Baby Is Three Read online

  She struck the switch swiftly, without warning, so that the darkness dazzled him, made him blink. But right away it was the room again, with the scythe of light and the shaded something hiding in the top corner of the wall by the door. There was always something shifting about there.

  She went away then, thumping the door closed, leaving the darkness and taking away the light, all but a rug-fuzzed yellow streak under the door. Bobby looked away from that, and for a moment, for just a moment, he was inside his shadow-pictures where the rubber-fanged dog and the fleshy black butterflies stayed. Sometimes they stayed … but mostly they were gone as soon as he moved. Or maybe they changed into something else. Anyway, he liked it there, where they all lived, and he wished he could be with them, in the shadow country.

  Just before he fell asleep, he saw them moving and shifting in the blank wall by the door. He smiled at them and went to sleep.

  When he awoke, it was early. He couldn’t smell the coffee from downstairs yet, even. There was a ruddy-yellow sunswatch on the blank wall, a crooked square, just waiting for him. He jumped out of bed and ran to it. He washed his hands in it, squatted down on the floor with his arms out. “Now!” he said.

  He locked his thumbs together and slowly flapped his hands. And there on the wall was a black butterfly, flapping its wings right along with him. “Hello, butterfly,” said Bobby.

  He made it jump. He made it turn and settle to the bottom of the light patch, and fold its wings up and up until they were together. Suddenly he whipped one hand away, peeled back the sleeve of his sleeper, and presto! There was a long-necked duck. “Quack-ack!” said Bobby, and the duck obligingly opened its bill, threw up its head to quack. Bobby made it curl up its bill until it was an eagle. He didn’t know what kind of noise an eagle made, so he said, “Eagle-eagle-eagle-eagle-eagle,” and that sounded fine. He laughed.

  When he laughed Mommy Gwen slammed the door open and stood there in a straight-lined white bathrobe and straight flat slippers. “What are you playing with?”

  Bobby held up his empty hands.

  “I was just—”

  She took two steps into the room. “Get up,” she said. Her lips were pale. Bobby got up, wondering why she was so angry. “I heard you laugh,” she said in a hissy kind of a whisper. She looked him up and down, looked at the door around him. “What were you playing with?”

  “A eagle,” said Bobby.

  “A what? Tell me the truth!”

  Bobby waved his empty hands vaguely and looked away from her. She had such an angry face.

  She stepped, reached, put a hard hand around his wrist. She lifted his arm so high he went on tiptoes, and with her other hand she felt his body, this side, that side. “You’re hiding something. What is it? Where is it? What were you playing with?”

  “Nothing. Reely, reely truly nothing,” gasped Bobby as she shook and patted. She wasn’t spanking. She never spanked. She did other things.

  “You’re being punished,” she said in her shrill angry whisper. “Stupid, stupid, stupid … too stupid to know you’re being punished.” She set him down with a thump and went to the door. “Don’t let me hear you laugh again. You’ve been bad, and you’re not being kept in this room to enjoy yourself. Now you stay here and think about how bad you are breaking windows. Tracking mud. Lying.”

  She went out and closed the door with a steadiness that was like slamming, but quiet. Bobby looked at the door and wondered for a moment about that broken window. He’d been terribly sorry; it was just that the golf ball bounced so hard. Daddy had told him he should be more careful, and he had watched sorrowfully while Daddy put in a new pane. Then Daddy had given him a little piece of putty to play with and asked him never to do it again and he’d promised not to. And the whole time Mommy Gwen hadn’t said a thing to him about it. She’d just looked at him every once in a while with her eyes and her mouth straight and thin, and she’d waited. She’d waited until Daddy went away.

  He went back to his sunbeam and forgot all about Mommy Gwen.

  After he’d made another butterfly and a dog’s head and an alligator on the wall, the sunbeam got so thin that he couldn’t make anything more, except, for a while, little black finger shadows that ran up and down the strip of light like ants on a matchstick. Soon there was no sunbeam at all, so he sat on the edge of his bed and watched the vague flickering of the something that lived in the end wall. It was a different kind of something. It wasn’t a good something and it wasn’t bad. It just lived there, and the difference between it and the other things, the butterflies and dogs and swans and eagles who lived there, was that the something didn’t need his hands to make it be alive. The something—stayed. Some day he was going to make a butterfly or a dog or a horse that would stay after he moved his hands away. Meanwhile, the only one who stayed, the only one who lived all the time in the shadow country, was this something that flickered up there where the two walls met the ceiling. “I’m going right in there and play with you,” Bobby told it. “You’ll see.”

  There was a red wagon with three wheels in the yard, and a gnarly tree to be climbed. Jerry came and called for a while, but Mommy Gwen sent him away. “He’s been bad.” So Jerry went away.

  Bad bad bad. Funny how the things he did didn’t used to be bad before Daddy married Mommy Gwen.

  Mommy Gwen didn’t want Bobby. That was all right—Bobby didn’t want Mommy Gwen either. Daddy sometimes said to grownup people that Bobby was much better off with someone to care for him. Bobby could remember ’way back when he used to say that with his arm around Mommy Gwen’s shoulders and his voice ringing. He could remember when Daddy said it quietly from the other side of the room, with a voice like an angry “I’m sorry.” And now, Daddy hadn’t said it at all for a long time.

  Bobby sat on the edge of his bed and hummed to himself, thinking these thoughts, and he hummed to himself and didn’t think of anything at all. He found a ladybug crawling up the dresser and caught it the careful way, circling it with his thumb and forefinger so that it crawled up on his hand by itself. Sometimes when you pinched them up they got busted. He stood on the windowsill and hunted until he found the little hole in the screen that the ladybug must have used to come in. He let the bug walk on the screen and guided it to the hole. It flew away, happy.

  The room was flooded with warm dull light reflected from the sparkly black shed roof, and he couldn’t make any shadow country people at all, so he made them in his head until he felt sleepy. He lay down then and hummed softly to himself until he fell asleep. And through the long afternoon the thing in the wall flickered and shifted and lived.

  At dusk Mommy Gwen came back. Bobby may have heard her on the stairs; anyway, when the door opened on the dim room he was sitting up in bed, thumbing his eyes.

  The ceiling blazed. “What have you been doing?”

  “Was asleep, I guess. Is it night time?”

  “Very nearly. I suppose you’re hungry.” She had a covered dish.

  “Mmm.”

  “What kind of an answer is that?” she snapped.

  “Yes ma’am I’m hungry Mommy Gwen,” he said rapidly.

  “That’s a little better. Here.” She thrust the dish at him. He took it, removed the top plate and put it under the bowl. Oatmeal. He looked at it, at her.

  “Well?”

  “Thank you, Mommy Gwen.” He began to eat with the teaspoon he had found hilt-deep in the grey-brown mess. There was no sugar on it.

  “I suppose you expect me to fetch you some sugar,” she said after a time.

  “No’m,” he said truthfully, and then wondered why her face went all angry and disappointed.

  “What have you been doing all day?”

  “Nothing. Playin’. Then I was asleep.”

  “Little sluggard.” Suddenly she shouted at him, “What’s the matter with you? Are you too stupid to be afraid? Are you too stupid to ask me to let you come downstairs? Are you too stupid to cry? Why don’t you cry?”

  He star
ed at her, round-eyed. “You wouldn’t let me come down if I ast you,” he said wonderingly. “So I didn’t ast.” He scooped up some oatmeal. “I don’t feel like cryin’, Mommy Gwen, I don’t hurt.”

  “You’re bad and you’re being punished and it should hurt,” she said furiously. She turned off the light with a vicious swipe of her hard straight hand, and went out, slamming the door.

  Bobby sat still in the dark and wished he could go into the shadow country, the way he always dreamed he could. He’d go there and play with the butterflies and the fuzz-edged, blunt-toothed dogs and giraffes, and they’d stay and he’d stay and Mommy Gwen would never be able to get in, ever. Except that Daddy wouldn’t be able to come with him, or Jerry either, and that would be a shame.

  He scrambled quietly out of bed and stood for a moment looking at the wall by the door. He could almost for-sure see the flickering thing that lived there, even in the dark. When there was light on the wall, it flickered a shade darker than the light. At night it flickered a shade lighter than the black. It was always there, and Bobby knew it was alive. He knew it without question, like “my name is Bobby” and “Mommy Gwen doesn’t want me.”

  Quietly, quietly, he tiptoed to the other side of the room where there was a small table lamp. He took it down and laid it carefully on the floor. He pulled the plug out and brought it down under the lower rung of the table so it led straight across the floor to the wall-receptacle, and plugged it in again. Now he could move the lamp quite far out into the room, almost to the middle.

  The lamp had a round shade that was open at the top. Lying on its side, the shade pointed its open top at the blank wall by the door. Bobby, with the sureness of long practice, moved in the darkness to his closet and got his dark-red flannel bathrobe from a low hook. He folded it once and draped it over the large lower end of the lamp shade. He pushed the button.

  On the shadow country wall appeared a brilliant disk of light, crossed by just the hints of the four wires that held the shade in place. There was a dark spot in the middle where they met.

  Bobby looked at it critically. Then, squatting between the lamp and the wall, he put out his hand.

  A duck. “Quackle-ackle,” he whispered.

  An eagle. “Eagle—eagle—eagle—eagle,” he said softly.

  An alligator. “Bap bap,” the alligator went as it opened and closed its long snout.

  He withdrew his hands and studied the round, cross-scarred light on the wall. The blurred center shadow and its radiating lines looked a little like a waterbug, the kind that can run on the surface of a brook. It soon dissatisfied him; it just sat there without doing anything. He put his thumb in his mouth and bit it gently until an idea came to him. Then he scrambled to the bed, underneath which he found his slippers. He put one on the floor in front of the lamp, and propped the other toe-upward against it. He regarded the wall gravely for a time, and then lay flat on his stomach on the floor. Watching the shadow carefully, he put his elbows together on the carpet, twined his forearms together and merged the shadow of his hands with the shadow of the slipper.

  The result enchanted him. It was something like a spider, something like a gorilla. It was a brand-new something that no one had ever seen before. He writhed his fingers and then held them still, and now the thing’s knobby head had triangular luminous eyes and a jaw that swung, gaping. It had long arms for reaching and a delicate whorl of tentacles. He moved the least little bit, and it wagged its great head and blinked at him. Watching it, he felt suddenly that the flickering thing that lived in the high corner had crept out and down toward the beast he had made, closer and closer to it until—whoosh!—it noiselessly merged with the beast, an act as quick and complete as the marriage of raindrops on a windowpane.

  Bobby crowed with delight. “Stay, stay,” he begged. “Oh, stay there! I’ll pet you! I’ll give you good things to eat! Please stay, please!”

  The thing glowered at him. He thought it would stay, but he didn’t chance moving his hands away just yet.

  The door crashed open, the switch clicked, the room filled with an explosion of light.

  “What are you doing?”

  Bobby lay frozen, his elbows on the carpet in front of him, his forearms together, his hands twisted oddly. He put his chin on his shoulder so he could look at her standing there stiff and menacing. “I was—was just—”

  She swooped down on him. She snatched him up off the floor and plumped him down on the bed. She kicked and scattered his slippers. She snatched up the lamp, pulling the cord out of the wall with the motion. “You were not to have any toys,” she said in the hissing voice. “That means you were not to make any toys. For this you’ll stay in here for—what are you staring at?”

  Bobby spread his hands and brought them together ecstatically, holding tight. His eyes sparkled, and his small white teeth peeped out so that they could see what he was smiling at. “He stayed, he did,” said Bobby. “He stayed!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about and I will not stay here to find out,” snapped Mommy Gwen. “I think you’re a mental case.” She marched to the door, striking the high switch.

  The room went dark—except for that blank wall by the door.

  Mommy Gwen screamed.

  Bobby covered his eyes.

  Mommy Gwen screamed again, hoarsely this time. It was a sound like a dog’s bark, but drawn out and out.

  There was a long silence. Bobby peeped through his fingers at the dimly glowing wall. He took his hands down, sat up straight, drew his knees up to his chest and put his arms around them. “Well!” he said.

  Feet pounded up the stairs. “Gwen! Gwen!”

  “Hello, Daddy.”

  Daddy ran in, turning on the light. “Where’s Mommy Gwen, Bob boy? What happened? I heard a—”

  Bobby pointed at the wall. “She’s in there,” he said.

  Daddy couldn’t have understood him, for he turned and ran out the door calling “Gwen! Gwen!”

  Bobby sat still and watched the fading shadow on the wall, quite visible even in the blaze of the overhead light. The shadow was moving, moving. It was a point-down triangle thrust into another point-down triangle which was mounted on a third, and underneath were the two hard sticks of legs. It had its arms up, its shadow-fists clenched, and it pounded and pounded silently on the wall.

  “Now I’m never going into the shadow country,” said Bobby complacently. “She’s there.”

  So he never did.

  The Stars Are the Styx

  EVERY FEW YEARS someone thinks to call me Charon. It never lasts. I guess I don’t look the part. Charon, you’ll remember, was the somber ferryman who steered the boat across the River Styx, taking the departed souls over to the Other Side. He’s usually pictured as a grim, taciturn character, tall and gaunt.

  I get called Charon, but that’s not what I look like. I’m not exactly taciturn, and I don’t go around in a flapping black cloak. I’m too fat. Maybe too old, too.

  It’s a shrewd gag, though, calling me Charon. I do pass human souls Out, and for nearly half of them, the stars are indeed the Styx—they will never return.

  I have two things I know Charon had. One is that bitter difference from the souls I deal with. They have lost only one world; the other is before them. But I’m rejected by both.

  The other thing has to do with a little-known fragment of the Charon legend. And that, I think, is worth a yarn.

  It’s Judson’s yarn, and I wish he was here to tell it himself—which is foolish; the yarn’s about why he isn’t here. “Here” is Curbstone, by the way—the stepping-off place to the Other Side. It’s Earth’s other slow satellite, bumbling along out past the Moon. It was built 7800 years ago for heavy interplanetary transfer, though of course there’s not much of that left any more. It’s so easy to synthesize anything nowadays that there’s just no call for imports. We make what we need from energy, and there’s plenty of that around. There’s plenty of everything. Even insecurity, though you have
to come to Curbstone for that, and be someone like Judson to boot.

  It’s no secret—now—that insecurity is vital to the Curbstone project. In a cushioned existence on a stable Earth, volunteers for Curbstone are rare. But they come in—the adventurous, the dissatisfied, the yearning ones, to man the tiny ships that will, in due time, give mankind a segment of space so huge that even mankind’s voracious appetite for expansion will be glutted for millennia. There is a vision that haunts all humans today—that of a network of force-beams in the form of a tremendous sphere, encompassing much of the known universe and a great deal of the unknown—through which, like thought impulses through the synaptic paths of a giant brain, matter will be transmitted instantly, and a man may step from here to the depths of space while his heart beats once. The vision frightens most and lures a few, and of those few, some are chosen to go out. Judson was chosen.

  I knew he’d come to Curbstone. I’d known it for years, ever since I was on Earth and met him. He was just a youngster then, thirty or so, and boiling around under that soft-spoken, shockproof surface of his was something that had to drive him to Curbstone. It showed when he raised his eyes. They got hungry. Any kind of hunger is rare on Earth. That’s what Curbstone’s for. The ultimate social balance—an escape for the unbalanced.

  Don’t wince like that when I say ‘unbalanced.’ Plain talk is plain talk. You can afford to be mighty plain about social imbalance these days. It’s rare and it’s slight. Thing is, when a man goes through fifteen years of primary social—childhood, I’m talking about—with all the subtle tinkering that involves, and still has an imbalance, it’s a thing that sticks with him no matter how slight it is. Even then, the very existence of Curbstone is enough to make most of ’em quite happy to stay where they are. The handful that do head for Curbstone do it because they have to. Once here, only about half make the final plunge. The rest go back—or live here permanently. Whatever they do, Curbstone takes care of the imbalance.

  When you come right down to it, misfits are that way either because they lack something or because they have something extra. On Earth there’s a place for everything and everything’s in its place. On Curbstone you find someone who has what you lack, or who has the same extra something you have—or you leave. You go back feeling that Earth’s a pretty nice safe place after all, or you go Out, and it doesn’t matter to anyone else, ever, whether you’re happy or not.