Big Book of Science Fiction (5 page)

“We’ve done something. I just
hope it isn’t serious. Anyhow, his arm isn’t bothering him any. That’s all we
were worried about in the first place.”

Iris put a cushion under the man’s
oddly planed head, touched the beach mattress he was lying on to see that he
would be comfortable. “He has a beautiful mustache,” she said. “Like silver. He
looks very old and wise, doesn’t he?”

“So does an owl. Let’s go to bed.”

Jack woke early, from a dream in
which he had bailed out of a flying motorcycle with an umbrella that turned
into a candy cane as he fell. He landed in the middle of some sharp-toothed
crags which gave like sponge rubber. He was immediately surrounded by mermaids
who looked like Iris and who had hands shaped like spur gears. But nothing
frightened him. He awoke smiling, inordinately happy.

Iris was still asleep. Outside,
somewhere, he heard the tinkle of Molly’s laugh. He sat up, looked at Molly’s
camp cot. It was empty.

Moving quietly, so as not to
disturb his wife, he slid his feet into moccasins and went out.

Molly was on her knees beside
their strange visitor, who was squatting on his haunches and—

They were playing patty-cake.

“Molly!”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“What are you trying to do? Don’t
you realize that that man has a broken arm?”

“Oh gosh. I’m sorry. Do you s’pose
I hurt him?”

“I don’t know. It’s very
possible,” said Jack Garry testily. He went to the alien, took his good hand.

The man looked up at him and
smiled. His smile was peculiarly engaging. All of his teeth were pointed, and
they were very widely spaced. “Eeee-yu mow madibu Mewhu,” he said.

“That’s his name,” Molly said
excitedly. She leaned forward and tugged at the man’s sleeve. “Mewhu. Hey,
Mewhu!” And she pointed at her chest.

“Mooly,” said Mewhu. “Mooly—Geery.”

“See, Daddy?” Molly said
ecstatically. “See?” She pointed at her father. “Daddy. Dah—dee.”

“Deedy,” said Mewhu.

“No, silly! Daddy.”

“Dewdy.”

“Dah-dy!”

Jack, quite entranced, pointed at
himself and said, “Jack.”

“Jeek.”

“Good enough. Molly, the man can’t
say ‘ah.’ He can say ‘oo’ or ‘ee’ but not ‘ah.’ That’s good enough.”

Jack examined the splints. Iris
had done a very competent job. When she realized that instead of the
radius-ulna development of a true human, Mewhu had only one bone in his
forearm, she had set the arm and laid on two splints instead of one. Jack
grinned. Intellectually, Iris would not accept Mewhu’s existence even as a
possibility; but as a nurse, she not only accepted his body structure but
skillfully compensated for its differences.

“I guess he wants to be polite,”
said Jack to his repentant daughter, “and if you want to play patty-cake, he’ll
go along with you, even if it hurts. Don’t take advantage of him, chicken.”

“I won’t, Daddy.”

Jack started up the fire and had
a green-stick crane built and hot water bubbling by the time Iris emerged. “Takes
a cataclysm to get you to start breakfast,” she grumbled through a pleased
smile. “When were you a boy scout?”

“Matter of fact,” said Garry, “I
was once. Will modom now take over?”

“Modom will. How’s the patient?”

“Thriving. He and Molly had a
patty-cake tournament this morning. His clothes, by the way, are red again.”

“Jack—where does he come from?”

“I haven’t asked him yet. When I
learn to caterwaul, or he learns to talk, perhaps we’ll find out. Molly has
already elicited the information that his name’s Mewhu.” Garry grinned. “And he
calls me ‘Jeek.’”

“Can’t pronounce an ‘r,’ hm?”

“That’ll do, woman. Get on with
the breakfast.”

While Iris busied herself over
breakfast, Jack went to look at the house. It wasn’t as bad as he had thought—a
credit to poor construction. Apparently the upper two rooms were a late
addition and had just been perched onto the older, comparatively flat-topped
lower section. The frame of Molly’s bed was bent beyond repair, but the box
spring and mattress were intact. The old roof seemed fairly sound, where the
removal of the jerry-built little top story had exposed it. The living room
would be big enough for him and Iris, and Molly’s bed could be set up in the
study. There were tools and lumber in the garage, the weather was warm and
clear, and like any other writer, Jack Garry was very much attracted by the
prospect of hard work for which he would not get paid, as long as it wasn’t
writing. By the time Iris called him for breakfast, he had most of the debris
cleared from the roof and a plan of action mapped out. It would only be
necessary to cover the hole where the stairway landing had been, and go over
the roof for potential leaks. A good rain, he reflected, would search those out
for him quickly enough.

“What “about Mewhu?” Iris asked
as she handed him an aromatic plate of eggs and bacon. “If we feed him any of
this, do you think he’ll throw another fit?”

Jack looked at their visitor, who
sat on the other side of the fire, very close to Molly, gazing big-eyed at
their breakfasts.

“I don’t know. We could give him
a little, I suppose.”

Mewhu inhaled his sample, and
wailed for more. He ate a second helping, and when Iris refused to fry more
eggs, he gobbled toast and jam. Each new thing he tasted he would nibble at,
blink twice, and then bolt down. The only exception was the coffee. One taste
was sufficient. He put it down on the ground and very carefully, very
delicately overturned it.

“Can you talk to him?” Iris asked
suddenly.

“He can talk to me,” declared
Molly.

“I’ve heard him,” Jack said.

“Oh, no. I don’t mean
that,”
Molly denied vehemently. “I can’t make any sense out of that stuff.”

“What do you mean, then?”

“I ... I dunno, Mommy. He
just—talks to me, that’s all.”

Jack and Iris looked at each
other. “Must be a game,” said Iris. Jack shook his head, looking at his
daughter carefully as if he had not really seen her before. He could think of
nothing to say, and rose.

“Think the house can be patched
up?”

“Oh sure.” He laughed. “You never
did like the color of the upstairs rooms, anyway.”

“I don’t know what’s gotten into
me,” said Iris thoughtfully. “I’d have kicked like a mule at any part of this.
I’d have packed up and gone home if, say, just a wall was gone upstairs, or if
there were just a hole in the roof, or if this . . .this android phenomenon
arrived suddenly. But when it all happens at once—I can take it all!”

“Question of perspective. Show me
a nagging woman and I’ll show you one who hasn’t enough to worry about.”

“You’ll get out of my sight or
you’ll have this frying pan bounced off your yammering skull,” said Iris
steadily. Jack got.

~ * ~

Molly
and Mewhu trailed after him as he returned to the house, stood side by side
goggling at him as he mounted the ladder.

“Whatsha doing, Daddy?”

“Marking off the edges of this
hole where the stairway hits the place where the roof isn’t, so I can clean up
the edges with a saw.”

“Oh.”

Jack roughed out the area with a
piece of charcoal, lopped off the more manageable rough edges with a hatchet,
cast about for his saw. It was still in the garage. He climbed down, got it,
climbed up again, and began to saw. Twenty minutes of this, and sweat was
streaming down his face. He knocked off, climbed down, doused his head at the
pump, lit a cigarette, climbed back up on the roof.

“Why don’t you jump off and back?”

The roofing job was looking
larger and the day seemed warmer than it had. Jack’s enthusiasm was in inverse
proportion to these factors. “Don’t be funny, Molly.”

“Yes, but Mewhu wants to know.”

“Oh, he does. Ask him to try it.”

He went back to work. A few
minutes later, when he paused for a breath, Mewhu and Molly were nowhere to be
seen. Probably over by the tent, in Iris’ hair, he thought, and went on sawing.

“Daddy!”

Daddy’s unaccustomed arm and
shoulder were, by this time, yelling for help. The dry soft-wood alternately
cheesed the saw out of line and bound it. He answered impatiently, “Well, what?”

“Mewhu says to come. He wants to
show you something.”

“Show me what? I haven’t time to
play now, Molly. I’ll attend to Mewhu when we get a roof over our heads again.”

“But it’s for you!”

“What is?”

“The thing in the tree.”

“Oh, all right.” Prompted more by
laziness than by curiosity, Jack climbed back down the ladder. Molly was
waiting. Mewhu was not in sight.

“Where is he?”

“By the tree,” she said with
exaggerated patience, taking his hand. “Come on. It’s not far.”

She led him around the house and
across the bumpy track that was euphemistically known as a road. There was a
tree down on the other side. He looked from it to the house, saw that in line
with the felled tree and his damaged roof were more broken trees, where
something had come down out of the sky, skimmed the tops of the trees, angling
closer to the ground until it wiped the top off his house and had then risen up
and up—to where?

They went deeper into the woods
for ten minutes, skirting an occasional branch or fallen treetop, until they
came to Mewhu, who was leaning against a young maple. He smiled, pointed up
into the tree, pointed to his arm, to the ground. Jack looked at him in
puzzlement.

“He fell out of the tree and
broke his arm,” said Molly.

“How do you know?”

“Well, he just did, Daddy.”

“Nice to know. Now can I get back
to work?”

“He wants you to get the thing in
the tree!”

Jack looked upward. Hung on a
fork two-thirds of the way up the tree was a gleaming object, a stick about
five feet long with a streamlined shape on each end, rather like the wingtip
tanks of a P-80. “What on earth is that?”

“I dunno. I can’t— He tol’ me,
but I dunno. Anyway, it’s for you, so you don’t ... so you don’t—” She looked
at Mewhu for a moment. The alien’s silver mustache seemed to swell a little. “—so
you don’t have to climb the ladder so much.”

“Molly—how did you know that?”

“He
told
me, that’s all.
Gosh, Daddy, don’t be mad. I don’t know how, honest; he just did, that’s all.”

“I don’t get it,” muttered Jack. “Anyhow—what’s
this about that thing in the tree? I’m supposed to break my arm too?”

“It isn’t dark.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Molly shrugged. “Ask him.”

“Oh. I think I catch that. He
fell out of the tree because it was dark. He thinks I can get up there and get
the whatzit without hurting myself because I can see what I am doing. He also
flatters me. Or is it flattery? How close to the apes does he think we are?”