings?”

  “We did,” Jock said. “Together.”

  Tom was grateful that the scamper of the children out of the room saved him from having to reply. He couldn’t think of anything but a grunt of astonishment.

  The conversation split into a group of chats about something called a psych machine, trips to Russia, the planet Mars, and several artists Tom had never heard of. He wanted to talk to Lois, but she was one of the group gabbling about Mars like children. He felt suddenly uneasy and out of things, and neither Rachel’s deprecating remarks about her section of the wood carvings nor Joyce’s interesting smiles helped much. He was glad when they all began to get up. He wandered outside and made his way to the children’s lean-to feeling very depressed.

  Once again he was the center of a friendly naked cluster, except for the same solemn-faced little girl skipping rope.

  A rather malicious but not very hopeful whim prompted him to ask the youngest, “What’s one and one?”

  “Ten,” the shaver answered glibly. Tom felt pleased. “It could also be two,” the oldest boy remarked.

  “I’ll say,” Tom agreed. “What’s the population of the world?”

  “About seven hundred million.”

  Tom nodded noncommittally and, grabbing at the first long word that he thought of, turned to the eldest girl. “What’s poliomyelitis?”

  “Never heard of it,” she said.

  The solemn little girl kept droning the same ridiculous chant: “Gik-lo, I-o, Rik-o, Gis-so.”

  His ego eased, Tom went outside and there was Lois. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  She took his hand. “Have we pushed ourselves at you too much? Has our jabbering bothered you? We’re a loudmouthed family and I didn’t think to ask if you were loning.”

  “Loning?”

  “Solituding.”

  “In a way,” he said. They didn’t speak for a moment. Then, “Are you happy, Lois, in your life here?” he asked.

  Her smile was instant “Of course. Don’t you like my group?”

  He hesitated. “They make me feel rather no good,” he said, and then admitted, “but in a way I’m more attracted to them than any people I’ve ever met.”

  “You are?” Her grip on his hand tightened. “Then why don’t you stay with us for a while? I like you. It’s too early to propose anything, but I think you have a quality our group lacks. You could see how you fit in. And there’s Joyce. She’s just visiting, too. You wouldn’t have to lone unless you wanted.”

  Before he could think, there was a rhythmic rush of feet and the Wolvers were around them.

  “We’re swimming,” Simone announced.

  Lois looked at Tom inquiringly. He smiled his willingness, started to mention he didn’t have trunks, then real-feed that wouldn’t be news here. He wondered whether he would blush.

  Jock fell in beside him as they rounded the ranch house. “Larry’s been telling me about your group at the other end of the valley. It’s comic, but I’ve whirled down the valley a dozen times and never spotted any sort of place there. What’s it like?”

  “A ranch house and several cabins.”

  Jock frowned. “Comic I never saw it.” His face cleared. “How about whirling over there? You could point it out to me.”

  “It’s really there,” Tom said uneasily. “I’m not making it up.”

  “Of course,” Jock assured him. “It was just an idea.”

  “We could pick up your camera on the way,” Lois put in.

  The rest of the group had turned back from the huge oval pool and the dark blue and flashing thing beyond it, and stood gay-colored against the pool’s pale blue shimmer.

  “How about it?” Jock asked them “A whirl before we bathe?”

  Two or three said yes besides Lois, and Jock led the way toward the helicopter that Tom now saw standing beyond the pool, its beetle body as blue as a scarab, its vanes flashing silver.

  The others piled in. Tom followed as casually as he could, trying to suppress the pounding of his heart “Wonder you don’t go by rocket,” he remarked lightly.

  Jock laughed. “For such a short trip?”

  The vanes began to thrum. Tom sat stiffly, gripping the sides of the seat, then realized that the others had sunk back lazily in the cushions. There was a moment of strain and they were falling ahead and up. Looking out the side, Tom saw for a moment the sooty roof of the ranch house and the blue of the pool and the pinkish umber of tanned bodies. Then the helicopter lurched gently around. Without warning a miserable uneasiness gripped him, a desire to cling mixed with an urge to escape. He tried to convince himself it was fear of the height.

  He heard Lois tell Jock, “That’s the place, down by that rock that looks like a wrecked spaceship.”

  The helicopter began to fall forward. Tom felt Lois’ hand on his.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” she said.

  “What?” he asked dully.

  “Whether you’ll stay with us. At least for a while.”

  He looked at her. Her smile was a comfort. He said, “If I possibly can.”

  “What could possibly stop you?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered abstractedly.

  “You’re strange,” Lois told him. “There’s a weight of sadness in you. As if you lived in a less happy age. As if it weren’t 2050.”

  “Twenty?” he repeated, awakening from his thoughts with a jerk. “What’s the time?” he asked anxiously.

  “Two,” Jock said. The word sounded like a knell.

  “You need cheering,” Lois announced firmly.

  Amid a whoosh of air rebounding from earth, they jounced gently down. Lois vaulted out “Come on,” she said.

  Tom followed her. “Where?” he asked stupidly, looking around at the red rocks through the settling sand cloud stirred by the vanes.

  “Your camera,” she told him, laughing. “Over there. Come on, I’ll race you.”

  He started to run with her and then his uneasiness got beyond his control. He ran faster and faster. He saw Lois catch her foot on a rock and go down sprawling, but he couldn’t stop. He ran desperately around the rock and into a gust of upwhirling sand that terrified him with its suddenness. He tried to escape from the stinging, blinding gust, but there was the nightmarish fright that his wild Strides were carrying him nowhere.

  Then the sand settled. He stopped running and looked around him. He was standing by the balancing rock. He was gasping. At his feet the rusty brown leather of the camera case peeped from the sand. Lois was nowhere in sight. Neither was the helicopter. The valley seemed different, rawer—one might almost have said younger.

  Hours after dark he trailed into Tosker-Brown. Curtained lights still glowed from a few cabins. He was footsore, bewildered, frightened. All afternoon and through the twilight and into the moonlit evening that turned the red rocks black, he had searched the valley. Nowhere had he been able to find the soot-roofed ranch house of the Wolvers. He hadn’t even been able to locate the rock like a giant bobbin where he’d met Lois.

  During the next days he often returned to the valley. But he never found anything. And he never happened to be near the balancing rock when the time winds blew at ten and two, though once or twice he did see dust devils. Then he went away and eventually forgot.

  In his casual reading he ran across popular science articles describing the binary system of numbers used in electronic calculating machines, where one and one make ten. He always skipped them. And more than once he saw the four equations expressing Einstein’s generalized theory of gravitation:

  He never connected them with the little girl’s chant: “Gik-lo, I-o, Rik-o, Gis-so.”

  [*] Ironically, just as we were going to press, another publisher issued a collection by Fritz Leiber. It included this story. I had a decision to make, and I have made it. I refuse to dep
rive you of the pleasure of reading our “Nice Girl.” She stays!

  PRONE

  Mack Reynolds

  Bet you that, if the Enemy involved in this story had been terrestrial, it would have appealed to the International Court of Justice at The Hague for protection against conduct not in accordance with the Ethics and Morals of Civilized Warfare. However, what the SupCom faced was an extraterrestrial Enemy who had no standing at The Hague, and his lack of ethics was as total as the kind of warfare he intended to wage. So (br-r-r-r!) read on.

  SUPCOM BULL UNDERWOOD SAID IN A VOICE OMINOUSLY mild, “I continually get the impression that every other sentence is being left out of this conversation. Now, tell me, General, what do you mean things happen around him?”

  “Well, for instance, the first day Mitchie got to the Academy a cannon burst at a demonstration.”

  “What’s a cannon?”

  “A pre-guided-missile weapon,” the commander of the Terra Military Academy told him. “You know, shells propelled by gunpowder. We usually demonstrate them in our history classes. This time four students were injured. The next day sixteen were hint in ground-war maneuvers.”

  There was an element of respect in the SupCom’s tone. “Your course must be rugged.”

  General Bentley wiped his forehead with a snowy handkerchief even as he shook it negatively. “It was the first time any such thing happened. I tell you, sir, since Mitchie Farthingworth has been at the academy things have been chaotic. Fires in the dormitories, small arms exploding, cadets being hospitalized right and left. We’ve just got to expel that boy!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” the SupCom growled. “He’s the apple of his old man’s eye. We’ve got to make a hero out of him if it means the loss of a battle fleet. But I still don’t get this. You mean the Farthingworth kid is committing sabotage?”

  “It’s not that. We investigated. He doesn’t do it on purpose, things just happen around him. Mitchie can’t help it.”

  “Confound it stop calling him Mitchie!” Bull Underwood snapped. “How do you know it’s him if he doesn’t do it? Maybe you’re just having a run of bad luck.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Bentley said, “until I ran into Admiral Lawrence of the Space Marines Academy. He had the same story. The day Mitchie—excuse me, sir—Michael Farthingworth set foot in Nuevo San Diego, things started happening. When they finally got him transferred to our academy the trouble stopped.”

  It was at times like these that Bull Underwood regretted his shaven head. He could have used some hair to tear, “Then it must be sabotage if it stops when he leaves!”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  The SupCom took a deep breath, snapped to his secretarobot, “Brief me on Cadet Michael Farthingworth, including his early life.” While he waited he growled under his breath, “A stalemated hundred-year war on my hands with those Martian makrons and I have to get things like this tossed at me.”

  In less than a minute the secretarobot began: “Son of Senator Warren Farthingworth, Chairman War Appropriations Committee. Twenty-two years of age. Five feet six, one hundred and thirty, blue eyes, brown hair, fair. Born and spent early youth in former United States area. Early education by mother. At age of eighteen entered Harvard but schooling was interrupted when roof of assembly hall collapsed killing most of faculty. Next year entered Yale, leaving two months later when 90 percent of the university’s buildings were burnt down in the holocaust of ’85. Next attended University of California but failed to graduate owing to the earthquake which completely . . .”

  “That’s enough,” the SupCom rapped. He turned and stared at General Bentley. “What the hell is it? Even if the kid was a psychokinetic saboteur he couldn’t accomplish all that.”

  The academy commander shook his head. “All I know is that, since his arrival at the Terra Military Academy, there’s been an endless series of casualties. And the longer he’s there the worse it gets. It’s twice as bad now as when he first arrived.” He got to his feet wearily. “I’m a broken man, sir, and I’m leaving this in your hands. You’ll have my resignation this afternoon. Frankly, I’m afraid to return to the school. If I do, some day I’ll probably crack my spine bending over to tie my shoelaces. It just isn’t safe to be near that boy.”

  For a long time after General Bentley had left, SupCom Bull Underwood sat at his desk, his heavy underlip in a pout “And just when the next five years’ appropriation is up before the committee,” he snarled at nobody.

  He turned to the secretarobot. “Put the best psychotechnicians available on Michael Farthingworth. They are to discover . . . well, they are to discover why in hell things happen around him. Priority one.”

  Approximately a week later the secretarobot said, “May I interrupt you, sir? A priority-one report is coming in.”

  Bull Underwood grunted and turned away from the star chart he’d been studying with the two Space Marine generals. He dismissed them and sat down at his desk.

  The visor lit up and he was confronted with the face of an elderly civilian. “Doctor Duclos,” the civilian said. “Case of Cadet Michael Farthingworth.”

  “Good,” the SupCom rumbled. “Doctor, what in the devil is wrong with young Farthingworth?”

  “The boy is an accident prone.”

  Bull Underwood scowled at him. “A what?”

  “An accident prone.” The doctor elaborated with evident satisfaction. “There is indication that he is the most extreme case in medical history. Really a fascinating study. Never in my experience have I been—”

  “Please, Doctor. I’m a layman. What is an accident prone?”

  “Ah, yes. Briefly, an unexplained phenomenon first noted by the insurance companies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An accident prone has an unnaturally large number of accidents happen either to him, or less often, to persons in his vicinity. In Farthingworth’s case, they happen to persons about him. He himself is never affected.”

  The SupCom was unbelieving. “You mean to tell me there are some persons who just naturally have accidents happen to them without any reason?”

  “That is correct,” Duclos nodded. “Most prones are understandable. Subconsciously, the death wish is at work and the prone seeks self-destruction. However, science has yet to discover the forces behind the less common type such as Farthingworth exemplifies.” The doctor’s emphatic shrug betrayed his Gallic background. “It has been suggested that it is no more than the laws of chance at work. To counterbalance the accident prone, there should be persons at the other extreme who are blessed with abnormally good fortune. However . . .”

  SupCom Bull Underwood’s lower lip was out, almost truculently. “Listen,” he interrupted. “What can be done about it?”

  “Nothing,” the doctor said, his shoulders raising and lowering again. “An accident prone seems to remain one as a rule. Not always, but as a rule. Fortunately, they are rare.”

  “Not rare enough,” the SupCom growled. “These insurance companies, what did they do when they located an accident prone?”

  “They kept track of him and refused to insure the prone, his business, home, employees, employers, or anyone or anything connected with him.”

  Bull Underwood stared unblinkingly at the doctor, as though wondering whether the other’s whole explanation was an attempt to pull his leg. Finally he rapped, “Thank you, Doctor Duclos. That will be all.” The civilian’s face faded from the visor.

  The SupCom said slowly to the secretarobot, “Have Cadet Farthingworth report to me.” He added sotto voce. “And while he’s here have all personnel keep their fingers crossed.”

  The photoelectric-controlled door leading to the sanctum sanctorum of SupCom Bull Underwood glided quietly open and a lieutenant entered and came to a snappy attention. The door swung gently shut behind him.

  “Well?” Bull Underwood growled.

  “Sir, a Cadet Michael Farthingworth to report to you.”

  “Send him in. Ah, just a minute, Lie
utenant Brown. How do you feel after talking to him?”

  “Me, sir? I feel fine, sir.” The lieutenant looked blankly at him.

  “Hmmm. Well, send him in, confound it.”

  The lieutenant turned and the door opened automatically before him. “Cadet Farthingworth,” he announced.

  The newcomer entered and stood stiffly before the desk of Earth’s military head. Bill Underwood appraised him with care. In spite of the swank Academy uniform, Michael Farthingworth cut a wistfully ineffectual figure. His faded blue eyes blinked sadly behind heavy contact lenses.

  “That’ll be all, Lieutenant,” the SupCom said to his aide.

  “Yes, sir.” The lieutenant about-faced snappily and marched to the door—which swung sharply forward and quickly back again before the lieutenant was halfway through.

  SupCom Bull Underwood winced at the crush of bone and cartilage. He shuddered, then snapped to his secretarobot, “Have Lieutenant Brown hospitalized . . . and, ah . . . see he gets a Luna Medal for exposing himself to danger beyond the call of duty.”

  He swung to the newcomer and came directly to the point. “Cadet Farthingworth,” he rapped, “do you know what an accident prone is?”

  Mitchie’s voice was low and plaintive. “Yes, sir.”

  “You do?” Bull Underwood was surprised.

  “Yes, sir. At first such things as the school’s burning down didn’t particularly impress me as being personally connected with me, but the older I get, the worse it gets, and after what happened to my first date, I started to investigate.”

  The SupCom said cautiously, “What happened to the date?”

  Mitchie flushed. “I took her to a dance and she broke her leg.”

  The SupCom cleared his throat. “So finally you investigated?”

  “Yes, sir,” Mitchie Farthingworth said woefully. “And I found I was an accident prone and getting worse geometrically. Each year I’m twice as bad as the year before. I’m glad you’ve discovered it too, sir. I . . . didn’t know what to do. Now it’s in your hands.”