He carried Peony out and locked her in a cage. She was too sleepy to protest, and she was dozing when the police came.
Chief Miler strode about the three rooms like a man looking for a burglar at midnight. He nudged the body of the neutroid with his foot. “What’s this, Norris?”
“The deviant we were about to destroy. I finished her with a wrench.”
“I thought you said there weren’t any deviants.”
“As far as the public’s concerned, there aren’t. I couldn’t see that it was any of your business. It still isn’t.”
“I see. It may become my business, though. How’d the blast happen?”
Norris told him the story up to the point of the detonation. “The light over the door was loose. Kept flickering on and off. Franklin reached up to tighten it. Must have been a little gas in the socket. Soon as he touched it—wham!”
“Why was the door open with the gas on?”
“I told you—we were checking the intakes. If you close the door, it starts the automatics. Then you can’t get it open till the cycle’s finished.”
“Where were you?”
“I’d gone to cut off the gas again.”
“Okay, stay in the house until we’re finished out here.”
*
When Norris went back in the house, his wife’s white face turned slowly toward him.
She sat stiffly by the living room window, looking sick. Her voice was quietly frightened.
“Terry, I’m sorry about everything.”
“Skip it.”
“What did you do?”
He grinned sourly. “I adapted to an era. Did you find the instruments?”
She nodded. “What are they for?”
“To cut off a tail and skin a tattooed foot. Go to the store and buy some brown hair-dye and a pair of boy’s trousers, age two. Peony’s going to get a crew-cut. From now on, she’s Mike.”
“We’re class-C, Terry! We can’t pass her off as our own.”
“We’re class-A, honey. I’m going to forge a heredity certificate.”
Anne put her face in her hands and rocked slowly to and fro.
“Don’t feel bad, baby. It was Franklin or a little girl. And from now on, it’s society or the Norrises.”
“What’ll we do?”
“Go to Atlanta and work for Anthropos. I’ll take up where Delmont left off.”
“Terry!”
“Peony will need a husband. They may find all of Delmont’s males. I’ll make her one. Then we’ll see if a pair of chimp-Ks can do better than their makers.”
Wearily, he stretched out on the sofa.
“What about that priest? Suppose he tells about Peony. Suppose he guesses about Franklin and tells the police?”
“The police,” he said, “would then smell a motive. They’d figure it out and I’d be finished. We’ll wait and see. Let’s don’t talk; I’m tired. We’ll just wait for Miler to come in.”
She began rubbing his temples gently, and he smiled.
“So we wait,” she said. “Shall I read to you, Terry?”
“That would be pleasant,” he murmured, closing his eyes.
She slipped away, but returned quickly. He heard the rustle of dry pages and smelled musty leather. Then her voice came, speaking old words softly. And he thought of the small child-thing lying peacefully in her cage while angry men stalked about her. A small life with a mind; she came into the world as quietly as a thief, a burglar in the crowded house of Man.
“I will send my fear before thee, and I will destroy the peoples before whom thou shalt come, sending hornets to drive out the Hevite and the Canaanite and the Hethite before thou enterest the land. Little by little I will drive them out before thee, till thou be increased, and dost possess the land. Then shalt thou be to me a new people, and I to thee a God....”
And on the quiet afternoon in May, while he waited for the police to finish puzzling in the kennels, it seemed to Terrell Norris that an end to scheming and pushing and arrogance was not too far ahead. It should be a pretty good world then.
He hoped Man could fit into it somehow.
Dawningsburgh
By Wallace West
A lean wind wails through the age-old
avenues of Dawningsburgh.
Mornings, it brings sand from surrounding hills and scrubs
at fresh paint, neon signs endlessly
proclaiming the city’s synthetic name and street markers
in seven languages.
At sunrise it prepares the dunes for footprints of
scurrying guided tourists.
When icy night clamps down and the intruders
scamper to their hotels,
the wind howls as it flings after them a day’s collection
of paper cups,
bottle caps and other picnic offal.
*
“Liars! Cheats!” whimpered Betsy O’Reilly as she tossed on the lumpy bed of her third class room and recalled the sky poster that had hypnotized her.
Now, Betsy was disappointed and bored. Slim, pretty, freckled and pert, but ten years older than she wished, she had mortgaged her secretarial salary to engage once more in The Eternal Quest. And, as always, the quest was proving futile. Eligible bachelors shunned Dawningsburgh as they did other expensive tourist traps. The “new friends” she had made were either loudmouthed, hairy miners en route to or from the orichalcum diggings, or middle-aged couples on tragic second honeymoons, or self-styled emigre artists and novelists intent on cadging free meals and any other favors that lonely females might grant.
But maybe, Betsy tried to console herself, there was something real here; something glamorous that she could find and cling to during the long months back in New York when she would have to subsist on soups and salads in order to pay her debt to Trans-Plan. Mars had been great, the guides insisted. Once, they said, it had even colonized Atlantis. Perhaps, under the sham and away from those awful conducted tours, something was still left that could make her feel a trifle less forlorn.
Betsy jumped out of bed and rummaged in a closet. There it was! A heated emergency garment equipped with plastic helmet, air pack and a searchlight. Required by law but seldom used, since tourists were told to stay off the 60° below zero streets at night.
Wriggling into the clumsy thing, she tested valves and switches as she had been instructed. Then she tiptoed out of her cubbyhole, down a corridor and into the hotel lobby.
The room clerk did not greet her with its usual trill. A robot, built on Earth as a “stand-in” for one of the vanished Martians, it had turned itself off when the last tourists left the dining room for their beds. But how lifelike it still looked, balancing on a perch behind the ornate plastic desk. And how human too, despite the obviously avian ancestry of the race it mimicked. What was it the guides had said about the way in which all intelligent lifeforms so far discovered closely resembled one