And Now the News (15 page)

“Have fun, kids,” said Chris, and got up and followed to the parlor.

In the foyer, he turned and glanced back. He met Mr. Magruder's penetrating gaze, a startling experience for one used to seeing only the man's cheek or lowered eyelid. He wished he could get some
message, some communication from it, but this time he couldn't. He felt very strange, as if he had been given absolute alternatives: chaos, or obedience to an orderly unknown. He knew he had chosen obedience and he was inexpressibly excited.

“Always wanted a spaceman in the family,” Miz Binns was saying proudly to Gerda Stein, “and Billy's always wanted to be one, and now look.”

From the couch, Gerda Stein said politely, “He seems to be doing very well.”

“Well? Why, he's in the top twentieth of his class, nobody ever did that before except one fellow that was an air marshal's son, Billy's born for it, that's what he is, born for it.”

Chris said, “He was running around in a space helmet when he was two years old.”

At his voice, Gerda Stein turned and smiled, “Oh, hello.”

“I declare I don't know how I could've had two boys so different,” said Miz Binns. “Years, I just couldn't guess what Chris here would end up doing, he's nicely settled down though, fixing adding machines.”

“Computers,” Chris said mildly.

“Really! That must be very interesting. I use a computer.”

“What kind?”

“KCI. It's only a very simple little one.”

“I know it. Mechanical binary. Clever little machine,” said Chris and, to his intense annoyance, found himself blushing again.

“Oh, well, you have something in common,” said Miz Binns. “I'll just scoot along upstairs and see that your room's just right. You keep Miss Stein happy till I call, Chris.”

“Don't go to any—” the girl began, but Miz Binns had fluttered out.

Chris thought,
we have something in common, have we?
He was absolutely tongue-tied. Keep Miss Stein happy, hah! He flicked a glance at her and found with something like horror that she was watching him. He dropped his eyes, wet his lips, and sat tensely wishing somebody would say something.

Billy said something. Leaving Tess standing in the foyer, he stepped
into the parlor, winked at Gerda Stein and said to Chris, “I heard that last test-firing of yours, shipmate—'Have fun!' Well,
you
have fun.” He looked at Gerda Stein with open admiration. “Just remember, brer pawn—first move don't win the game; it's only an advantage. You told me that yourself.”

“Shucks,” Chris said inanely.

“I'll see
you
soon,” said Billy, stabbing a forefinger toward her.

“Good night,” Gerda Stein said courteously.

Billy left the room, bellowing, “C'mon Venus-bird, let's go git depraved.” Tess Milburn squeaked, then tittered, and they went out. Miz Binns came downstairs just then and stopped at the front door.

“You Tess Milburn,” she called in what she apparently hoped was mock severity, “you don't go keepin' that boy up until all hours!” From the warm dark came Billy's rich laughter.

“That boy,” breathed Miz Binns, coming into the parlor, “I do declare, he's a caution, come on upstairs now if you want to and see your room, Miss Stein. That your bags out there on the stoop? Chris, just nip out and get Miss Stein's bags in like a good boy.”

“All right, Mom.” He was glad to have something to do. He went out and found the bags, two of them, a large suitcase and what looked like an overnight case. The suitcase was no trouble, but the little one weighed perhaps fifty pounds and he grunted noisily when he lifted it.

“Here,” called Miz Binns, “I'll—”

“No!” he barked. “I can handle it.” Mom wouldn't learn, couldn't learn that a man might be humiliated in front of strangers.

He lifted the bags abruptly, knowing just how Bill—how a fellow could walk, sing, surge them up to the landing, lift and surge again to the top, breathing easily. He took a step and swung, and got all tangled with the screen door, and banged the overnight case noisily against the jamb; his arms and back wouldn't do the easy graceful thing his mind knew how to do with them. So he didn't lift and swing, or breathe easily, but plodded and hauled, and came into the north bedroom blowing like a grampus. All in the world he hoped for was that he wouldn't catch Gerda Stein smiling.

He caught Gerda Stein smiling.

He put the bags down by the bed and went blindly back down the stairs. Mr. Magruder was just then pacing his leisurely way into the parlor, his newspaper under his arm, and Chris became painfully aware of how hard he was still breathing and how it must look. He controlled it and fled to the dining room.

He stood against the table for a long moment, pulling himself together, and then, with his glazed eyes fixed on the dish of cold hominy grits, slid gratefully into the familiar aloneness of his conjectures.

Hominy is corn, is dry before cooking; absorbs moisture softens swells steams gets cold loses moisture gets gummy if left long enough would set like concrete anyway until more moisture came along. Deeper he went into a lower level, seeing the hydroscopes, the thirsty molecular matrices, yearning and getting, satiated, yielding, turning again to thirsty corn. Down again to a lower level and the awareness all about him of the silent forces of the capillary, the unreasonable logic of osmosis, the delicate compromise called meniscus.

Water, water, everywhere …
in the table-legs and the cloth, water fleeing from the edges of a pool of gravy, flying to the pores of a soda-cracker, all the world sere and soggy, set, slushy, slippery and solid because of water.

Down in this level there were no pipestem arms nor unready tongues nor fumblings for complex behavior codes known reflexively to all the world but Christopher Binns, and he was comforted.

“What you
dreaming
about, boy, I do declare!”

He came up out of it and faced her. He felt much better. “I'll give you a hand washing up, Mom.”

“Now you don't have to do any such of a thing, Chris. Go on into the parlor and chat with Mr. Magruder.”

He chuckled at the thought and began to stack the dirty plates. His mother went into the kitchen to clear the sink, shaking her head. Her woeful expression, he divined, was only superficial, a habit, an attitude; he could sense the core excitement and delight with which Billy always filled her.

Billy can do no wrong; he syllogized—

Billy does everything well;
THEREFORE

Billy does no wrong well
.

He carried the plates into the kitchen.

“I'm going to bed, dear.”

“Good night, Mom.”

“Thanks for helping. Chris—”

“You're not angry at Billy, are you, about Tess, I mean?”

“Why should I be angry?” he asked.

“Well, I'm glad, then.” She thought he had answered her. “He doesn't mean it, you know that.”

“Sure, Mom.” He wondered dispassionately how her remark could possibly be applied to the situation, and gave up. He wondered also, with considerably more interest, how and why he had been aware that while he was in the kitchen, Gerda Stein had come down and re-entered the parlor and that Mr. Magruder had gone up to bed. He wondered also what use the information would be to him, he who had the Sadim touch. The Sadim touch was a recurrent whimsy with him; it was Midas spelled backward and signified that everything he touched, especially gold, turned to—“Shucks.”

“What, dear?”

“Nothing. Good night, Mom.”

Palely she kissed him and tiredly toiled up the stairs. He stood by the dining room table; looking at the cut-glass sugar bowl, now turned out to pasture in its old age and holding two dozen teaspoons, handles down, looking like something a robot bride in a cartoon might carry for a bouquet. He scanned the orderly place-settings around the table, the clean inverted cups mouthing their saucers, each handle a precise sixty degrees off the line of the near table edge; the bread plates with the guaranteed fourteen-karat, one hundred percent solid gold edging absent from every convexity, wanly present in the concave.

And he couldn't lose himself in these things. Below the level of the things themselves, there was nowhere he could go. Something had closed his usual road to elsewhere and he felt a strange panic. He was unused to being restrained in the here and now, except on company time.

All right, then, he admitted.

He walked slowly through the foyer and into the parlor. Gerda Stein sat on the couch. She wasn't knitting, or reading, or doing anything. Just sitting quietly, as if she were waiting. What on Earth could she be waiting for?

He looked for the right place to sit, a chair not too close (not because he was afraid of being “forward” but because he would have absolutely no resources if she thought he was) and not too far away (because it was late and everyone was in bed and they would have to keep their voices low. In case they talked).

“Here,” she said, and put her hand on the cushion beside her.

In his own house, he said, “Thank you, thank you very much,” and sat down. When the silence got to be too much for him, he faced her. She looked back gravely and he turned again and stared at the print of the sentinel at Pompeii which had hung there since before he was born.

“What are you thinking?”

You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen
. But he said, “You comfortable?” He considered his statement, hanging there untouched in the room, and added with something like hysteria, “In your room, I mean.”

She shrugged. It conveyed a great deal. It was, “Quite what I expected,” and “There's certainly nothing to complain about,” and “What can it possibly matter?” and, more than anything else, “I won't be here long enough to have any feelings about it one way or the other.”

Any of these things, spoken aloud by anyone else, would have made him wildly defensive, for all he may not have been able to express it. Spoken by her, perhaps it would be different. He couldn't know. But transmitted thus mutely—he had nothing to say. He put his hands together between his knees and squeezed, miserable and excited.

“Why did your brother go to the Space Academy?” she asked.

“Congressman Shellfield got him the appointment.”

“I didn't mean that.”

“Oh,” he said, “you mean
why
.” He looked at her and again had to look away. “He wanted to, I guess. He always wanted to.”

“You can't always want to do anything,” she said gently. “When did it start?”

“Gosh … I dunno. Years back. When we were kids.”

“What about you?”

“Me?” He gave a short, uncertain laugh. “I can't remember wanting anything specially. Mom says—”

“I wonder where he ever got the idea,” she mused.

He guessed she had been thinking about Billy up in her room and had come down to find out more about him, had sat here waiting until he could come and tell her more. He made a sad, unconscious little gesture with his hands. Then he remembered that she had asked a question. When he didn't answer questions, why did she just wait like that?

“We used to play spaceman before Billy could talk,” he recalled. He glanced her way and laughed surprisedly. “I'd forgotten all about that. I really had.”

“What kind of games?”

“Games,
you
know. Rocket to the Moon and all. I was the captain and he was the crew. Well, at first I was the … I forget. Or I was the extraterrestrial and he was the explorer. Games.” He shrugged. “I remember the takeoffs. We'd spread out on the couch and scream when the acceleration pressed the air out of our lungs. Mom didn't much like that screaming.”

She laughed. “I can imagine. Tell me, do all spacemen talk the way he does?”

“You mean that ‘shipmate' and ‘gantry' and ‘hit the blockhouse'?”

He paused for such a long time that she asked quietly, “Don't you want to tell me?”

He started. “Oh, sure, sure. I had to think. Last year, Easter vacation, he brought another cadet with him, name of Davies. Nice fellow, quiet, real black hair, sort of stoop-shouldered. I'd heard Billy talking that way before, thought it was the way to talk. But when I used it on Davies, he'd just look at me—” unconsciously, Chris was mimicking the wonderstruck Davies—“as if I was crazy. Harmless, but crazy.” He gave this soft, embarrassed chuckle. “I guess I didn't do it right. I guess there's just exactly a right way of saying those
things. You have to be a cadet to do it.”

“Oh? Do all the cadets talk that way?”

“Davies didn't. Not to us, anyway. I never met any others.”

“Maybe Billy's the only one who talks that way.”

Chris had never considered the possibility. “That would sure sound funny at the Academy.”

“Not if he never did it there.”

Chris made a sudden awkward movement of the head, trying to brush away the idea. Stubbornly, it wouldn't brush. It was, after all, the first hypothesis his kind of logic had been able to accept for Cadet Davies' odd reactions. In itself, this was welcome, but it opened up an area of thinking about his brother he disliked to indulge in.

He said as much: “I wouldn't like to think of Billy that way, talking like—like when we were seven, eight years old.”

“Why not? How do you like to think of Billy?”

“He's—getting what he wants. Going where he wants to go. He always has.”

“Instead of you?”

“I don't know what you mean.” Or, he added silently,
why you ask or why you want to know any of this
. He shifted his feet and turned to meet that disconcerting, warm, open, unjeering smile. “What do you want me to say?” he demanded, with a trace of irritation.