Young Star Travelers Page 6

  It was on the fifth day of working that Raul, Joboy, and I were sent, along with a small clearing machine, in the other direction—into the woods on the opposite side of that bare place. I noticed that Joboy kept turning his head in one direction. When our guard dropped back, he whispered to me.

  “Tam, Teddi’s here!”

  I missed a step. Teddi! Teddi was a dirty rag! Was Joboy hurt in the head now? I was so scared that I could have yelled, but Joboy shook his head at me.

  “Teddi says no. He’ll come when it’s time. He don’t like the Littles. They make everything bad.”

  They set us to piling up logs and tree branches. We could lift and carry bigger loads than any Little. I kept Joboy with me as much as I could, and away from Raul. I didn’t want Raul to know about Joboy and Teddi. As far as I was concerned, Raul still had some of the tweener look, and I never trusted him.

  There was sticky sap oozing out of the wood, and it got all over us. At first I tried to wipe it off Joboy and myself, using leaves, but Joboy twisted away from me.

  “Don’t, Tam. Leave it on. It makes the bugs stay away.”

  I had noticed that the Littles kept slapping at themselves and grunting. There were a lot of flies, and from the way the Littles acted, they could really bite. But the buzzers weren’t bothering us, so I was willing to stay sticky, if that’s what helped. The Littles acted as if the bites were getting worse. They moved away from us. Finally two of them went back to the log buildings, to get bug spray, I suppose, leaving only the one who drove the machine. He got into the small cab and closed the windows. I suppose he thought there was no chance of our running off into that strange wilderness.

  Raul sat down to rest, but Joboy wandered close to the edge of the cut, and I followed to keep an eye on him. He squatted down near a bush, facing it. The leaves were big and flat and had yellow veins. Joboy stared, as if they were windows he could see through.

  I knelt beside him. “What is it, Joboy?”

  “Teddi’s there.” He pointed with his chin, not moving his scratched, dirty hands from his knees.

  “Joboy—” I began, then stopped suddenly. In my head was something, not words but a feeling, like saying hello, except— Oh, I can never tell just how it was!

  “Teddi,” Joboy said. His voice was like Da’s, when I was no older than Joboy and there was a bad storm and Da was telling me not to be afraid.

  What made that come into my mind? I stared at the bush. As I studied it now, I saw an opening between two of the leaves that was a window, enough for me to see—

  Teddi! Well, perhaps not Teddi as Da had first brought him (and before Joboy wore him dirty and thin from much loving) but enough like him to make Joboy know. Only this was no stuffed toy; this was a live creature! And it was fully as large as Joboy himself, which was about as big as one of the Littles. Its bright eyes stared straight into mine.

  Again I had that feeling of greeting, of meeting someone who meant no harm, who was glad to see me. I had no doubt that this was a friend. But—what was it? The Littles hated wild things, especially big wild things. They would kill it! I glanced back at the one in the cab, almost sure I would see him aiming a blaster at the bush.

  “Joboy,” I said as quietly as I could, “the Little will—”

  Joboy smiled and shook his head. “The Little won’t hurt Teddi, Tam. Teddi will help us; he likes us. He thinks to me how he likes us.”

  “What you looking at, kid?” Raul called.

  Joboy pointed to a leaf. “The buzzer. See how big that one is?”

  Sure enough, there was an extra-big one of the red buzzing flies sitting on the leaf, scraping its front legs together and looking as if it wanted a bite of someone. At that moment, I felt Teddi leave, which made me happier, as I didn’t have Joboy’s confidence in Teddi’s ability to defend himself against the Littles.

  That was the beginning. Whenever we went near the woods, sooner or later Teddi would turn up in hiding. I seldom saw any part of him, but I always felt him come and go. Joboy seemed to be able to think with him and exchange information—until the day Teddi was caught.

  The creature had always been so cautious that I had begun to believe that the Littles would never know about him. But suddenly he walked, on his hind legs, right into the open. Raul yelled and pointed, and the Little on guard used his stunner. Teddi dropped. At least, he hadn’t been blasted, not that that would necessarily save him.

  I expected Joboy to go wild, but he didn’t. He went over with the rest of us to see Teddi, lying limp and yellow on mashed, sticky leaves where we had been taking off tree limbs. Joboy acted as if he didn’t know a thing about him. That I could not understand.

  Teddi was a little taller than Joboy. His round, furry head would just top my shoulder, and his body was plump and fur-covered all over. He had large, round ears, set near the top of his head, a muzzle that came to a point, and a dark brown button of a nose. Yes, he looked like an animal, but I was sure he was something far different.

  Now he was just a stunned prisoner, and the Littles made us carry him over to the machine. Then they took us all back to camp. They dumped us in the lockup and took Teddi into another hut. I know what Littles do to animals. They might—I only hoped Joboy couldn’t imagine what the Littles might do to Teddi. I still didn’t understand why he wasn’t upset.

  But when we were shut in, he took my hand. “Tam?”

  I thought I knew what he was going to ask—that I help Teddi—and there was nothing I could do.

  “Tam, listen—Teddi, he wanted to be caught. He did! He has a plan for us. It will work only if he gets real close to the Littles, so he had to be caught.”

  “What does he mean?” El-Su demanded.

  “The kid’s mind-broke!” Raul burst out. “They knocked over some kind of an animal out there and—”

  “Shut up!” I snapped at Raul. I had to know what Joboy meant, because it was plain that he believed what he was saying, and he knew far more about Teddi than I did.

  “Teddi can do things with his head.” Joboy paid no attention to either El-Su or Raul, looking straight at me as if he must make me believe what he was saying.

  Remembering for myself, I could agree in part. “I know—”

  “He can make them—the Littles—feel bad inside. But we have to help.”

  “How? We can’t get out of here—”

  “Not yet,” Joboy agreed. “But we have to help Teddi think—”

  “Mind-broke!” Raul exploded and slouched away. But El-Su and the other two girls squatted down to listen.

  “How do we help think?” She asked the question already on my tongue.

  “You feel afraid. Remember all the bad things you are afraid of. And we hold hands in a circle to remember them—like bad dreams.” Joboy was plainly struggling to find words to make us understand.

  “That’s easy enough—to remember bad things,” El-Su agreed. “All right, we think. Come on, girls.” She took Amay’s hand and Mara’s. I took Mara’s other hand, and Joboy took Amay’s, so we were linked in a circle.

  “Now”—Joboy spoke as sharply as any Little setting us to work—“think!”

  We had plenty of bad things to remember: cold, hunger, fear. Once you started thinking and remembering, it all heaped up into a big black pile of bad things. I thought about every one of them—how Mom died, how Da was lost, and how—and how—and how. . .

  I got so I didn’t even see where we were or whose hands I held. I forgot all about the present; I just sat and remembered and remembered. It came true again in my mind, as if it were happening all over again, until I could hardly stand it. Yet once I had begun, I had to keep on.

  Far off, there was a noise. Something inside me tried to push that noise away. I had to keep remembering, feeding a big black pile. Then suddenly the need for remembering was gone. I awakened from the nightmare.

  I could hear someone crying. El-Su was facing me with tear streaks on her grimy face; the two little girls were bawling
out loud. But Joboy wasn’t crying. He stood up, looking at the door, though he still held on to our hands.

  Then I looked in that direction. Raul crouched beside the door, hands to his head, moaning as if something hurt him bad. The door was opening—probably a Little, to find out why we were making all that noise.

  Teddi stood there, with another Teddi behind him, looking over his shoulder. All the blackness was gone out of my head, as if I had rid myself of all the bad that had ever happened to me in my whole life. I felt so light and free and happy—as if I could flap my arms like wings and go flying off!

  Outside, near where the Teddis stood, there was a Little crawling along the ground, holding on to his head the way Raul did. He didn’t even see us as we walked past him. We saw two other Littles, one lying quiet, as if he were dead. Nobody tried to stop us or the Teddis. We just walked out of the bad old life together.

  I don’t know how long we walked before we came to an open place, and I thought, This I remember, because it was in my dream. Here were Joboy and Teddi, hand in paw. There was a Teddi with me, too, his furry paw in my hand, and from him the feeling was all good.

  We understand now what happened and why. When the Littles first came to this world, spoiling and wrecking, as they always have done and still do, the Teddis tried to stop them. But the minds of the Littles were closed tight; the Teddis could not reach them—not until they found Joboy. He had no fear of them, because he knew a Teddi who had been a part of his life.

  So Joboy was the key to unlock the Littles’ minds, with us to add more strength, just as it takes more than one to lift a really big stone. With Joboy and us opening the closed doors of the Littles’ minds, the Teddis could feed back to them all the fear they had spread through the years, the fear we had lived with and known in our nightmares. Such fear was a poison worse than any of the Littles’ own weapons.

  We still go and think at them now and then, with a Teddi to aim our thoughts from where we hide. From all the signs, it won’t be long before they will have had enough and will raise their starship and leave us alone. Maybe they will try to come back, but by then, perhaps, the Teddis and we can make it even harder for them.

  Now we are free, and no one is ever going to put us back in a Nat pen. We are not “Nats” anymore. That is a Little name, and we take nothing from the Littles—ever again! We have a new name from old, old times. Once it was a name to make little people afraid, so it is our choice. We are free, and we are Giants, growing larger every day.

  So shall we stay!

  The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl

  by Katherine MacLean

  Life in the asteroid belt—could it be as much like the Old West as this story suggests?

  * * *

  Abe was getting too big for the home barrel. He was six-foot-four and maybe still growing, and when he stood up straight his head was up past spin center in the barrel and spin gravity was pulling his head the other way. He said it made him feel dizzy and upside down.

  We were sorry the barrel was so small but we couldn’t calculate any way to make it bigger, so Abe sat down a lot. When he sat down he stretched out his legs, and his legs were long legs and we tripped over him coming and going.

  Ma always swore she’d never let any son of hers work at the Belt Foundry, not with those rowdy drinking men and their sinful shows in their recreation lounge, and their trips to the Gambling Hells on the Moon. She said they were bad company for a Christian. But then she tripped over Abe’s legs while she was carrying a pot of stew to the table.

  Well, we all ran over to help clean up, and the piglets helped the most, even licking up the spots, but Ma got up mad with her mouth zipped tight closed and went back to the solar oven to cook up something else. She didn’t say a thing all the time she was cooking, like she was thinking. When she had a good hot meal of fish and potatoes out on the table she sat down with us and said the blessing and served us each out a helping, and then said what she’d been thinking.

  “Abe, why don’t you get a job at the Belt Foundry? They’ve got big rooms with a spin center a lot higher than you. And I hear they have all the books that was ever written in their readout library.”

  I’m just eleven, and Abe hardly notices me among the parcel of other kids, but I’d been yearning after the fine, free rich life of a Belt Foundry Engineer in my heart so I knew how Abe felt. He’d never let Ma know he’d been yearning after it and keeping silent, but he went around the table and gathered her up in his long arms and gave her such a kiss she got all pink and pretty.

  “You’re always thinking of us,” was all he said. We didn’t notice what we were eating we all got so excited talking about Abe’s new job at the Belt Foundry. We didn’t know much so we talked about all the video stories we’d seen when the heroes are space miners and engineers and rock jumpers, and we got more excited retelling all the plots and interrupting each other. Abe told a few and laughed a lot at the things we acted out. After dinner he sat in a corner polishing his pressure suit and loading it with extra fuel tanks and extra water, and listened to us still talking about asteroid mining and smelting beams and building starships until long past sleep time.

  Two sleeps later, the proximity bell rang and we woke up and saw that our orbit was going to cross a Belt Mine nugget heading for the Belt Foundry. The deeper-toned safety bell rang, meaning it had changed course with those safety jets the miners fasten to their nuggets, and it was going to miss us. While we were still sitting up blinking at the screen Abe went out the airlock like a shot, wearing his pressure suit half shut. We got to the scope window and watched his elastic rope hook onto the passing nugget while his suit was still inflating. The nugget was about a forty-meter chunk of nickel iron, good quality, by the shine of it. It went out of sight, trailing Abe. I wanted to turn the scope onto tracking and enlarging and watch Abe go for a while, but Ma said no.

  “Gone is gone,” she said. “Let him do his thing. Abe’s grown up now. Everybody get back to bed.” But when she got into bed she started sobbing.

  My sister Harriet is fifteen, she’s the oldest, she got down from her bunk and hugged Ma and tried to comfort her.

  Ma hugged her back. “I gave you all a good Christian home,” she whispered to Harriet. “And now Abe is going out into all those temptations, and those godless miners will lead him astray to the Gambling Hells and the dancing and the wicked girls.”

  I fell asleep thinking of the Gambling Hells and the wicked girls. I wished I was as old as Abe so I could go over there and resist temptation while the girls tried to tempt me. They’d tempt me to dance and play cards, and maybe I’d give in and play a little, just to make them feel better. Cards sounded like fun.

  Next day, picking vegetables out of the aquarium, I remembered thinking like that and I felt sorry. I went to Ma and put my arm around her neck. “I won’t ever leave you, Ma.”

  She laughed and cheered up, and set Harriet and me to repairing the spare water temperature circulation pump. Harriet and me were the oldest now, so we could do the important jobs like fixing machinery. She set my little brother to farming the aquarium instead of me. I felt important, but fixing the pump was hard and slow, and Harriet got kind of mean and sharp-talking when we made a mistake, and tried to make it my fault.

  I missed Abe.

  Next week, Saturday, Abe came in the airlock and surprised us. He was wearing a new pressure suit with light blue stripes and carrying a big gift box, and gave it to Ma. It was a new pressure suit and when she got into it and inflated it it didn’t change shape much from her shape. It still looked like a person, and like her. She looked at herself in the mirror and let out a squeal that sounded like one of the girl kids. “Heaven’s sake. It looks like I don’t have nothing on, almost.”

  “Looks fine, Ma,” I said. “Now we’ll know it’s you when we’re all outside working.”

  “It looks sinful,” she said, but she said it low and timid, ’cause she wanted us to argue.

  “You work
hard. You deserve a pretty new suit,” Abe said.

  “It’s real pretty, keep it, Ma,” said Harriet.

  “Girls are supposed to look pretty. It’s only right!” I said it very loud and Harriet and me had said the right things because Ma turned and reached up and hugged around Abe’s neck. “I’ll keep it. Thank you, Abe, thank you.”

  When Ma let go of Abe he stood up straight past the center spin point without bracing his feet. We saw him tilt and all yelled for him to crouch down, but he’d forgotten about low spin centers in a week in the big barrelhouses at the Belt Foundry, and spin-push got him and he went over sideways looking surprised. We ran under him to catch him and all went down in a tangle, wrestling and laughing like we used to.

  After he got all us kids piled off him and sat up, Abe said, “It’s real good to be home.”

  He went around grinning and fed the aquarium fish, and when Ma served him a plate of dinner he sneaked most of it off his plate to the floor to watch the piglets whistle and push each other for it. He was grinning all the time. Around sleep time the proximity bell rang and Abe got back into his new blue striped pressure suit and kissed Ma. “Friends coming to pick me up,” he said. “I’ll get presents for the kids, my next paycheck. Back in two weeks.”

  Ma let out what she’d been worrying about all week. “Hold back against those temptations, Abe. Don’t let your new friends lead you into drinking or drugs or gambling or sinful girls. Promise?”

  “Nice of you to worry about me, Ma,” he said and hugged Harriet and me and Bobby, and Renee, and Ruthy, and then climbed up to the centerlock and out.

  But I noticed his way of answering was not naturally the way he talked, and he didn’t promise. He didn’t promise anything.

  I wondered.

  Next week was busy. One of the two piglets gave out a boxful of little baby piglets, and Ma kept us from playing with them for three days, but we watched them a lot. The week after, the piglets were bigger and noticed us more and Ma let us play with them. Wednesday when we kids were in bed Ma and Harriet got together and killed the old father piglet and salted it for bacon. When we found out why he was missing we kids decided to stay mad at Ma and Harriet for a long time. But Ma explained to us that old piglets don’t grow wise and don’t have good memories to remember, they just get tired and stop having fun, so they don’t get any pleasure out of living a long time. She said we make space for more new young ones by eating the old ones.