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‘Did I?’ said the boy.
‘You did! How?’
‘Oh,’ the boy said, ‘that was a long time ago.’
‘A long time ago!’
They all laughed, and while they were laughing, the quiet boy moved his bare foot on the sidewalk and brushed against a number of red ants that were scurrying about on the sidewalk. Secretly, his eyes shining, while his parents chatted with the old man, he saw the ants hesitate, quiver, and lie still on the cement. He knew they were cold now.
‘Good-bye!’
The doctor drove away, waving.
The boy walked ahead of his parents. As he walked he looked away towards the town and began to hum ‘School Days’ under his breath.
‘It’s good to have him well again,’ said the father.
‘Listen to him. He’s so looking forward to school!’
The boy turned quietly. He gave each of his parents a crushing hug. He kissed them both several times.
Then, without a word, he bounded up the steps into the house.
In the parlour, before the others entered, he quickly opened the birdcage, thrust his hand in, and petted the yellow canary, once.
Then he shut the cage door, stood back, and waited.
Referent
ROBY MORRISON fidgeted. Walking in the tropical heat he heard the wet thunder of waves on the shore. There was a green silence on Orthopaedic Island.
It was the year 1997, but Roby did not care.
All around him was the garden where he prowled, all ten years of him. This was Meditation Hour. Beyond the garden wall, to the north, were the High I.Q. Cubicles where he and the other boys slept in special beds. With morning they popped up like bottle-corks, dashed into showers, gulped food, and were sucked down vacuum-tubes half across the island to Semantics School. Then to Physiology. After Physiology he was blown back underground and released through a seal in the great garden wall to spend this silly hour of meditative frustration, as prescribed by the island Psychologists.
Roby had his opinion of it. ‘Damned silly.’
Today, he was in furious rebellion. He glared at the sea, wishing he had the sea’s freedom to come and go. His eyes were dark, his cheeks flushed, his small hands twitched nervously.
Somewhere in the garden a chime vibrated softly. Fifteen more minutes of meditation. Huh! And then to the Robot Commissionary to stuff his dead hunger as taxidermists stuff birds.
And, after the scientifically pure lunch, through the tube again to Sociology. Of course, late in the warm green afternoon, games would be played in the Main Garden. Games some tremble-brained Psychologist had evolved from a nightmare-haunted sleep. This was the future! You must live, my lad, as the people of the past, of the year 1920, 1930, and 1942 predicted you would live! Everything fresh, brisk, sanitary, too, too fresh! No nasty old parents about to give one complexes. Everything controlled, dear boy!
Roby should have been in a perfect mood for something unique.
He wasn’t.
When the star fell from the sky a moment later he was only more irritated.
The star was a spheroid. It crashed and rolled to a stop on the hot green grass. A small door popped open in it.
Faintly, this incident recalled a dream to the child. A dream which with superior stubbornness he had refused to record in his Freud Book this morning. The dream-thought was in his mind at the exact instant that the star-door popped wide and some ‘thing’ emerged.
Some ‘thing’.
Young eyes, seeing an object for the first time, have to make a familiar thing of it. Roby didn’t know what this ‘thing’ was, stepping from the sphere. So, scowling, Roby thought of what it most resembled.
Instantly the ‘something’ became a certain thing.
