Big Book of Science Fiction (8 page)

Molly said in a strange, quiet
voice, “No, Daddy. He’s lookin’ at dreams.”

“Dreams?”

“A place with a or’nge sky,” said
Molly. He looked up sharply. Her eyes were closed. “Lots of Mewhus. Hunderds an’
hunderds—big ones. As big as Mr. Thorndyke.” (Thorn-dyke was an editor whom
they knew in the city. He was six feet seven.) “Round houses, an’ big airplanes
with . . . sticks fer wings.”

“Molly, you’re talking nonsense!”
said her mother worriedly. Jack shushed her. “Go on, baby.”

“A place, a room. It’s a . . .
Mewhu is there and a bunch more. They’re in ... in lines. Rows. There’s a big
one with a yella hat. He—keeps them in rows. Here’s Mewhu. He’s outa the line.
He’s jumpin’ out th’ windy with a flyin’ belt.” There was a long silence. Mewhu
moaned.

“Well?”

“Nothin’, Daddy—wait! It’s . , .
all . . . fuzzy. Now there’s a thing, a kinda summerine. Only on the ground,
not in the water. The door’s open. Mewhu is ... is inside. Knobs, and clocks.
Pull on the knobs. Push a— Oh.
Oh!
It hurts!” She put her fists to her
temples.

“Molly!”

Molly opened her eyes and said,
quite calmly, “Oh,
I’m
all right, Mommy. It was a thing in the dream
that hurt, but it didn’t hurt
me.
It was all a bunch of fire an’ ... an’
a sleepy feeling, only bigger. An’ it hurt.”

“Jack, he’ll harm the child!”

“I doubt it,” said Jack.

“So do I,” said Iris,
wonderingly, and then, almost in-audibly, “Now, why did I say that?”

“Mewhu’s asleep,” said Molly
suddenly.

“No more dreams?”

“No more dreams. Gee. That
was—funny.”

“Come and have some lunch,” said
Iris. Her voice shook a little. They went into the house. Jack looked down at
Mewhu, who was smiling peacefully in his sleep. He thought of putting the
strange creature to bed, but the day was warm and the grass was thick and soft
where he lay. He shook his head and went into the house.

“Sit down and feed,” Iris said.

He looked around. “You’ve done
wonders in here,” he said. The litter of lath and plaster was gone, and Iris’
triumphant antimacassars blossomed from the upholstery. She curtsied. “Thank
you, m’lord.”

~ * ~

They
sat around the card table and began to do damage to tongue sandwiches. “Jack.”

“Mm-m?”

“What was that—telepathy?”

“Think so. Something like that.
Oh, wait’ll I tell Zinsser! He’ll never believe it.”

“Are you going down to the
airfield this afternoon?”

“‘You bet. Maybe I’ll take Mewhu
with me.”

“That would be a little rough on
the populace, wouldn’t it? Mewhu isn’t the kind of fellow you can pass off as
your cousin Julius.”

“Heck, he’d be all right. He
could sit in the back seat with Molly while I talked Zinsser into coming out to
have a look at him.”

“Why not get Zinsser out here?”

“You know that’s silly. When we
see him in town, he’s got time off. Out here he’s tied to that airport almost
every minute.”

“Jack—do you think Molly’s quite
safe with that creature?”

“Of course! Are you worried?”

“I ... I am, Jack. But not about
Mewhu. About me. I’m worried because I think I should worry more, if you see
what I mean.”

Jack leaned over and kissed her. “The
good old maternal instinct at work,” he chuckled. “Mewhu’s new and strange and
might be dangerous. At the same time Mewhu’s helpless and inoffensive, and
something in you wants to mother him, too.”

“There you really have something,”
said Iris, thoughtfully. “He’s as big and ugly as you are, and unquestionably
more intelligent. Yet I don’t mother you.”

Jack grinned. “You’re not kiddin’.”
He gulped his coffee and stood up. “Eat it up, Molly, and go wash your hands
and face. I’m going to have a look at Mewhu.”

“You’re going in to the airport,
then?” asked Iris.

“If Mewhu’s up to it. There’s too
much I want to know, too much I haven’t the brains to figure out. I don’t think
I’ll get all the answers from Zinsser, by any means; but between us we’ll
figure out what to do about this thing. Iris, it’s
big!”

Full of wild, induced
speculation, he stepped out on the lawn. Mewhu was sitting up, happily
contemplating a caterpillar.

“Mewhu.”

“Dew?”

“How’d you like to take a ride?”

“Hubilly grees. Jeek?”

“I guess you don’t get the idea.
C’mon,” said Jack, motioning toward the garage. Mewhu very, very carefully set
the caterpillar down on a blade of grass and rose to follow; and just then the
most unearthly crash issued from the garage. For a frozen moment no one moved,
and then Molly’s voice set up a hair-raising reiterated screech. Jack was
pounding toward the garage before he knew he had moved.

“Molly! what is it?”

At the sound of his voice the
child shut up as if she were switch-operated.

“Molly!”

“Here I am, Daddy,” she said in
an extremely small voice. She was standing by the car, her entire being
concentrated in her protruding, faintly quivering lower lip. The car was
nose-foremost through the back wall of the garage.

“Daddy, I didn’t mean to do it; I
just wanted to help you get the car out. Are you going to spank me? Please,
Daddy, I didn’t—”

“Quiet!”

She was quiet, but immediately. “Molly,
what on earth possessed you to do a thing like that? You know you’re not
supposed to touch the starter!”

“I was pretending, Daddy, like it
was a summerine that could fly, the way Mewhu did.”

Jack threaded his way through
this extraordinary shambles of syntax. “Come here,” he said sternly. She came,
her paces half-size, her feet dragging, her hands behind her where her
imagination told her they would do the most good. “I ought to whack you, you
know.”

“Yeah,” she answered tremulously.
“I guess you oughta. Not more’n a couple of times, huh, Daddy?”

Jack bit the insides of his
cheeks for control, but couldn’t make it. He grinned.
You little minx,
he thought. “Tell you what,” he said gruffly, looking at the car. The garage
was fortunately flimsy, and the few new dents on hood and fenders would blend
well with the old ones. “You’ve got three good whacks coming to you. I’m going
to add those on to your next spanking.”

“Yes, Daddy,” said Molly, her
eyes big, and chastened. She climbed into the back seat and sat, very straight
and small, away back out of sight. Jack cleared away what wreckage he could,
and then climbed in, started the old puddle-vaulter and carefully backed out of
the damaged shed.

Mewhu was standing well clear,
watching the groaning automobile with startled silver eyes. “Come on in,” said
Jack, beckoning. Mewhu backed off.

“Mewhu!” cried Molly, putting her
head out the rear door. Mewhu said. “Yowk,” and came instantly. Molly opened
the door and he climbed in, and Molly shouted with laughter when he crouched
down on the floor, and made him get up on the seat. Jack pulled around the
house, stopped, picked up Mewhu’s jet rod, blew a kiss through the window to
Iris, and they were off.

Forty minutes later they wheeled
up to the airport after an ecstatic ride during which Molly had kept up a
running fire of descriptive commentary on the wonders of a terrestrial
countryside. Mewhu had goggled and ogled in a most satisfactory fashion,
listening spellbound to the child—sometimes Jack would have sworn that the
silver man understood everything she said—and uttering little shrieks, exclamatory
mewings, and interrogative peeps.

“Now,” said Jack, when he had
parked at the field boundary, “you two stay in the car for a while. I’m going
to speak to Mr. Zinsser and see if he’ll come out and meet Mewhu. Molly, do you
think that you can make Mewhu understand that he’s to stay in the car, and out
of sight? You see, if other people see him, they’ll want to ask a lot of silly
questions, and we don’t want to embarrass him, do we?”

“No, Daddy. Mewhu’ll be good.
Mewhu,” she said, turning to the silver man. She held his eyes with hers. His
mustache swelled, rippled. “You’ll be good, won’t you, and stay out of sight?”

“Jeek,” said Mewhu. “Jeek
mereedy.”

“He says you’re the boss.”

Jack laughed, climbing out. “He
does, eh?” Did the child really know or was it mostly a game? “Be good, then.
See you soon.” Carrying the jet rod, he walked into the building.

Zinsser, as usual, was busy. The
field was not large, but did a great deal of private-plane business, and as
traffic manager, Zinsser had his hands full. He wrapped one of his pudgy,
flexible hands around the phone he was using. “Hi, Garry! What’s new out of
this world?” he grated cheerfully. “Sid-down. With you in a minute.” He bumbled
cheerfully into the telephone, grinning at Jack as he talked. Jack made himself
as comfortable as patience permitted and waited until Zinsser hung up.

“Well now,” said Zinsser, and the
phone rang again.

Jack closed his open mouth in
annoyance. Zinsser hung up and another bell rang. He picked up a field
telephone from its hook on the side of his desk. “Zinsser. Yes—”

“Now that’s enough,” said Jack to
himself. He rose, went to the door, closed it softly so that he was alone with
the manager. He took the jet rod, and to Zinsser’s vast astonishment, stood up
on his desk, raised the rod high over his head, and stepped off. A hurricane
screamed out of the jets. Jack, hanging by his hands from the rod as it lowered
him gently through the air, looked over his shoulder. Zinsser’s face looked
like a red moon in a snow flurry, surrounded as it was by every interoffice
memo for the past two weeks.

Anyway, the first thing he did
when he could draw a breath was to hang up the phone.

“Thought that would do it,” said
Jack, grinning.

“You . . . you . . . what
is
that thing?”

“It’s a dialectical polarizer,”
said Jack, alighting. “That is, it makes conversations possible with airport
managers who won’t get off the phone.”

Zinsser was out of his chair and
around the desk, remarkably light on his feet for a man his size. “Let me see
that.”

Jack handed it over.

~ * ~

“Look,
Mewhu! Here comes a plane!”

Together they watched the Cub
slide in for a landing, and squeaked at the little puffs of dust that were
thrown up by the tires and flicked away by the slipstream.

“And there goes another one. It’s
gonna take off!” The little blue low-wing coupe taxied across the field, braked
one wheel, swung in its own length and roared down toward them, lifting to howl
away into the sky far over their heads.

“Eeeeeyow,” droned Molly,
imitating the sound of the motor as it passed everhead.

“S-s-s-s-sweeeeee!” hissed Mewhu,
exactly duplicating the whine of control surfaces in the prop blast.

Molly clapped her hands and
shrieked with delight. Another plane began to circle the field. They watched it
avidly.