One Hundred
by Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and others
©2020 Positronic Publishing
Cover Image © Can Stock Photo / grandfailure
One Hundred is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locales or institutions is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.
ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-4396-4
Jackie Sees a Star
by Marion Zimmer Bradley
So you want to hear about the Edwards child? Oh, no, you don’t get by with that one! You can just put on your hat again, and walk right back down those stairs, Mister, We’ve had too many psychologists and debunkers around here, and we don’t want any more.
Oh—you’re from the University? Excuse me, professor. I’m sorry. But if you knew what we’ve put up with, from reporters, and all kinds of crackpots . . . and it isn’t good for Jackie, either. He’s getting awfully spoiled. If you knew how many paddlings I’ve had to give that kid in just this past week.
His mother? Me? Oh, no! No, I’m just Jackie’s aunt. His mother, my sister Beth, works at the Tax Bureau. Jackie’s father died when he was only a week old. You know . . . he’d been in the Big Bombings in ‘64, and he never really got over it. It was pretty awful.
Anyhow, I look after Jackie while my sister works. He’s a good little kid—spoiled, but what kid isn’t, these days?
It was I who heard it first, as a matter of fact. You see I’m around Jackie a lot more than his mother is.
I was making Jackie’s bed one morning when he came up behind me, and grabbed me round the waist, and asked, real serious, “Aunt Dorothy, are the stars really other suns like this one, and do they have planets too?”
I said, “Why, sure, Jackie. I thought you knew that.”
He gave me a hug. “Thanks, Aunt Dorothy. I thought Mig was kidding me.”
“Who’s Mig?” I asked. I knew most of the kids on the block, you see, but there was a new little girl on the corner. I asked, “Is she the little Jackson girl?”
Jackie said, “Mig isn’t a. girl!” And did he sound disgusted! “Besides,” he said, “Mig doesn’t live ‘round here at all. His name is really Migardolon Domier, but I call him Mig. He doesn’t really talk to me. I mean, just inside my head.”
I said, “Oh.” I laughed a little bit, too, because Jackie isn’t really an imaginative kid. But I guess most kids go through the imaginary-playmate stage. I had one when I was a kid. I called her Bitsy—but anyway, Jackie just ran out to play, and I didn’t think about it again until one day he asked me what a spaceship looked like.
So I took him to see that movie—you know the one Paul Douglas played in about the trip to Mars—but would you believe it, the kid just stuck up his nose.
“I mean a real spaceship!” he said. “Mig showed me a lot better one than that!”
“So I spoke kind of sharp. You know, I didn’t like him to be rude. And he said, “Well, Mig’s father is building a spaceship. It goes all the way across the Gal—the gallazzy, I guess, and goes through—Aunt Dorothy, what’s hyperspace?”
“Oh, ask Mig what it is,” I said, real cross with him. You know how it is when kids act smart.
The next day was Saturday, so Beth was at home with Jackie, and I stayed with Mother. But when I came over Monday morning, she asked me, “Dorrie, where on earth did Jack pick up all this rocketship lingo? And what kind of a phase is this Mig business?”
I told her I’d taken him to see socket mars, and she was quite provoked. Beth still thinks rockets are kind of comicbook stuff, and she gave me a long talk about trashy movies, and getting him too excited, and overstimulating his imagination, and so forth.
Then she gave me the latest developments on this Mig affair. It seemed that Jackie had given with the details. Mig was a little fellow who lived on a planet halfway across the “gallazzy,” and his father was a rocketship engineer.
Well, you know how kids are about spaceships. Jackie wasn’t quite six, but he’s always been kind of old for his age. That afternoon he started teasing me to take him to the Planetarium. He kept on about it until I finally took him, that evening, after Beth got home.
It was quite late when we left. The stars had all come out, and while we were walking home, I asked him which one of the stars Mig lived on. And, professor, do you know what that child said? He said, “You can’t live on a star, dummy! You’d burn up! He lives on a planet around the star!”
He pointed off toward the north, fidgeted around for a few minutes, and finally said, “Well, the sky kind of looks different where Mig lives. But I think it’s up there somewhere,” and he pointed into the Big Dipper.
I didn’t encourage the Mig business, but, good gosh, it didn’t need encouraging, I guess it was two or three days later when Jackie told me that Mig’s sun was going to blow up, so his father was building a spaceship, and they were coming here to live.
I kept a straight face. But I couldn’t help wondering what would happen when Jackie got his Mig, so to speak, down to earth. Probably it would just ease the fantasy off into a more normal phase, and it would gradually disappear.
One night in August, Beth wanted to go to a movie with some girls from her office, so I stayed with Jackie. I was reading downstairs when I suddenly heard him bawling upstairs—not very loud, but real unhappy and pitiful.
I ran upstairs and took him up, thinking he’d had a bad dream, and held him, just shaking and trembling, until he finally quieted down to a hiccup now and then.
And then he said, in the unhappiest little voice, “Mig has to leave his—his erling on the planet, to get blowed up with the sun! It’s a little bitty thing like a puppy, but his Daddy says there isn’t any room on the spaceship for it! But he got it for his—well, I guess it was kind of like a birthday—and he wanted to show it to me when he got here!”
Well!
I guess the lecture I gave him about imagination had something to do with it, because I didn’t hear any more about Mig for quite some time. He kept Beth posted, though. He even told her when the spaceship was going to take off and when Mig’s sun was going to blow up, or else where we’d see it. I don’t know which. But anyway, he made her mark it down on the Calendar. The fifth of November, it was.
Well, in September I went back to college, and—well, I don’t just talk about—things outside of the family, but my boy friend, Dave, he was almost like one of the family, and this year he’d got a job working with Professor Milliken at the Observatory.
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