Collected Short Fiction, page 661
Pop roared back off the bridge.
“A girl in boy territory!” Its shocked voice splashed them like cold rain. “What would Mother say?”
Black tracks spurting gravel, it lurched past Blinkie and crashed into the brush.
“Listen, Pop!” Butch started after it, waving and squealing. “They ain’t no girl—”
Ratbait tripped him and turned to give Joey the sign but Joey was already gone. Something splashed under the bridge and Ratbait saw a yellow head vanishing under the stream that drifted out of a black tunnel.
“Pop-Pop—” Butch rubbed gravel out of his mouth and danced on the pavement. “Come back, Pop. Joey’s in the creek. Ratbait and Blinkie—they helped him get away.”
The scoutmaster swung back down the slope, empty whips waving. It skidded across the trail and down the bank to the hot creek. Its yellow hood disappeared in the steam.
Blinkie clenched his fat fists.
“You told on Joey, Butch.”
“An’ you’ll catch it.” Murky eyes bugging, Butch edged away. “You just wait till Pop gets back.”
They waited. The tired cubs sat down to rest and the tenderfeet fretted in their hot prams. Breathing hard, Blinkie kept close to Butch. Ratbait watched till Pop swam back out of the drain.
The whips were wrapped around two small bundles that dripped pink water. Unwinding, the whips dropped Joey and his friend on the trail. They crumpled down like rag dolls but the whips set them up again.
“How’s this, scouts?” Old Pop laughed like steel gears clashing. “We’ve caught ourselves a real live girl.”
In a bird-quick way she shook the water out of her sand-colored hair. Standing straight, without the whips to hold her, she faced Pop’s glaring lamps. She looked tall for twelve.
Joey was sick when the whips let him go. He leaned off the bridge to heave and limped back to the girl. She wiped his face with her wet hair. They caught hands and smiled at each other as if they were all alone.
“They tripped me, Pop.” Braver now, Butch thumbed his nose at Blinkie and ran toward the machine. “They tried to stop my telling you—
“Leave them to Mother.” Pop bugled a song of joy. “Let them try their silly tricks on her.” It wheeled toward the bridge. The whips pushed Joey and the girl ahead of the crunching tracks. “Now hop with Pop to Jamboree! Hop with Pop! Hop, hop!”
THEY climbed that last hill to a tall iron door in Mother’s old gray wall. The floors beyond were naked steel, alive with machinery underneath. They filed into a dim, round room that echoed to the grating squeal of Pop’s hard tracks.
“Fox Troop, here we are for Jamboree!” Pop’s jolly voice made a hollow booming on the curved steel wall, which reflected Pop’s red light. “Mother wants you to know why we celebrate this happy time each year.”
The machine was rolling as it spoke to the center of a wide black circle in the middle of the floor. Something drummed far below like a monster heart and Ratbait saw that the circle was the top of a black steel piston. It slid slowly up, lifting Pop. The drumming died and Pop’s eyes blazed down on the cubs in the Anthrax Patrol, to stop their awed murmuring.
“Once there wasn’t any Mother.” The shock of that crashed and throbbed and faded. “There wasn’t any yearly Jamboree. There wasn’t even any Pop, to love and care for little boys.”
The cubs were afraid to whisper but a stir of troubled wonder spread among them.
“You won’t believe how tenderfeet were made.” There was a breathless hush. “In those bad old days, boys and girls were allowed to change like queer insects. They changed into creatures called adults—”
The whips writhed and the red lamps glared and the black cleats creaked on the steel platform.
“Adults!” Pop spewed the word. “They malfunctioned and wore out and ran down. Their defective logic circuits programed them to damage one another. In a kind of strange group malfunction called war they systematically destroyed one another. But their worst malfunction was in making new tenderfeet.”
Pop turned slowly on the high platform, sweeping the silent troop with blood-red beams that stopped on Joey and his girl. All the scouts but Ratbait and Blinkie had edged away from them. Her face white and desperate, she was whispering in Joey’s ear. Listening with his arm around her, he scowled up at Pop.
“Once adults made tenderfeet, strange as that may seem to you. They used a weird natural process we won’t go into. It finally broke down because they had damaged their genes in war. The last adults couldn’t make new boys and girls at all.”
The red beams darted to freeze a startled cub.
“Fox Troop, that’s why we have Mother. Her job is to collect undamaged genes and build them into whole cells with which she can assemble whole boys and girls. She has been doing that a long time now and she does it better than those adults ever did. And that’s why we have Jamboree! To fill the world with well-made boys and girls like you and to keep you happy in the best time of life—even those old adults always said childhood was the happy time. Scouts, clap for Jamboree!”
The cubs clapped, the echo like a spatter of hail on the high iron ceiling.
“Now, scouts, those bad old days are gone forever,” Pop burbled merrily. “Mother has a cozy place for each one of you and old Pop watches over you, and you’ll never be adult—”
“Pop! Pop!” Butch squealed. “Lookit Joey an’ his girl—”
POP spun around on the high platform. Its blinding beams picked up Joey and the girl sprinting toward a bright sky-slice where the door had opened for the last of the prams.
“Wake up, guys!” Joey’s scream shivered against the red steel wall. “That’s all wrong. Mother’s just a runaway machine. Pop’s a crazy robot—”
“Stop for Pop!” The scoutmaster was trapped on top of that huge piston but its blazing lamps raced after Joey and the girl. “Catch ’em, cubs! Hold ‘em tight. Or there’ll be no Jamboree!”
“I told you, Pop!” Butch scuttled after Joey. “Don’t forget I’m the one that told. I’m the one—” Ratbait dived at his heels. They skidded together on the floor.
“Come on, scouts!” Joey was shouting. “Run away with us. Our own genes are good enough.”
The floor shuddered under him and that bright sky-slice grew thinner. Lurching on their little tracks, the prams formed a line to guard it. Joey jumped the shrieking tenderfeet but the girl stumbled. He stopped to pick her up.
“Help us, scouts,” he gasped. “We gotta get away—”
“Catch ’em for Pop!” that metal bellow belted them. “Or there’ll be no gold stars for anybody!”
Screeching cubs swarmed around them. The door clanged shut. Pop plunged off the sinking piston almost too soon. The yellow hood crunched. Hot oil splashed and smoked but the whips hauled Pop upright again.
“Don’t mess around with M-M-M-M-Mother!” The anvil voice came back with a stuttering croak. “She knows best!”
The quivering whips dragged Joey and the girl away from the clutching cubs and pushed them into a shallow pit where that great black piston had dropped below the level of the floor.
“Now sing for your Mother!” old Pop chortled. “Sing for the Jamboree!”
The cubs howled out their official song and the Jamboree went on. There were Pop-shaped balloons for the tenderfeet, and double scoops of pink ice milk for the cubs and gold stars for nearly everybody.
“But Mother wants a few of you,” old Pop purred.
A pointing whip picked out Blinkie. He jumped into the pit without waiting to be dragged. But Butch turned white and tried to run when it struck at him.
“Pop! Not m-m-m-m-me!” he squeaked. “Don’t forget I told on Joey. I’m only going on eleven and I’m in line for leader and I’ll tell on everybody—”
“That’s why Mother wants you.” Old Pop laughed like a pneumatic hammer. “You’re getting too adult.”
The whip snaked Butch into the pit, dull eyes bulging more than ever. He slumped down on the slick black piston and struggled like a squashed bug and then lay moaning in a puddle of terror.
Ratbait stood sweating as the whip came back to him. His stomach felt cold and strange and the tall red wall spun like a crazy wheel around him. He couldn’t move. The whip pulled him to the rim of the pit.
There Blinkie took his hand. Ratbait shook off the whip and stepped down into the pit. Joey nodded and the girl gave him a white, tiny smile. They all closed around her, arms linked tight, as the piston dropped.
“Now hop along for Pop! You’ve had your Jamboree—”
That hooting voice died away far above and the pit’s round mouth shrank into a blood-colored moon. The hot dark drummed like thunder all around them and the slick floor tilted. It spilled them all into Mother’s red steel jaws.
1971
The Moon Children
PART ONE
Earth had not seen their like—and did not want to . . .
HEREDITY
I
ON THAT epic day when man first touched the moon, we—my brother Tom and I—lay on the floor of our two-room flat over our father’s shop in Newark, drinking in the drama of it through our old black-and-white TV.
One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind . . .
Those electric words of Armstrong’s still shiver in my memory. The worn brown carpet smelled of our father’s strong Turkish tobacco and our mother’s lavender body powder and those stale scents are still mingled in my mind with the unforgettable throb of wild pride that caught my throat when man’s searching boot first found the moon.
“Now they’ve got themselves the gelt.” Tom’s raw envy nearly spoiled the moment for me. “And here I am, still stuck in Hotzenplotz!”
The history of the moon children begins with that instant, even though they would not even be born for many years. I wish chance had selected a better historian, because their story seems too big for me to tell. Looking at the task, I think of Swift’s Gulliver.
Gulliver has always been my favorite literary character. I never understood all the higher criticism of Swift as a theological satirist, but I always felt close to Gulliver—a plain, ordinary human being, reasonable and honest, involved through no fault, of his own in affairs that were too much for him.
The lives of the moon children are a vaster adventure than anything Swift invented for Gulliver, and telling it well calls for more style and wit than I possess. Perhaps my brother Tom should have been the narrator. He was involved as deeply as I and he had humor and imagination. I recall our father saying that he was the natural poet of the family and I was only the schlemiel.
“Please, Gamal!” Mother came plaintively to my defense. “You’re hurting Kim and teaching Tom too many of your own slick tricks. Better a schlemiel than a gonif.”
“Your own son a thief already? Hoo-ha!”
He gave her a black-eyed blink of wounded innocence and told a Yiddish joke that I didn’t understand, though Tom snickered knowingly. Mother stared back indignantly and suddenly decided to send me down to the delicatessen to buy boiled ham hocks for our dinner. Father snarled bitterly at that, but the ham hocks were cheap.
In spite of such bickering Tom knew how to make up with me. We were generally friends. After the moon landing, when we knew the Eagle was safe in space again, I remember how we stood up and shook hands and resolved to be astronauts.
“What chance have you got?” With a weary sigh, Mother looked up sadly from the potatoes she was peeling, “Gamal Hodian’s kids?”
“What’s wrong with Pop?” Tom stared at her. “He out-smarts everybody. Anyhow, like the TV says, things will be different now. Kim can be your pet schlemiel if he wants, but me, I’m grabbing my share of the planets.”
“Don’t call Kim that—”
“Pop does,” Tom reminded her. “Me, I don’t care what he is. I’m on my way to the moon.”
“Better finish high school first.”
“Better help your little yukl blow his nose.” Tom smirked at me, “I’ll do okay. Pop says I’ll be another macher, just as good as him.”
White-lipped, Mother bent over her potatoes again. My eyes blurred with pity for us both. She was a big, raw-boned blonde. She must have been a striking girl, though her wedding pictures show her already worn and fading when she married.
Once she caught Tom and me rummaging through a black, lavender-scented, lacquer box of old photographs and trinkets he had found in her dresser. Her pictures looked lovely to me, but he was snickering at her “cow-sized tits.” She slapped him and snatched the box away, but later she let me see her souvenirs and told how she had run away from an unhappy home in the Arkansas hills, hoping to break into show business.
She couldn’t help sobbing when she talked about it. She said her voice had been too thin and her bones too big. She tried the Nashville Grand Old Opry and tried Hollywood and tried New York, but her luck never broke. She was a waitress in a third-rate bar when she met Gamal Hodian.
HODIAN must have been an alias, but I never knew my father’s original name. He was a dark, stocky, evasive man, who spoke several languages badly, English worst of all. He was secretive about everything. Mother thought he was an Egyptian native. Tom believed he was Jewish. I once heard a business associate call him “a sneaking Armenian thief.” He used to say himself that he had no country. His passport was Turkish, but probably forged.
He had wanted to name my brother Tamar and me Kemal, but Mother made him call us Tom and Kim. The Hodian name must have been assumed when he began visiting the United States, soon after World War II and long before he met my mother. He called himself an importer and we always lived in some low-rent section, over or behind a grimy little shop that was sparsely stocked with the cheap perfumes and tarnished brassware and tattered scraps of carpet that he had imported.
There were other imports, I think, that I never learned much about. Strange customers always made him nervous and he was away most of the time on what Mother called buying trips. One of those lasted nearly three years. Mother told us he was ill in Ankara, but Tom snorted that he was somewhere in jail.
The year I entered high school he disappeared. He had always hated Sicilians and Mother insisted that the Mafia had murdered him. Long after, however, I found among her things a little packet of scented letters mailed in Marseilles to “M. Hobereau” at a Staten Island post office box. In a very feminine French hand they begged him to come back to his cherie and their petit enfant. Perhaps he went.
Though he had never been a bountiful provider, times grew even harder for us then. Mother closed out the shop and began to look for a job. Some of my father’s old friends put her on an uncertain dole, I think to keep her from telling what she knew about them.
Once one of them took me into a bar to talk about my future. A dark, watchful, jumpy little man who stank of garlic and cheap wine, he whispered questions and blinked in unbelief at all I didn’t know about my father’s connections. Mother must have been begging him to offer me some kind of job, but finally he stalked out indignantly and left me to pay for the drinks.
Mother stumbled or jumped in front of a truck the spring I finished high school. Two fat sisters and a Baptist preacher-brother came from Little Rock for the funeral. I had cleared the empty gin bottles out of the flat and I didn’t tell them about the needle marks the coroner had found on her arms.
Tom was already on his way toward the moon by then. Older than I, stronger and darker and smarter, more like our father, he always had a keener eye for the main chance. He weeded the Yiddish expressions out of his speech and earned a college scholarship to major in space science.
I did worse. With no head for math, I won no scholarships. Mother’s insurance came to six thousand dollars when all the bills were paid. I went to Las Vegas with my share, to try my luck. It was bad. The money lasted three nights.
MY ACTUAL education began with that disaster. Sometimes I was hungry. The police picked me up two or three times before I learned I hadn’t inherited my father’s talents. I tended bar and drove taxis and sold used cars. I bought a guitar and tried crooning folk ballads, but my voice turned out no better than my mother’s. I wrote songs nobody sang and a novel nobody would print. I was a disk jockey and a TV reporter and even a political campaign manager—for a candidate who lost.
Tom, year by year, moved closer to our old dream. He went from college into the Space Force and finally into COSMOS—the acronym stood for Civilian Organization of Man in Outer Space. Its idealistic aim was to explore space in peace for the common good. Tom used to poke fun at the high-minded slogan, “free worlds for free men,” but he lifted off for the new training base on the moon with the first class of COSMOS cadets. He had already changed his name to Thomas Hood.
He-wangled an assignment to a satellite survey team. The COSMOS space engineers were then developing the seeker-type survey rocket, which carried a dozen tons of sophisticated hardware designed to chart and analyze the surface of an airless world from low orbital flight. The seeker survey was planned to cover a hundred satellites and large asteroids, beginning with test flights around Earth’s moon.
“Not that I think we’ll find anything.” Tom grinned. “But the moon’s a cozy little mission, close to home and Robin Hudson.”
Robin was the jet-set daughter of Howard Hudson, a hotel tycoon he had managed to meet. With her sullen charm and her father’s fortune she was more exciting to Tom than the moon was now, since the spacemen were passing it by.
He took me to one of her father’s floating resorts, the Antilles Hudson, for a weekend with the other members of his three-man survey team. Seeker One was already in orbit around the moon and Tom’s Seeker Two crewmen were waiting for the space engineers to analyze the data tapes.
The invitation surprised me. Annoyed when I wouldn’t change my own name to match his, he had begun treating me like a beggar relation. Yet I was glad enough to go—the failure of that political adventure had left me without job or plans.
