The Man Who Lost the Sea (45 page)

“I gon’
hide!
” shrieked Noël in something very like Tandy’s special rasping shriek; and go she did, hide she did, ineffectively (the mother knew she was in the baby’s blue chiffonier) but with great purpose. Apparently her “not allowed” was big enough to make it worth while defying the giants. Sighing, the mother went to the back door. “Tandy!”

“Yes, Mommy …”

“Bring Daddy’s cultivator to him, he needs it!”

“The handle-fingers?”

“That’s right, dear.”

She watched Tandy, in a yellow dress, bounding from behind the garage and heading for the front lawn. She waited until she saw the flash of yellow again and called her to the back steps.

“Tandy, you must have been terribly rough to Noël about not playing with your brownie. She’s afraid to go back there because you said she’s not allowed.”

“No, I didn’t, Mommy.”

“Tandy!” (The explosion of the name alone was the mother’s favorite curb.)

For the first time in many weeks Tandy began to pucker up, the eyes grew bright, the mouth trembled. “I reely, reely, reely …”

Moving on impulse, the mother stepped forward and took Tandy’s wrist. “Shh, honey. Take me out and show me what you’re doing.”

Tandy immediately shut it all off and they went back of the garage, Tandy skipping. The mother was prepared to be complimentary as one normally is, multiplied by the wonder of what she had seen before; but she was not prepared for what she found.

One wall had been removed from the little house, the shiplap scraps unearthed and tossed aside. The roof was still supported by the other side and the top of the creel. A heap of flat stones lay near, and a small sack of readymixed concrete. A seed-flat was doing service as a miniature mortar-board, and a discarded pancake-turner as a trowel.

Tandy was composedly replacing the wooden wall with one of fieldstone.

“Tandy! Why, I never … who taught you to do this?”

“I asked Mr. Holmes-the-gym-teacher.” (Tandy’s teachers’ names were all compounded like this.)

“But-but … where did you get the concrete?”

“I boughted it. I saved my ’lowance money and all my ice-cream money. That’s all right, isn’t it? I didn’t go into town, Robin did on his bicycle.” She slopped water from a toy sand-bucket and began to mix the concrete.

“Robin never told me,” said the mother faintly.

“I guess you never asked him, Mommy.”

“I guess I never.” The mother wet her lips. “Tandy, how did you ever think of all this?”

“I didn’t think of it. I just did it, that’s all.” She picked up a slather of cement and ladled it on to the top course of her new wall. “You wouldn’t expect a brownie to go on living in a ol’ wood house, now, would you?” she demanded in grandmotherly tones.

“No, I—I suppose not … Tandy, I saw the dresser and the little chair and the tablecloth. They’re lovely. Tandy, did someone iron the tablecloth for you?”

“Oh, it irons itself,” said Tandy. “You wash it an’ rinse it and stick it on a window an’ when it’s dry it’s ironed.”

“What’s that lovely white floor?”

Tandy selected and hefted a stone, then carefully laid it on the course. “Borax,” she said.

“And you bought that with your ice-cream money too?”

“Sure. Brownies like borax and the little lumps off roots and that stuff there.” She pointed to the rows of dark green weed.

“What is that?”

“The brownie’s farm.”

“I mean, the plant.”

“I don’t know what the real name is. I found it through the woods there, there’s a whole patch. I call it brownie spinach. Look, over there’s the lumps. It’s like candy to a brownie.” She pointed to a heap of roots, from some legume or other—the mother couldn’t tell, for the leaves were gone; but the root-hairs had clusters of the typical nitrogenous nodules. “Tandy, how on earth do you know so much about brownies?”

Tandy gave her an impish glance. “I guess the same way you know about little girls.”

The mother laughed. “Oh, but I had little girls of my own!”

Tandy just nodded: “Mm-hm.”

The mother laughed again. When she left Tandy was fitting a whiskey-bottle—the three-sided “pinch” bottle—full of water, into the wall she was building, taking infinite pains to have it slant just so.

The mother wasn’t laughing, though, later when she told her husband about it. As such things occasionally do, these developments had come about invisibly to him, having shown themselves mostly when he was away during the day. He listened, frowning thoughtfully, and when the children were glued to the television set the parents went out to look at the brownie house. All he said—all he could find to say, over and over, was: “Well, how about that.”

When they left he snapped off a sprig of the dark green weed and put it in his pocket.

“And she sets the table every night,” breathed the mother.

After she finished the fieldstone house (even the roof was stone, laid over the plywood from which the mossy earth had been swept away) Tandy seemed to abandon the brownie and his house altogether.
She went back to one of her earlier passions, modeling clay, and spent her time studiously working it. But not ducks, not elephants. She would make thick rectangular slabs of it, and draw, or score, deeply into it. Some of the channels she cut were deeper than others, some curved, some straight but cut with her stylus at an acute angle, so that portions were undercut. “Looks like a three-dimensional Mondrian,” said the father one night when the kids were asleep. He worked in a museum and knew a great many things, and had access to a great many more. That plant, for example. “It’s
astralagus vetch
,” he told his wife. “And I knew I’d read something about it somewhere, so I looked it up again. It’s a pretty ordinary sort of vegetable except for some reason it has a fantastic appetite for selenium. So much so that proposals have been made to mine selenium—and you know, that’s that light-sensitive element they use in TV tubes and photocells and the like—by planting the vetch where selenium is known to be in the soil, harvesting the whole plant, burning it and recovering selenium from the ash. All of which is beside the point—what on earth made the little fuzzhead pick the stuff up and plant it?”

“Brownies like it,” the mother said, and smiled.

It was the very next morning that Tandy was missing from the breakfast table.

There was only a small flurry about it; the mother knew just where to look. The child was busily packing armloads of vetch and tangles of knobby roots into a hole in the solid front of the brownie house. The brownie himself sat against the garage, its face turned toward her, its not-closed, not-open eyes seeming to watch. “I’m sorry, Mommy,” Tandy said brightly, “but I’m not late for school, am I?”

“No, dear, but your breakfast is ready. What on earth are you doing to the brownie’s house?”

“It isn’t a house any more,” said Tandy, in the tones of one explaining the self-evident to one who should know better without asking, “it’s a factory.” She put both hands in the hole and pushed hard. Apparently the house was baled full of weeds and roots. She daubed mortar around the opening quickly.

“Come, dear.”

“Just finished, Mommy.” She took a flat stone and set it into the opening, which must have been prepared for it, for it seemed a perfect fit. Another slap of mortar and she was up smiling. “I’m sorry, Mommy, but this is the day I had to do that.”

“For the brownie.”

“For the brownie.” They went back to the house.

In Hawaii, a specialist, who should have been but was not more than a sergeant at the missile tracking station, grunted and straightened away from the high definition screen. “Lost it.” He pulled a tablet toward him, glanced at the clock, and started filling in the log.

Nobody saw the faint swift streak as the satellite died. But if there had been a witness to that death—placed not to see faint swift streaks, but right on the scene, with a high-speed stroboscopic viewing device, he would have had some remarkable pictures.

As the golden sphere surrendered to the ravening attack of fractional heat, in that all but immeasurable fragment of time wherein parts became malleable, plastic, useful—they were used. Selenium from the solar cells, nitrogen from the pressurized interior, boro-silicates ripped from refractory parts, were gleaned and garnered and formed and conformed. For a brief time (but quite long enough) there existed a device of molten alloy bars and threads surrounding a throat, or gate, which was composed of a pulsing, brilliant blue non-substance.

Anything placed within this blue area would cease to exist—not destroyed in any ordinary sense, but utterly eliminated. And the laws of the universe being what they are, such eliminated matter must reappear elsewhere. Exactly where, depends of course on circumstances.

That morning the mother was hanging clothes when a flash of light caught her eye. She put down her clothesbasket and went to the back of the garage.

The brownie sat with his back to the garage, staring glumly at the torn-up remnants of his “farm.” The midmorning sunlight, warm and bright in this clear dry day, struck down through a gap in the trees and poured itself on and over the pinch bottle, half in and half out of the near wall of the little house. The colors were, she found
by screening her vision through her eyelashes, lovely and very bright—flame-orange and white—why, the bottle itself seemed to be alight.

Or was it the inside of the little house?

There was a violent, sudden hiss as the bottle, full of water, popped its cork and sent a gout of water inside the little stone structure. Steam rolled up and then disappeared, and she took a pace back from the sudden wave of heat. Terrified, she began to think of hose, or extinguisher … the garage, all these trees, the house … and then she saw that the side of the brownie’s house which adjoined the wooden garage was fieldstone too. The heat, whatever it was, was contained.

It seemed to diminish a little. Then the glass bottle wavered, softened, slumped and fell inside. Heat blasted out again and again diminished.

She stepped closer and peered down through the hole left by the bottle. She could clearly see, lying on the floor of the stone chamber, the clay slab Tandy had made, with its odd, geometrical system of ditches and scorings. But they seemed filled with some quivering liquid, which even as she watched turned from yellow to silver and then dulled to what could only be called a chalky pewter. The lines and ditches, filled with this almost-metal, made a sort of screen, but not exactly. It was too tangled for that. Say an irregular frame about an irregular opening in the center of the slab. And this center area began to turn blue and then purple, and then throb in some way she would never be able to describe. She had to turn her eyes away.

Looking away seemed to snap the thread of fascination with which she had leashed fear. She fled to the house, dialed the telephone, got her husband. “Quick,” she said, and stopped to pant, alarming him mightily. “Come home.”

It was all she could manage. She hung up and sank into a couch. She was therefore unaware of Noël, who came trotting across the back of the house and straight and fearlessly behind the garage. She stood for a while with a red lollipop in her mouth and pink hands behind her, watching the heat-flickers over the stones, then circled them carefully to windward and squatted down where she could peer inside. Carefully then, and much more steadily than even a deft
three-year-old might be expected to move, she reached down with her delicate lollipop and probed the molten slag.

“Oh, don’t, don’t!” the mother said later back of the garage, as the father stabbed angrily at the hot stones with a crowbar. “Tandy might … she might … oh, it’s meant so much to her …”

“I don’t care, I don’t care,” he growled, stabbing and slashing and ruining. “I don’t like it. Just say it’s about fire, like playing with matches. We won’t punish her or anything.”

“No?” she said woefully, looking at the ruins.

“And this,” he said, “damn devilish thing.” He scooped up the brownie and thrust it among the scorching rocks. It flamed up easily. The last thing to go was the pair of dull eyes. The mother was at last sure they had been open the whole time. “Just tell her we almost had a fire,” growled the father.

 … which was the selfsame day Tandy brought back her report card, the absolutely perfect report card, and the note:

It was signed by her teacher, and it left them numb. Then the mother kissed Tandy and exclaimed, “Oh darling, whoever in the world magicked you!”

Exclamation or no, Tandy took it as a question and answered it directly: “The brownie.”

There was a heavy silence, and then the mother took Tandy’s hand. “You have to know about something,” she said, and ungently to the father, “You come too.”

They went out behind the garage, the woman touching Tandy’s shoulders with ready mother hands. “There was a fire, honey. It all burned up. The brownie burned too.”

The father, watching Tandy’s face, which had not changed at the sight of the ruin (was this that un-seeing you read about, when people in shock deny to themselves what they see?) said suddenly and hoarsely, “It was an accident.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Tandy said. She looked at her father and her mother but they were both looking at their feet. “And anyway
he
isn’t burned up, he wasn’t in that fire.”

“He was,” said the father, but she ignored him. “Anyway,” the mother said, “I’m terribly sorry about your pretty little house, Tandy.”