Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
Then Miss Morin gave orders about getting the crate ready to carry, fixing a handle on each corner and screwing in eyebolts around the edge so we could lash our food and water on the top. Then she told Pam to come with her and went and climbed back into the busted tipped-over ship. The rest of us went on working on the crate. After a time Pam came back looking real quiet and stiff and said for Flip to go see her. Flip come back after a while and he looked scared. He said for Fatty to go in. Well, one at a time we went in to see Miss Morin, all five of us. She had something special to say to each one of us and said it was private, so let’s keep it that way for now. We turned in soon as it was dark, sleeping outdoors near the crate. In the morning Miss Morin was dead. We could see her in there through the glass port in the door, but the door was locked from the inside. Her eyes was open and she’d throwed up a lot of blood. I bet she tried hard not to do that but she did anyway. Maybe we would have buried her too but like I said, she locked herself in and there wasn’t nothing to do but get going. Tommy was the biggest, he was fifteen, and when he said let’s go, we went. Tommy and Hal and Fatty took
the three handles and Pam and Flip walked along ahead. It wasn’t too long before Fatty begun to whine about how heavy the crate was, and Pam took over. Fatty kept on whining but not so loud. Flip was all over the place, ahead, behind, all over; well, Flip was only nine. He told what Miss Morin had said to him private. It was “Always ask somebody first.”
It did not get too hot that first day although the air was very dry. We could look back and see the boat for a long time. It was plains country covered mostly with a brown weed. We seen like a mouse with six legs and a whole bunch of bugs that run sideways like crabs and one time a bunch of big knob-headed birds like ostriches away off, watching us. After a time we couldn’t see the boat no more, it just went out of sight in that rolling country, you’d think it sank. We had to yell at Fatty to take over from Pam. Pam would not complain but she got tired easier than the others. Pam was fourteen but not very big. We wanted to stop but Tommy made us keep dragging until the sun was right overhead and then we lay up until we could be sure which way it was setting, so we’d know which way to go. We ate some and drank a little of the water, Tommy wouldn’t let us have but a little, and we lay around in the shade and talked a little, some about Miss Morin. A funny thing happened about that:
Somebody said something about what a ironbound bitch she was, she wouldn’t give you a cup of water if you was drowning, if she had a kind word for anybody it would choke her, and the next thing you know Flip was screaming at us. Flip! Flip was a fuzzyheaded little nine-year-old, I guess some people would say he was kind of cute, but mostly he was underfoot and asking questions and running when it was easier to walk, make you tired just looking at him. Well you know how little kids are. Anyway here he was yelling at us that Miss Morin was not either a ironbound bitch, we was all a bunch of ironbound bitches and we stunk too. I mean he was mad and crying. After a time he was sad and crying, which is a lot different, and he told us that one time at the Probation Center he got up tight and tried to run away, he couldn’t’ve been no more than seven. It was at night and nobody could get through the force-fences, but he didn’t know that and he tried for a long time and then it got
cold and he flopped down by one of the fence generators. And who should come along but Miss Morin, she must’ve been looking for him half the night, and she did not say nothing but sat down beside him, and he climbed up into her lap and went to sleep and she held him like that until morning and took him back and never gave him no Detention. We listened to him bug-eyed because we could not believe Miss Morin would do such a thing but we could not disbelieve Flip telling about it crying.
Soon as the shadows started pointing east we got ourselves together and started east too. Fatty got to whining worse than ever and we let Flip help on that corner. After the third time Flip stepped on Fatty’s feet, Fatty was ready to kill him and chased him away and then couldn’t whine so much.
It was getting more hilly and we come over the top of a rise and down in a little valley it looked like somebody had built something. I mean there was five or six things standing up out of the ground, like if you have a oval bowl and cut it in two crosswise and stand it up on the cut. A couple were two or three feet tall and the others as tall as a man and then there was one really big one, I mean twelve foot or more. Flip, he went bouncing down the slope to see what they were, he had no more sense than a puppy dog. As we worked our way down the hill we could see that in front of each of the half-oval things there was a patch of bare purplish rock, or it looked like rock, dished down with kind of a wet mud in it, and back at the bottom of the tall thing, half sunk in the slime, a thing almost as big as your head, red and green and a shivery sort of yellow. We thought at first it was some kind of animal trapped or tied in there, because when we came up closer it began to wobble and spin and wiggle and swell up and all. Also there was a very sweet sticky smell that came up. Flip I guess wanted a closer look at that ball-thing inside, and in he went to look at it close or poke at it. Soon as he touched it the whole tall half-oval, like on a hinge, slammed down like a big mouth closing. My God I could feel the ground shake. Fatty started to scream and scream. We dropped the crate and ran over there. The big oval thing lay flat down now, it was covered with brown bark and it was made of hard wood. Flip’s hand and forearm stuck out from one
side. Tommy hit Fatty to stop the screaming and tried to get his fingers in the crack and lift, and Hal grabbed Flip’s wrist and tried to pull him out. Tommy couldn’t budge the thing, and the hand and forearm up to the elbow came off, chomped right in two. Fatty started to scream again and Hal fell down on his back and dropped the arm and looked at it and throwed up.
However we all were at first, it turned into a big mad. We jumped and kicked at that big closed thing, laying there like a great big wooden clam. We couldn’t barely dent it. Then somebody thought of the bag of firemakers we had with us, discs about as big as your hand, you pull out the string and it begins to burn. Hal pulled the string on one and throwed it into one of the other clam-things, and it came down whomp! shaking the ground, and after a time smoke come out all around the edge. So we killed them all with the firemakers. You’d’ve thought we was all crazy the way we laughed. You would have to be there, be us, before you could understand how it was we could laugh at all that. We built a fire on the big closed one that got Flip, but it kept going out. I don’t think we really hurt that one none.
We buried the arm and said the same words we said over the pilot and Mr. Petrilli and the Stein kid and Rodney, and picked up the crate and moved on.
We got into foothills before dark and found a place against a wall of rock and built a fire and ate and drank some more of our water. We got out the sleeping bags, they didn’t weigh but a few ounces each but once they was inflated they were snug. Pam got into hers and Tommy went to get in with her, and before you know it Hal caught him by the shoulder and snatched him backwards and bowled him right over.
Tommy was big and broad and had shiny teeth, and Hal couldn’t never have knocked him down if he expected it but he didn’t. It could be Hal was even more surprised than Tommy because he did not try to stomp him or anything. Tommy rolled right on over and come up on his feet and dived on Hal and they went round and round. Hal got in a couple of real good ones because he was so mad but it wasn’t no contest. Tommy beat the hell out of him and stood back and let
him get up, and when Hal went for him again he beat the hell out of him again. So Hal quit. Tommy went back to Pam.
Pam said no, get away, and called to Hal. She said, “Hal, you’re going to sleep with me.” Tommy let out a roar at that and wanted to know why, and Pam told him straight. She said, “Miss Morin said if anybody got to fighting over me I was to sleep with the loser. Now you both think about that the next time you want to fight.” And she held open the sleeping bag until Hal got through the thing of not believing his ears and the thing of creeping past Tommy trying to be sure he wouldn’t hit him again anyway and at last got in. Tommy just stood there shaking his head and after Hal was in with Pam he went and got his own bag and got in it and turned his face to the rock wall.
Much later in the night when the fire had burned down real low and it was quiet, Tommy woke up. Pam was slipping into his sleeping bag. She whispered, “Well, she didn’t say I couldn’t sleep with the winner too.” But would you believe, Tommy kicked her out.
The next day was the thirsty day, and it was this close to being the last day alive for Fatty. The way Tommy and Hal looked at each other from time to time you would think there was going to be a murder. Also Tommy was plenty mad at Pam and Pam was still stung at getting kicked out like that, I mean, no woman likes to get turned down like that. In the middle of all this there’s Fatty, whose feet hurt, who is thirsty, who wants to know how much longer this trip is going to take, and most of all, over and over and over again, “Why do we have to carry this thing?”
It got so that the big reason for carrying the crate was to bug Fatty. That whine was enough, after a while, to make the rest of us join forces and forget what we had going against each other.
We climbed. I don’t know what we would of done if it was overcast. We were going west, but as the mountain grew steeper and rougher we had to go north for miles, sometimes, and then cut back again to go around. Once we spent three hours lowering ourselves into a canyon that seemed to turn west and climb again to a pass high to the south, only to find it was a dead end after a turn at the bottom, and it took us seven hours to haul ourselves and the crate
back out again, right back to where we had started. We camped there too, and there wasn’t but a splash of water left. Aside from being mad, Pam and Fatty were holding out pretty well, and of course Tommy was a bull, but Hal wasn’t making it. He didn’t say anything, but the way he slumped down when we stopped to rest, and the way he kept on panting for breath long after the rest of us were cooled down and ready to go, it worried us. Really the reason we camped where we did was that Hal passed out. I mean he just buckled at the knees and went down. Pam saw his head bump, bounce a little on the rock. She dropped her corner of the crate and went to him and sat him up, leaning against her, and wiped his face with her sleeve. He wouldn’t open his eyes and when she opened one for him you couldn’t see anything but the white. Without saying anything Tommy came around with the canteen and measured out a share of water and fed it to him. It brought him around, and then right away he fell into a normal sleep, and we had to wake him up to eat.
That was the cold night. We fused three bags and all slept together or we couldn’t’ve made it. Never be thirsty and cold at the same time. That is not good.
In the morning, first thing, Tommy gave Hal another drink, and three hours later, when we were near the peak, he gave him more. It was Fatty who realized what was going on. Maybe Fatty was looking for something more to whine about, I don’t know. By now Pam was mostly handling the point and Fatty was full time on the left corner. Tommy held the right-side handle of the crate with one hand and kept his other arm around Hal, who could only stumble along glassy-eyed. Fatty quit complaining and took to watching Tommy all the time.
We reached the high pass, and down there, way down, we saw the river. Funny, how the sight of it made the little swallow of water that Tommy doled out seem like so much less. But we all of us knew that it wasn’t the time to gulp it down. Fatty and Pam and Hal each got their share, and we went on, and not once until after the rain did Fatty whine.
And oh it rained, it came up like artillery, with no more warning than ten minutes of mugginess. Next thing you know we were bracing
ourselves against the rocks and hanging on to the crate with hands, feet and teeth. The torrents of water roared and sprayed all around us, first out of the sky lashed by solid slamming fists of wind, and then from uphill as the water found its way around the crags and down the fissures, smashing into boulders and throwing spray high in the air. Just as quickly, the wet shrapnel from the sky quit, but the water on the mountain went on and on, hissing and roaring and shining in the sun. And as soon as he dared take his hands off the crate, there was Tommy with the canteen, catching a little waterspout with it, holding it steady until it glugged full and spit out and overflowed. Then he very carefully screwed on the cap, and turned to the spout off the rock, still running.
Fatty scrambled over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Take it very easy at first, Tommy.” And winked.
Tommy said, “You don’t miss a thing, do you, Fatty?” He got a mouthful of water from the rock and swished it around and spit it out before he sipped a little. Pam wanted to know what the talk was about. Hal came around the rock dripping all over and looking better than he had in two days. Tommy said to shut up. Fatty grinned and said no. “You know what he’s been doing? Giving his own water ration to Hal.” Tommy said again to shut up. Hal said, “Jesus, Tommy.” Pam looked at Tommy like … like the way guys wish girls would look.
Tommy sounded a little sore when he said, “It wasn’t me, damn yez all. Miss Morin, she told me to.” He let that soak in. “She must’ve known what would happen. Or maybe she just knew … me. She said, if you come to hate somebody, do him a favor. A big one. That’s why I gave Hal the water.” He looked at Hal, and said, kind of surprised, “I don’t hate you no more. How about that.”
I think we could of said the thing about Miss Morin, how it really was with her, right then, except for what happened. Maybe even that’s what Pam was going to say, because she jumped up and kind of, you know, capered, like it was more than she could hold, and said, “Listen, Miss Morin was—” and then she was gone, just—gone, because, what with that bash of rain and all, the mountain was different, there was an edge that was closer, and I guess slippery
too. All three of us were side by side on our bellies yelling something I can’t even spell, and looking down at Pam falling away, getting smaller and smaller, and hitting a cliff face and bouncing far out and down and smaller still and landing on a saddleback and sliding, and then there wasn’t any Pam any more. Rocks and some mud, and then more rocks and a crazy gout of dry dust, uncovered by the rock-fall, shot out of the cliff and went down after her, smoky and pretty in the new washed sunlight.