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The garden trembled with the approaching thunder of the cylinder. Roby laughed. To hell with Mr Grill. To hell with this island.
He thrust himself into the ship. There was much he could learn, it would come in time. He was just on the skirt of knowledge now, but that little knowledge had saved his life, and now it would do even more.
A voice cried out behind him. A familiar voice. So familiar that it made Roby shudder. Roby heard small-boy feet crash the underbrush. Small feet on a small body. A small voice pleading.
Roby grasped the ship controls. Escape. Complete and unsuspected. Simple. Wonderful. Grill would never know.
The sphere door slammed. Motion.
The star, Roby inside, rose on the summer sky.
Mr Grill stepped out of the seal in the garden wall. He looked around for Roby. Sunlight struck him warmly in the face as he hurried down the path.
There! There was Roby. In the clearing ahead of him. Little Roby Morrison staring at the sky, making fists, crying out to nobody. At least Grill could see nobody about.
?
??Hello, Roby,’ called Grill.
The boy jerked at the sound. He wavered – in colour, density, and quality. Grill blinked, decided it was only the sun.
‘I’m not Roby!’ cried the child. ‘Roby escaped! He left me to take his place, to fool you so you wouldn’t hunt for him! He fooled me, too!’ screamed the child, nastily, sobbing. ‘No, no, don’t look at me! Don’t think that I’m Roby, you’ll make it worse! You came expecting to find him, and you found me and made me into Roby! You’re moulding me and I’ll never, never change, now! Oh, God!’
‘Come now, Roby –’
‘Roby’ll never come back. I’ll always be him. I was a rubber ball, a woman, a Sandman. But, believe me, I’m only malleable atoms, that’s all. Let me go!’
Grill backed up slowly. His smile was sick.
‘I’m a referent. I’m not a label!’ cried the child.
‘Yes, yes, I understand. Now, now, Roby, Roby, you just wait right there, right there now, while I, while I, while I call the Psycho-Ward.’
Moments later, a corps of assistants ran through the garden.
‘Damn you all!’ screamed the child, kicking. ‘God damn you!’
‘Tut,’ declared Grill quietly, as they forced the child into the vac-cylinder. ‘You’re using a label for which there is no referent!’
The cylinder sucked them away.
A star blinked on the summer sky and vanished.
The Marriage Mender
IN the sun, the headboard was like a fountain, tossing up plumes of clear light. It was carved with lions and gargoyles and bearded goats. It was an awe-inspiring object even at midnight, as Antonio sat on the bed and unlaced his shoes, and put his large calloused hand out to touch its shimmering harp. Then he rolled over into this fabulous machine for dreaming, and he lay breathing heavily, his eyes beginning to close.
‘Every night,’ his wife’s voice said, ‘we sleep in the mouth of a calliope.’
Her complaint shocked him. He lay a long while before daring to reach up his hard-tipped fingers to stroke the cold metal of the intricate headboard, the threads of this lyre that had sung many wild and beautiful songs down the years.
‘This is no calliope,’ he said.
‘It cries like one,’ Maria said. ‘A billion people on this world tonight have beds. Why, I ask the saints, not us?’
‘This,’ said Antonio gently, ‘is a bed.’ He plucked a little tune on the imitation brass harp behind his head. To his ears it was Santa Lucia.
‘This bed has humps like a herd of camels was under it.’
