. . . oh, I don’t know!”
Now he was suspicious again. “All right,” he said. “I’ll leave. You come with me.”
It was just that simple. Go back with him. Let them come and not find me. What could they do? Their own rules would keep them from hunting for me. They couldn’t come down among the people of Earth. Go back. Stop running.
We got into his car, and he turned around and smiled at me again, like the other time.
I smiled back, seeing him through a shiny kind of mist which must have been tears. I reached for him, and he reached for me at the same time.
When we let go, he tried to start the car, and it wouldn’t work. Of course. I’d forgotten till then. I started laughing and crying at the same time in a sort of a crazy way, and took him back inside and showed him the projector. They’d forgotten to give me any commands about not doing that, I guess. Or they thought it wouldn’t matter.
It did matter. Larry looked it over, and puzzled over it a little, and fooled around, and asked me some questions. I didn’t have much technical knowledge, but I knew what it did, and he figured out the way it did it. Nothing with an electro-magnetic motor was going to work while that thing was turned on, not within a mile or so in any direction. And there wasn’t any way to turn it off. It was a homing beam, and it was on to stay—foolproof.
That was when he looked at me, and said slowly, “You got here three days ago, didn’t you, babe?”
I nodded.
“There was—God-damn it, it’s too foolish! There was a—a flying saucer story in the paper that day. Somebody saw it land on a hilltop somewhere. Some crackpot. Some . . . how about it, kid?”
I couldn’t say yes and I couldn’t say no, and I did the only thing that was left, which was to get hysterical. In a big way.
He had to calm me down, of course. And I found out why the television shows stop with the kiss. The rest is very private and personal.
*
Author’s note: This story was dictated to me by a five-year-old boy—word-for-word, except for a very few editorial changes of my own. He is a very charming and bright youngster who plays with my own five-year-old daughter. One day he wandered into my office, and watched me typing for a while, then asked what I was doing. I answered (somewhat irritably, because the children are supposed to stay out of the room when I’m working) that I was trying to write a story.
“What kind of a story?”
“A grown-up story.”
“But what kind?”
“A science-fiction story.” The next thing I was going to do was to call my daughter, and ask her to take her company back to the playroom. I had my mouth open, but I never got a syllable out. Teddy was talking.
“I don’t know where they got the car,” he said. “They made three or four stops before the last . . . .” He had a funny look on his face, and his eyes were glazed-looking.
I had seen some experimental work with hypnosis and post-hypnotic performance. After the first couple of sentences, I led Teddy into the living-room, and switched on the tape-recorder. I left it on as long as he kept talking. I had to change tapes once, and missed a few more sentences. When he was done, I asked him, with the tape still running, where he had heard that story.
“What story?” he asked. He looked perfectly normal again.
“The story you just told me.”
He was obviously puzzled.
“The science-fiction story,” I said.
“I don’t know where they got the car,” he began; his face was set and his eyes were blank.
I kept the tape running, and picked up the parts I’d missed before. Then I sent Teddy off to the playroom, and played back the tape, and thought for a while.
There was a little more, besides what you’ve read. Parts of it were confused, with some strange words mixed in, and with sentences half-completed, and a feeling of ambivalence or censorship or inhibition of some kind preventing much clarity. Other parts were quite clear. Of these, the only section I have omitted so far that seems to me to belong in the story is this one:—
*
The baby will have to be born on Earth! They have decided that themselves. And for the first time, I am glad that they cannot communicate with me as perfectly as they do among themselves. I can think some things they do not know about.
We are not coming back. I do not think that I will like it on Earth for very long, and I do not know—neither does Larry—what will happen to us when the Security people find us, and we cannot answer their questions. But—
I am a woman now, and I love like a woman. Larry will not be their pet; so I cannot be. I am not sure that I am fit to be what Larry thinks of as a “human being.” He says I must learn to be “my own master.” I am not at all sure I could do this, if it were necessary, but fortunately, this is one of Larry’s areas of semantic confusion. The feminine ofmaster is mistress, which has various meanings.
Also, there is the distinct possibility, from what Larry says, that we will not, either of us, be allowed even as much liberty as we have here.
There is also the matter of gratitude. They brought me up, took care of me, taught me, loved me, gave me a way of life, and a knowledge of myself, infinitely richer than I could ever have had on Earth. Perhaps they even saved my life, healing me when I was quite possibly beyond the power of Earthly medical science to save. But against all this—
They caused the damage to start with. It was their force-field that wrecked the car and killed my parents. They have paid for it; they are paying for it yet. They will continue to pay, for more years than make sense in terms of a human lifetime.They will continue to wander from planet to planet and system to system, because they have brokentheir own law, and now may never go home.
But I can.
I am a woman, and Larry is a man. We will go home and have our baby. And perhaps the baby will be the means of our freedom, some day. If we cannot speak to save ourselves, he may some day be able to speak for us.
I do not think the blocks they set in us will penetrate my womb as my own thoughts, I hope, already have.
*
Author’s note: Before writing this story—as a story—I talked with Johnny’s parents. I approached them cautiously. His mother is a big woman, and a brunette. His father is a friendly fat redhead. I already knew that neither of them reads science-fiction. The word is not likely to be mentioned in their household.
They moved to town about three years ago. Nobody here knew them before that, but there are rumors that Johnny is adopted. They did not volunteer any confirmation of that information when I talked to them, and they did not pick
