A Treasury of Great Science Fiction 1 Read online

  “I’ll have to go and fetch somebody to help,” I told her.

  “No. I’ll crawl,” she said.

  I walked beside her, carrying the shoe, and feeling useless. She kept going gamely for a surprisingly long way, but she had to give it up. Her trousers were worn through at the knees, and the knees themselves were sore and bleeding. I had never known anyone, boy or girl, who would have kept on till that pitch; it awed me slightly. I helped her to stand up on her sound foot, and steadied her while she pointed out where her home was, and the trickle of smoke that marked it. I set off half-running, with a high sense of responsibility. When I looked back she was on all fours again, disappearing into the bushes.

  I found the house without much difficulty, and knocked, a little nervously. A tall woman answered. She had a fine, handsome face with large bright eyes. Her dress was russet and a little shorter than those most of the women at home wore, but it carried the conventional cross, from neck to hem and breast to breast, in a green that matched the scarf on her head.

  “Are you Sophie’s mother?” I asked.

  She looked at me sharply and frowned. She said, with anxious abruptness:

  “What is it?”

  I told her.

  “Oh,” she said. “Her foot!”

  She looked hard at me again for a moment, then she stood the broom she was holding against the wall, and asked briskly:

  “Where is she?”

  I led her by the way I had come. At the sound of her voice Sophie crawled out of the bushes.

  Her mother looked at the swollen, misshapen foot and the bleeding knees.

  “Oh, my poor darling!” she said, holding her and kissing her. Then she added: “He’s seen it?”

  “Yes,” Sophie told her. “I’m sorry, Mummy. I tried hard, but I couldn’t do it myself, and it did hurt so.”

  Her mother nodded slowly. She sighed.

  “Oh, well. It can’t be helped now. Up you get.”

  Sophie climbed on to her mother’s back, and we all went back to the house together.

  The commandments and precepts one learns as a child are just a set of bits; parts of no pattern, few of them even touching one another. Some lodge and are remembered by rote, but they mean little until there is example—and, even then, the example needs to be recognized.

  Thus, I was able to sit patiently and watch the hurt foot being washed, cold-poulticed, and bound up, and perceive no connection between it and the affirmation which I had heard almost every Sunday of my life. I could repeat the words of the affirmation, just as I could repeat many other sets of words, but it had simply never occurred to me that they had any connection with real life or real people. They were just something that got said on Sunday:

  “And God created man in his own image. And God decreed that man should have one body, one head, two arms and two legs; that each arm should be jointed in two places and end in one hand; that each hand should have four fingers and one thumb; that each finger should bear a flat finger-nail . . .”

  And so on until:

  “Then God created woman, also, and in the same image, but with these differences, according to her nature: her voice should be of higher pitch than man’s; she should grow no beard; she should have two breasts . . .”

  And so on again.

  I knew it all, word for word—and yet the sight of Sophie’s six toes stirred nothing in my memory. They looked no less proper to her foot than my five did to my own. I saw the foot resting in her mother’s lap. Watched her mother pause to look down at it for a still moment, lift it, bend to kiss it gently, and then look up with tears in her eyes. I felt sorry for her distress, and for Sophie, and for the hurt foot—but nothing more.

  While the bandaging was being finished I looked around the room curiously. The house was a great deal smaller than my home, a cottage, in fact, but I liked it better. It felt friendly. And although Sophie’s mother was anxious and worried she spoke to me now and then as if I was as real a person as herself. She did not give me the feeling that I was the one regrettable and unreliable factor in an otherwise orderly life, the way most people did at home. And the room itself seemed to me the better, too, for not having groups of words hanging on the wall that people could point to in disapproval. At home they had been doing that since long before I had been able to read the words. Instead, this room had several drawings of horses, which I thought very fine.

  Presently, Sophie, tidied up now, and with the tearstains washed away, hopped to a chair at the table. Quite restored but for the foot, she inquired with grave hospitality whether I liked eggs.

  I said I did.

  Afterward, her mother told me to wait where I was while she carried Sophie upstairs. She returned in a few minutes, and sat down beside me. She took my hand in hers and looked at me seriously for some moments. I could feel her anxiety strongly; though quite why she should be so worried was not, at first, clear to me. I was surprised by her, for there had been no sign before that she could think in that way. I thought back to her, trying to reassure her and show her that she need not be anxious about me, but it didn’t reach her. She went on looking at me with her eyes shining, much as Sophie’s had when she was trying not to cry. Her thoughts were all worry and shapeless as she kept on looking at me, I tried again but still couldn’t reach them. Then she nodded slowly, and said in words:

  “You’re a good boy, David. You were very kind to Sophie. I want to thank you for that.”

  I felt awkward, and looked at my shoes. I couldn’t remember anyone saying before that I was a good boy. I knew no form of response designed to meet such an event.

  “You like Sophie, don’t you?” she went on, still looking at me.

  “Yes,” I told her. And I added: “I think she’s awfully brave, too. It must have hurt a lot.”

  “Will you keep a secret—an important secret—for her sake?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course,” I agreed, but a little uncertain in my tone for not realizing what the secret was.

  “You—you saw her foot?” she said, looking steadily into my face. “Her—toes?”

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said again.

  “Well, that is the secret, David. Nobody else must know about that. You are the only person who does, except her father and me. Nobody else must know. Nobody at all—not ever.”

  “No,” I agreed, and nodded seriously again.

  There was a pause—at least, her voice paused, but her thoughts went on, as if “nobody” and “not ever” were making desolate, unhappy echoes there. Then that changed and she became tense and fierce and afraid inside. It was no good thinking back to her. I tried clumsily to emphasize in words that I had meant what I said.

  “Never—not anybody at all,” I assured her earnestly.

  “It’s very, very important,” she insisted. “How can I explain to you?” But she didn’t really need to explain. Her urgent, tight-strung feeling of the importance was very plain. Her words were far less potent. She said:

  “If anyone were to find out, they’d—they’d be terribly unkind to her. We’ve got to see that that never happens.”

  It was as if the anxious feeling had turned into something hard, like an iron rod.

  “Because she has six toes?” I asked.

  “Yes. That’s what nobody but us must ever know. It must be a secret between us,” she repeated, driving it home. “You’ll promise, David.”

  “I’ll promise. I can swear, if you like,” I offered.

  “The promise is enough,” she told me.

  It was so heavy a promise that I was quite resolved to keep it completely—even from my cousin Rosalind. Though, underneath, I was puzzled by its evident importance. It seemed a very small toe to cause such a degree of anxiety. But there was a great deal of grown-up fuss that seemed disproportionate to causes. If I had not learned long ago that a grown-up could scarcely ever give a satisfactory answer to a simple question I would have asked her just why it was so important, and why anybody should be unkind to
Sophie on account of it. But as one was liable sometimes to get punished simply for putting a question at all, I had got into the habit of not asking things much. So I held on to the main point—the need for secrecy. That would not be difficult. I could just tuck it in among my rather large range of private secrets, though it would be unusual to have one I could not share even with Rosalind.

  Sophie’s mother kept on looking at me with a sad, but unseeing expression until I became uncomfortable. She noticed as I fidgeted, and smiled. It was a kind smile.

  “All right, then,” she said. “We’ll keep it secret, and never talk about it again?”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  On the way down the path from the door, I turned around.

  “May I come and see Sophie again soon?” I asked.

  She hesitated, giving the question some thought, then she said:

  “Very well—if you are sure you can come without anyone knowing.”

  Not until I had reached the bank and was making my homeward way along the top of it did the monotonous Sunday precepts join up with reality. Then, suddenly, the Definition of Man recited itself in my head: “—and each leg shall be jointed twice and have one foot, and each foot five toes, and each toe shall end with a flat nail . . .” And so on, until finally: “And any creature that shall seem to be human, but is not formed thus is not human. It is neither man nor woman. It is a Blasphemy against the true Image of God, and hateful in the sight of God.”

  I was abruptly perturbed—and considerably puzzled, too. A Blasphemy was, as had been impressed upon me often enough, a frightful thing. Yet there was nothing frightful about Sophie. She was simply an ordinary little girl—if a great deal more sensible and braver than most. Yet, according to the Definition . . .

  Clearly there must be a mistake somewhere. Surely having one very small toe extra—well, two very small toes, because I supposed there would be one to match on the other foot—surely that couldn’t be enough to make one “hateful in the sight of God?”

  The ways of the world were very puzzling. In the course of my ten years I had accumulated quite a lot of lore of one kind and another, bits from church, bits from my parents, bits from lessons, bits from other children, bits from adventuring on my own, but they were still disjointed and not to be relied upon for guidance. When I did something amiss, I still had little but the scale of the punishment to indicate whether I had committed an enormity, or a peccadillo. The things I knew did not connect to make a clear course of conduct. The best I could do was to cling to the simpler things that I did understand—things like a promise being a promise. That, at least, was clear and straightforward.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I reached home by my usual method. At a point where the woods had lapped up the side of the bank and grown across it I scrambled down on to a narrow, little-used track. From there on I was watchful, and kept my hand on my knife. I was supposed to keep out of the woods, for it did occasionally—though very rarely—happen that large creatures penetrated as far into civilized parts as Waknuk, and there was just a chance that one might encounter some kind of wild dog or cat. However, and as usual, the only creatures I heard were small ones, hurriedly making off.

  After a mile or so I reached cultivated land, with the house in sight across three or four fields. I worked along the fringe of the woods, observing carefully from cover, then crossed all but the last field in the shadows of the hedges, and paused to prospect again. There was no one in sight but old Jacob slowly shoveling muck in the yard. When his back was safely turned I cut swiftly across the bit of open ground, climbed in through a window, and made my way cautiously to my own room. One of the troubles about home was that if one walked in by a door there would almost certainly be some person who, after a what-have-you-been-up-to-now? question, would find one a useful, but uncongenial job.

  Our house is not easy to describe. My grandfather, Elias Strorm, built the first part of it over fifty years before; since then it had grown new rooms and extensions at various times. By now, it rambled off on one side into stock-sheds, stores, stables, and barns, and on the other into washhouses, dairies, cheese-rooms, farmhands’ rooms, and so on until it three-quarters enclosed a large, beaten-earth yard which lay to leeward of the main house and had a midden for its central feature.

  Like all the houses of the district to which it had given its name, it was constructed on a frame of solid, roughly dressed timbers, but, since it was the oldest house there, most of the spaces in the outer walls had been filled in with bricks and stones from the ruins of some of the Old People’s buildings, and plastered wattle was used only for the internal walls.

  My grandfather, in the aspect he wore when presented to me by my father as an example, appeared to have been a man of somewhat tediously unrelieved virtue. It was only later that I pieced together a portrait that was more credible, if less creditable.

  Elias Strorm came from the east, somewhere near the sea. Why he came is not quite clear. He himself maintained that it was the ungodly ways of the East which drove him to search for a less sophisticated, stauncher-minded region; though I have heard it suggested that there came a point when his native parts refused to tolerate him any longer. Whatever the cause, it persuaded him to Waknuk—then undeveloped, almost frontier country—with all his worldly goods in a train of six wagons, at the age of forty-five. He was a husky man, a dominating man, and a man fierce for rectitude. He had eyes that could flash with evangelical fire beneath bushy brows. Respect for God was frequently on his lips, and fear of the devil constantly in his heart, and it seems to have been hard to say which inspired him the more.

  Soon after he had started the house he went off on a journey and brought back a bride. She was shy, pretty in the pink and golden way, and twenty-five years younger than himself. She moved, I have been told, like a lovely colt when she thought herself unwatched; as timorously as a rabbit when she felt her husband’s eye upon her.

  All her answers, poor thing, were dusty. She did not find that a marriage service generated love; she did not enable her husband to recapture his youth through hers; nor could she compensate for that by running his home in the manner of an experienced housekeeper.

  Elias was not a man to let shortcomings pass unremarked. In a few seasons he straightened the coltishness with admonitions, faded the pink and gold with preaching, and produced a sad, gray wraith of wifehood who died, unprotesting, a year after her second son was born.

  Grandfather Elias had never a moment’s doubt of the proper pattern for his heir. My father’s faith was bred into his bones, his principles were his sinews, and both responded to a mind richly stored with instances from the Bible, and from Nicholson’s Repentances. In faith father and son were at one; the difference between them was only in approach; the evangelical flash „did not appear in my father’s eyes; his virtue was more legalistic.

  Joseph Strorm, my father, did not marry until Elias was dead, and when he did, he was not a man to repeat his father’s mistakes. My mother’s views harmonized with his own. She had a strong sense of duty, and never doubted where it lay.

  Our district, and, consequently, our house as the first there, took the name Waknuk because of a tradition that there had been a place of that name there, or thereabouts, long, long ago, in the time of the Old People. The tradition was, as usual, vague, but certainly there had been some buildings there, for remnants and foundations had remained until they were taken for new buildings. There was also the long bank, running away until it reached the hills and the huge scar there that must have been made by the Old People when, in their superhuman fashion, they had cut away half a mountain in order to find something or other that interested them. It may have been called Waknuk then; anyway, Waknuk it had become, an orderly, law-abiding, God-respecting community of some hundred scattered holdings, large and small.

  My father was a man of local consequence. When, at the age of sixteen, he had made his first public appearance by giving a Sunday address in the church his father ha
d built, there had still been fewer than sixty families in the district. But as more land was cleared for farming and more people came to settle, he was not submerged by them. He was still the largest landowner, he still continued to preach frequently on Sundays and explain with practical clarity the laws and views held in heaven upon a variety of matters and practices, and he continued upon the appointed days to administer the laws temporal, as a magistrate. For the rest of the time he saw to it that he, and all within his control, continued to set a high example to the district.

  Within the house, life centered, as was the local custom, upon the large living room which was also the kitchen. As the house was the largest and best in Waknuk, so was the room. The great fireplace there was an object of pride—not vain pride, of course; more a matter of being conscious of having given worthy treatment to the excellent materials that the Lord had provided: a kind of testament, really. The hearth was solid stone blocks. The whole chimney was built of bricks and had never been known to catch fire. The area about its point of emergence was covered with the only tiles in the district, so that the thatch which covered the rest of the roof had never caught fire, either.

  My mother saw to it that the big room was kept very clean and tidy. The floor was composed of pieces of brick and stone and artificial stone cleverly fitted together. The furniture was whitely scrubbed tables and stools, with a few chairs. The walls were whitewashed. Several burnished pans, too big to go in the cupboards, hung against them. The nearest approach to decoration was a number of wooden panels with sayings, mostly from Repentances, artistically burnt into them. The one on the left of the fireplace read: Only the Image of God Is Man. The one on the right: Keep Pure the Stock of the Lord. On the opposite wall two more said: Blessed Is the Norm, and In Purity Our Salvation. The largest was the one on the back wall, hung to face the door which led to the yard. It reminded everyone who came in: Watch Thou for the Mutant!

  Frequent references to these texts had made me familiar with the words long before I was able to read; in fact I am not sure that they did not give me my first reading lessons. I knew them by heart, just as I knew others elsewhere in the house which said things like: The Norm Is the Will of God, and, Reproduction Is the Only Holy Production, and, The Devil Is the Father of Deviation, and a number of others about Offenses and Blasphemies.