He wasn’t going back to Terra.
The pillows were intelligent, they were sentient, and they weren’t going to let him go back alive. He’d be buried on Triton, with Neptune glowering overhead. The thermometer on the wall registered twenty, but he was shivering, he was growing colder by the second. The heat was leaving him in great waves; it was being sucked from his body as a pump draws air from a jar.
As the incredible coldness closed over him, he found time to wonder how the pillows could direct their force, what their method of operation was, and he felt a flash of triumph at the thought that this would show McTeague and the others. When they found him frozen to death in the warm cabin, surely they would wonder and remember what he had said. The pillows had overreached themselves.
Just before he stopped thinking permanently, the fallacy came to him. The pillows knew what they were doing. They would let the heat flow back to him once he was dead; there would not be even an icicle to warn McTeague. It would be written down in the log as heart failure.
“Stow that noise, Toots,” McTeague said. They were at mess; he was holding a juicy chunk of berl meat before the hexapod’s sleek nose and waving it back and forth enticingly. “Be a good hexapod. Here.” He made another pass with the meat at the hexapod.
“He’s not interested,” Willets said above the din of the creature’s howls. “It upset him, that young fellow dying that way.” He poured more cream on his frujuit.
“Yeah, it’s too bad he had a bum pump and all that, but hell, he was nothing but a nut. Toots is a smart cookie. He oughtn’t to take on so over a guy like that.” He studied the hexapod thoughtfully an instant and then spread a piece of bread thickly with bollo tongue paste.
Toots pushed the offering aside and howled again, a long, dismal howl, a very sad howl, that seemed to come from a long way off.
“I don’t know what ails him, anyway,” said McTeague. He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Something’s bothering him, that’s sure. The way he’s going on, you’d think it was the end of the world.”
THE LISTENING CHILD
It was not until after his first bad heart attack that Edwin Hoppier really noticed the child. He had long ago decided on the basis of his contacts with his married sister’s strident brood that he didn’t like children. But the doctor, after telling him roundly that he was lucky to be alive, had ordered at least a month’s rest in bed. Somebody had to bring the trays up from the boarding house dining room. Timmy was usually the one.
Timmy’s grandmother dressed him in smocks and little breeches she cut out of discarded housedresses, and this costume, together with his long black cotton stockings and home-trimmed hair, gave him an odd resemblance to the kindergarten pupils of thirty years ago. After he had successfully negotiated the hazards of knocking, opening the door, and putting the tray down, he would linger, smiling shyly, until Hoppler began to eat. Hoppler always spoke to him, but Timmy never answered. One day Hoppler mentioned it to Mrs. Dean when she was straightening up his room.
“Oh, didn’t you know?” she said, putting down her dust cloth and turning. “I thought I’d told you. Why, the poor little fellow had scarlet fever when he was a year old, just after his mother died. He’s deaf. He can’t hear a thing.
“He goes to the deaf school, but he hasn’t learned to lip-read yet. The teacher says it’s hard to teach them, when they can’t hear at all. And of course he can’t talk.”
“That’s too bad,” Hoppler said with an effort. He had the invalid’s dislike for hearing about other people’s troubles. “Are you sure he’s entirely deaf, though? I thought I’d noticed him listening to things.”
Mrs. Dean shook her head. “You mean that way he has of putting his head on one side and listening to something you can’t hear yourself? That doesn’t mean anything. I asked the doctor at the clinic about it, and he said Timmy couldn’t possibly be hearing anything. It gives you the creeps to watch him, though, doesn’t it? I used to get the shivers every time, until I got used to it. But he’s just like his ears were filled with concrete, he’s that deaf. Poor little thing.”
The next time Timmy brought up a tray, Hoppler motioned him over to the bed and folded a paper boat for him. Timmy hung back, smiling shyly. At last he almost snatched the paper and ran out of the room with it. And after that he stayed longer when he brought the tray, and his smiles grew less shy.
Once in a while Edwin caught him “listening.” He would cock his head to one side and hearken, while his eyes grew bright. Edwin did not find it as disconcerting as Mrs. Dean had pictured it. It was not until the day before Timmy’s birthday that it actually bothered him.
The day was sunny and fairly warm. Children were playing outside in the street, and Edwin’s open window let in plenty of noise. When Timmy first began to “listen,” tippng his head farther than usual, attentive and concentrated, the pantomime was so vivid that Hoppler was sure some of the sound from outside must have got through to the boy’s dulled nerves. A dog was barking, children called to each other, somebody was trying to start a car. Timmy must have heard some of it.
The boy relaxed. His attention came back to the picture Edwin was drawing for him. Seconds later there came a burst of shrill, agonized yelping that ended abruptly on a high note. There was a babble of children’s excited voices, fright growing in them. Windows went up. And then, cutting across the confusion, a little girl’s shriek, “He’s dead! Oooh, oooh, that car ran over him. Blackie’s dead!”
Hoppler put down his pencil and looked at Timmy’s face. The boy’s gray eyes were fixed intently—there was always something bird-like and intense about him—on the drawing. Now he looked up at Edwin and smiled rather uncertainly.
It was a normal response. Timmy plainly hadn’t heard the commotion in the street and couldn’t imagine what his friend was stopping for. But Edwin pleated his lower lip with his fingers and frowned. Timmy hadn’t heard the dog’s yelps, the cries, when they occurred. Had he, somehow, heard them ahead of time? It was beyond belief. But it had looked like that.
Hoppler finished the picture—two children wading in a scratchy brook—and gave it to Timmy. Timmy folded it up carefully, making the chuckling sound that with him indicated pleasure. He started toward the door and then came back to run one finger tightly over the back of Edwin’s hand. It was one of the mannerisms, half engaging, half pathetic, which made Hoppler fond of him. This time he found himself wincing a little from the touch. When Timmy had gone out, Hoppler pressed his hands nervously to his chest.
It was nearly a month later that Timmy “listened” again. Hoppler was sitting up in an armchair and Timmy, lying on the floor, was drawing a panoramic street scene on a large piece of butcher paper he had brought up from the kitchen. He was drawing with great verve, making out-sized pedestrians and dogs and small, very bustle-backed automobiles. Now and then he frowned as his pencil went through the paper to the soft carpet beneath. The boarding house was quiet except for a distant clatter from the kitchen where the pans and dishes from supper were being washed up.
Timmy got to his feet. He looked sharply at Hoppler for a moment and then fixed his eyes on a spot four or five feet above his head. His lips parted. His head tipped. His eyes grew wide.
Hoppler watched him uneasily. He had almost forgotten his speculations when the dog had been killed—it was the kind of idea a sensible person will try to dismiss—but now it recurred to him. Was something going to happen? What foolishness! But was Timmy, somehow, listening to the elsewise inaudible footsteps of disaster drawing near?
Gradually the tension ebbed away from Timmy’s face. He drew a deep breath. He tossed the pale brown hair back out of his eyes. He squatted down on the floor again and picked up his pencil. On a still-empty portion of the paper he began to draw some birds. He had just started the wings of the third one when the familiar a gonizing pressure began in Hoppler’s chest.
The attack was going to be a bad one, Edwin saw. He felt the familiar fright at the way breath was being
