The Best of Gene Wolfe

other, seeing, children larger than he lived. He ate there; the thick woman was angry once because he pushed his beets, by accident, off his plate. That night he slept in a narrow bed.

The next three days were all the same. In the morning the thick woman took him to school. In the evening she came for him. There was a television at the thick woman’s house—Little Tib could never remember her name afterward—and when supper was over, the children listened to television.

On the fifth day of school he heard his father’s voice in the corridor outside, and then he came into Ms. Munson’s room with a man from the school, who sounded important.

“This is Mr. Jefferson,” the man from the school told Ms. Munson. “He’s from the Government. You are to release one of your students to his care. Do you have a George Tibbs here?”

Little Tib felt his father’s hand close on his shoulder. “I have him,” his father said. They went out the front door, and down the steps, and then along the side. “There’s been a change in orders, Son; I’m to bring you to Niagara for examination.”

“All right.”

“There’s no place to park around this damn school. I had to park a block away.”

Little Tib remembered the rattly truck his father had when they lived at the old place, but he knew somehow that the truck was gone like the old place itself, belonging to the real father locked in his memory. The father of now would have a nice car.

He heard footsteps, and then there was a man he could see walking in front of them—a man so small he was hardly taller than Little Tib himself. He had a shiny bald head with upcurling hair at the sides of it, and a bright green coat with two long coattails and two sparkling green buttons. When he turned around to face them (skipping backward to keep up), Little Tib saw that his face was all red and white except for two little, dark eyes that almost seemed to shoot out sparks. He had a big, hooked nose like Indra’s, but on him it did not look cruel. “And what can I do for you?” he asked Little Tib.

“Get me loose,” Little Tib said. “Make him let go of me.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know,” Little Tib confessed.

The man in the green coat nodded to himself as if he had guessed that all along, and took an envelope of silver paper out of his inside coat pocket. “If you are caught again,” he said, “it will be for good. Understand? Running is for people who are not helped.” He tore one end of the envelope open. It was full of glittering powder, as Little Tib saw when he poured it out into his hand. “You remind me,” he said, “of a friend of mine named Tip. Tip with a p. A b is just a p turned upside down.” He threw the glittering powder into the air, and spoke a word Little Tib could not quite hear.

For just a second there were two things at once. There was the sidewalk and the row of cars on one side and the lawns on the other, and there was Ms. Munson’s room, with the sounds of the other children, and the mopped- floor smell. He looked around at the light on the cars, and then it was gone and there was only the sound of his father’s voice in the hall outside, and the feel of the school desk and the paper with dots in it. The voice of the man in the green coat (as if he had not gone away at all) said, “Tip turned out to be the ruler of all of us in the end, you know.” Then there was the beating of big wings. And then it was all gone, gone completely.

The classroom door opened, and a man from the school who sounded important said, “Ms. Munson, I have a gentleman here who states that he is the father of one of your pupils.

“Would you give me your name again, sir?”

“George Tibbs. My boy’s name is George Tibbs too.”

“Is this your father, George?” Ms. Munson said.

“How would he know? He’s blind.”

Little Tib said nothing, and the Important Man said, “Perhaps we’d better all go up to the office. You say that you’re with the Federal Government, Mr. Tibbs?”

“The Office of Biogenetic Improvement. I suppose you’re surprised, seeing that I’m nothing but a dirt farmer— but I got into it through the Agricultural Program.”

“Ah.”

Ms. Munson, who was holding Little Tib’s hand, led him around a corner.

“I’m working on a case now. . . . Perhaps it would be better if the boy waited outside.”

A door opened. “We haven’t been able to identify him, you understand,” the Important Man said. “His retinas are gone. That’s the reason for all this red tape.”

Ms. Munson helped Little Tib find a chair, and said, “Wait here.”

Then the door closed and everyone was gone. He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, and for an instant there were points of light like the glittering dust the man in the green coat had thrown. Little Tib thought about what he was going to do, and not running. Then about Krishna, because he had been Krishna. Had Krishna run? Or had he gone back to fight the king who had wanted to kill him? Little Tib could not be sure, but he did not think Krishna had run. Jesus had fled into Egypt; he remembered that. But Jesus had come back. Not to Bethlehem, where he had run from, but to Nazareth, because that was his real home. Little Tib remembered talking about the Jesus story to his father, when they were sitting on the stage. His father had brushed it aside; but Little Tib felt it might be important somehow. He put his chin on his hands to think about it.

The chair was hard—harder than any rock he had ever sat on. He felt the unyielding wood of its arms stretching to either side of him while he thought. There was something horrible about those arms, something he could not remember. Just outside the door the bell rang, and he could hear the noise the children’s feet made in the hall. It was recess; they were pouring out the doors, pouring out into the warm fragrance of spring outside.

He got up, and found the door edge with his fingers. He did not know whether anyone was seeing him or not. In an instant he was in the crowd of pushing children. He let them carry him down the steps.

Outside, games went on all around him. He stopped shuffling and shoving now, and began to walk. With the