Robert Silverberg The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame Volume One, 1929-1964

“I suppose so. I’ll see on Sunday. I’d like to have it—but we still owe the Van Husens for their canary. I don’t know why that bird had to pick our house to die—it must have been sick when we got it. Now there’s just no satisfying Betty Van Husen.

She even hinted she’d like our piano for a while!”

“Well, honey, you try for the stereoscope—or just anything you think we’ll like.”

At last he swallowed the carrot. It had been a little young and tough. Anthony’s whims about the weather made it so that people never knew what crops would come up, or what shape they’d be in if they did. All they could do was plant a lot; and always enough of something came up any one season to live on. Just once there had been a grain surplus; tons of it had been hauled to the edge of Peaksville and dumped off into the nothingness. Otherwise, nobody could have breathed when it started to spoil.

“You know,” Dad went on, “it’s nice to have the new things around. It’s nice to think that there’s probably still a lot of stuff nobody’s found yet, in cellars and attics and barns and down behind things. They help, somehow. As much as anything can help—”

“Sh-h!” Mom glanced nervously around.

“Oh,” Dad said, smiling hastily, “it’s all right! The new things are good! It’s nice to be able to have something around you’ve never seen before, and know that something you’ve given somebody else is making them happy. That’s a real good thing.”

“A good thing,” his wife echoed.

“Pretty soon,” Aunt Amy said, from the stove, “there won’t be any more new things. We’ll have found everything there is to find. Goodness, that’ll be too bad.”

“Amy!”

“Well . . .“ Her pale eyes were shallow and fixed, a sign of her recurrent vagueness. “It will be kind of a shame—no new things—”

“Don’t talk like that,” Mom said, trembling. “Amy, be quiet!”

“It’s good,” said Dad, in the loud, familiar, wanting-to-be-overheard tone of voice. “Such talk is good. It’s okay, honey don’t you see? It’s good for Amy to talk any way she wants. It’s good for her to feel bad. Everything’s good. Everything has to be good.”

Anthony’s mother was pale. And so was Aunt Amy the peril of the moment had suddenly penetrated the clouds surrounding her mind. Sometimes it was difficult to handle words so that they might not prove disastrous. You just never knew. There were so many things it was wise not to say, or even think— but remonstration for saying or thinking them might be just as bad, if Anthony heard and decided to do anything about it. You could just never tell what Anthony was liable to do.

Everything had to be good. Had to be fine just as it was, even if it wasn’t. Always.

Because any change might be worse. So terribly much worse.

“Oh, my goodness, yes, of course it’s good,” Mom said. “You talk any way you want to, Amy, and it’s just fine. Of course, you want to remember that some ways are better than others.”

Aunt Amy stirred the peas, fright in her pale eyes.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “But I don’t feel like talking right now. It it’s good that I don’t feel like talking.”

Dad said tiredly, smiling, “I’m going out and wash up.”

They started arriving around eight o’clock. By that time Mom and Aunt Amy had the big table in the dining room set, and two more tables off to the side. The candles were burning, and the chairs situated, and Dad had a big fire going in the fireplace.

The first to arrive were the Sipiches, John and Mary. John wore his best suit, and was well scrubbed and pink-faced after his day in McIntyre’s pasture. The suit was neatly pressed but getting threadbare at elbows and cuffs. Old McIntyre was working on a loom, designing it out of schoolbooks, but so far it was slow going. McIntyre was a capable man with wood and tools, but a loom was a big order when you couldn’t get metal parts. McIntyre had been one of the ones who, at first, had wanted to try to get Anthony to make things the villagers needed, like clothes and canned goods and medical supplies and gasoline. Since then he felt that what had happened to the whole Terrance family and Joe Kinney was his fault, and he worked hard trying to make it up to the rest of them. And since then no one had tried to get Anthony to do anything.

Mary Sipich was a small, cheerful woman in a simple dress. She immediately set about helping Mom and Aunt Amy put the finishing touches on the dinner.

The next arrivals were the Smiths and the Dunns, who lived right next to each other down the road, only a few yards from the nothingness. They drove up in the Smiths’ wagon, drawn by their old horse.

Then the Reillys showed up, from across the darkened wheat-field, and the evening really began. Pat Reilly sat down at the big upright in the front room and began to play from the popular sheet music on the rack. He played softly, as expressively as he could—and nobody sang. Anthony liked piano playing a whole lot, but not singing; often he would come up from the basement, or down from the attic, or just come, and sit on top of the piano, nodding his head as Pat played “Lover” or

“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” or “Night and Day.” He seemed to prefer ballads, sweet-sounding songs—but the one time somebody had started to sing, Anthony had looked over from the top of the piano and done something that made everybody afraid of singing from then on. Later they’d decided that the piano was what Anthony had heard first, before anybody had ever tried to sing, and now anything else added to it didn’t sound right and distracted him from his pleasure.

So every television night Pat would play the piano, and that was the beginning of the evening. Wherever Anthony was, the music would make him happy and put him in a good mood, and he would know that they were gathering for television and waiting for him.

By eight-thirty everybody had shown up, except for the seventeen children and Mrs. Soames, who was off watching them in the schoolhouse at the far end of town.

The children of Peaksville were never, never allowed near the Fremont house—not since little Fred Smith had tried to play with Anthony on a dare. The younger children weren’t even told about Anthony. The others had mostly forgotten about him, or were told that he was a nice, nice goblin but they must never go near him.

Dan and Ethel Hollis came late, and Dan walked in not suspecting a thing. Pat Reilly had played the piano until his hands ached—he’d worked pretty hard with them today--and now he got up, and everybody gathered around to wish Dan Hollis a happy birthday.

“Well, I’ll be darned,” Dan grinned. “This is swell. I wasn’t expecting this at all . .

. gosh, this is swell!”

They gave him his presents mostly things they had made by hand, though some were things that people had possessed as their own and now gave him as his. John Sipich gave him a watch charm, hand-carved out of a piece of hickory wood. Dan’s watch had broken down a year or so ago, and there was nobody in the village who knew how to fix it, but he still carried it around because it had been his grandfather’s and was a fine old heavy thing of gold and silver. He attached the charm to the chain while everybody laughed and said John had done a nice job of carving. Then Mary Sipich gave him a knitted necktie, which he put on, removing the one he’d worn.

The Reillys gave him a little box they had made, to keep things in. They didn’t say what things, but Dan said he’d keep his personal jewelry in it. The Reillys had made it out of a cigar box, carefully peeled of its paper and lined on the inside with velvet. The outside had been polished, and carefully if not expertly carved by Pat—

but his carving got complimented, too. Dan Hollis received many other gifts—a pipe, a pair of shoelaces, a tiepin, a knit pair of socks, some fudge, a pair of garters made from old suspenders.

He unwrapped each gift with vast pleasure and wore as many of them as he could right there, even the garters. He lit up the pipe and said he’d never had a better smoke.

Which wasn’t quite true, because the pipe wasn’t broken in yet; Pete Manners had had it lying around ever since he’d received it as a gift four years ago from an out-of-town relative who hadn’t known he’d stopped smoking.

Dan put the tobacco into the bowl very carefully. Tobacco was precious. It was only pure luck that Pat Reilly had decided to try to grow some in his back yard just before what had happened to Peaksville had happened. It didn’t grow very well, and then they had to cure it and shred it and all, and it was just precious stuff. Everybody in