Short Fiction

for two thousand years. Destruction and cruelty and death.”

“All you have to do is prove we’d be better off if the Druids had stayed,” Ned said.

“Darling, think. If people grew wiser all the time, if they never aged, would they want to murder one another?”

“Now see here⁠—”

Cynthia smiled. “Think of having our own beautiful little home forever, in a fragrant woody patch, with shining kitchen utensils on the wall. Think of being spared all the miseries of old age and poverty and sickness and death.

“Think of having neighbors like the Sweeneys to grow young with, to grow wise and young with, day by splendid day until the end of time.”

There was a long silence, and then Cynthia said: “I’d trust them, Ned. The Druids, I mean. I’d take the chance. What have we to lose that’s really great, that can hold a candle to what the Sweeneys have?”

“You can go anywhere if you just remember how close you are to where you want to be!” Tommy Sweeney said, coming through the pilot-room wall in a blaze of light. He grinned. “I asked mom and dad to try real hard this time and here they are!”

All of the Sweeneys came into the pilot-room as Tommy spoke, their faces incredibly radiant.

“I never really believed Tommy until this minute!” Clifton Sweeney said. “If you just forget about walls you’re where you want to be!”

“Sure you are!” Tommy said. “It’s as easy as skinning a chipmunk.”

“Ned, Cynthia,” Helen Sweeney said. “Come back!”

Tommy’s sister simply smiled, a mischievous elfin smile which seemed to mock the vast loneliness of space. It was as if some wizard game, played by laughing children and wise forest creatures through long golden afternoons, had become a universe-spanning web, embracing everything in its path in a warm and radiant way.

Cynthia looked at Dan. “Well, darling?”

“Yes,” Ned said, with quick decision. “We’ll go back!”

---

And at that moment, in the forest deep and dark, the Druids built another house. It was designed to appeal to a man and a woman who had traveled far and grown weary of human cruelty and death. It was designed for gracious living; but whether the Druids, in their inscrutable wisdom, wished mankind well or ill, who could say?

Little Men of Space

The children were coming home. Elwood could see them from the cottage doorway, shouting and rejoicing in the bright October sunlight. They carried lunch baskets and⁠—as they came tripping toward him across the lawn⁠—he was ready to believe that nothing in life could be quite as enchanting as the simple wonder of childhood itself with its lighthearted merriment and freedom from care.

He was ready to forget the laundry bills and the scuffed shoes, the father-and-son problems, all the tormenting lesser difficulties which could demolish parenthood as an exact science and turn it into a madcap adventure without rhyme or reason.

Mary Anne was in the lead. She squealed with delight when she caught sight of her father’s entranced face, as if by some miracle he had become all at once a gift-bestowing snowman quite as remarkable as the hollow dolls, one within the other, which she had received from him as a goodwill offering on her last birthday.

Eleven-year-old Melvin was more circumspect. In his son’s eyes John Elwood represented all the real values of life in so far as they could be translated into model locomotives and bridge-building sets. But he knew his father to be a man of dignity who could not be easily cajoled. It was best to let his sister try first and when she failed.⁠ ⁠…

For an instant as he stared Elwood found himself secretly envying his son. At a quarter-past eleven Melvin had a firm grasp of elementary physics. His feet were firmly planted on the ground and he wasn’t serious-minded enough yet to make the tragic mistakes that come with adult unsureness.

Not the kind of mistakes which he, James Seaton Elwood, had made with the moon rocket, for instance. Or the mistake which he was making now by whimsically comparing the ages of his son and daughter to the moving hands of a clock.

How absurd it was to think of Mary Anne as a quarter-past seven when her budding feminine intuition made her as ageless as the Sphinx. All children were ageless really and it was absurd to imagine that they could be made to conform to any logical frame of reference, scientific or otherwise.

Children were illogically imaginative, with a timelessness which gave them an edge on adults when it came to solving problems that required a fresh approach to reality. What was it Wordsworth had said? Trailing clouds of glory.⁠ ⁠…

“Daddy, Mr. Rayburn let us out early⁠—so we could have a picnic. It would have been fun if Melvin hadn’t spoiled everything. He ate up all of the peanut butter sandwiches himself.”

“Tattle tale!”

“He got in a fight too. Freddy Mason didn’t want to fight but Melvin started it!”

“I didn’t!”

“You did! You know you did!”

“That’s a lie!”

Elwood lowered his eyes and saw that both of his children were now as close to him as they could ever be. Mary Anne was tugging at his sleeve, begging him to take her part, and Melvin was appealing to him in man-to-man fashion, his contemptuous masculinity acting as a foil to his sister’s feminine wiles.

It was a grave crisis and Elwood recognized it as such. Ordinarily he would have shunned a cut-and-dried solution but for once he had no choice.

---

When children fall out, when you are backed into a corner and your authority totters, there is only one sure way to save yourself⁠—Occupy their minds with something else.

“You’re spoiling the surprise, kiddies,” Elwood said, striving to sound embittered. “It’s been a lonesome hard day for me but I kept telling myself you’d soon be home to share my triumph. I suppose I shouldn’t say this⁠—but your mother just doesn’t understand me the way you do.”

“What is it, daddy?” Mary Anne asked, a sudden warm solicitude in her gaze.

“Yeah, Pop, tell us!” Melvin