For his interview with his son, Unk sat behind her desk while his son Chrono stood before him. It was Chrono’s wish to remain standing.
Unk, in planning the things he would say, idly opened Miss Fenstermaker’s desk drawers, found that they were filled with rocks, too.
Young Chrono was shrewd and hostile, and he thought of something to say before Unk did. “Baloney,” he said.
“What?” said Unk.
“Whatever you say — it’s baloney,” said the eight-year-old.
“What makes you think so?” said Unk.
“Everything anybody says is baloney,” said Chrono. “What you care what I think anyway? When I’m fourteen, you put a thing in my head and I do whatever you want anyway.”
He was referring to the fact that antennas were not installed in the skulls of children until their fourteenth year. This was a matter of skull size. When a child reached his fourteenth birthday, he was sent to the hospital for the operation. His hair was shaved off, and the doctors and nurses joshed him about having entered adulthood. Before the child was wheeled into the operating room he was asked to name his favorite kind of ice cream. When the child awoke after the operation, a big dish of that kind of ice cream was waiting for him — maple walnut, buttercrunch, chocolate chip, anything.
“Is your mother full of baloney?” said Unk.
“She is since she came back from the hospital this last time,” said Chrono.
“What about your father?” said Unk.
“I don’t know anything about him,” said Chrono. “I don’t care. He’s full of baloney like everybody else.”
“Who isn’t full of baloney?” said Unk.
“I’m not full of baloney,” said Chrono. “I’m the only one.”
“Come closer,” said Unk.
“Why should I?” said Chrono.
“Because I’m going to whisper something very important.”
“I doubt it,” said Chrono.
Unk got up from the desk, went around to Chrono, and whispered in his ear, “I’m your father, boy!” When Unk said those words, his heart went off like a burglar alarm.
Chrono was unmoved. “So what?” he said stonily. He had never received any instructions, had never seen an example in life, that would make him think a father was of any importance. On Mars, the word was emotionally meaningless.
“I’ve come to get you,” said Unk. “Somehow we’re going to get away from here.” He shook the boy gently, trying to make him bubble a little.
Chrono peeled his father’s hand from his arm as though the hand were a leech. “And do what?” he said.
“Live!” said Unk.
The boy looked over his father dispassionately, seeking one good reason why he should throw in his lot with this stranger. Chrono took his good-luck piece from his pocket, and rubbed it between his palms.
The imagined strength he got from the good-luck piece made him strong enough to trust nobody, to go on as he had for so long, angry and alone. “I’m living,” he said. “I’m all right,” he said. “Go to hell.”
Unk took a step backward. The corners of his mouth pulled down. “Go to hell?” he whispered.
“I tell everybody to go to hell,” said the boy. He was trying to be kind, but he wearied of the effort at once. “Can I go out and play batball now?”
“You’d tell your own father to go to hell?” murmured Unk. The question echoed back through Unk’s emptied memory to an untouched corner where bits of his own strange childhood still lived. His own strange childhood had been spent in daydreams of at last seeing and loving a father who did not want to see him, who did not want to be loved by him.
“I — I deserted from the army to come here — to find you,” said Unk.
Interest flickered in the boy’s eyes, then died. “They’ll get you,” he said. “They get everybody.”
“I’ll steal a space ship,” said Unk. “And you and your mother and I will get on it, and we’ll fly away!”
“To where?” said the boy.
“Some place good!” said Unk.
“Tell me about some place good,” said Chrono.
“I don’t know. We’ll have to look!” said Unk.
Chrono shook his head pityingly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. You’d just get a lot of people killed.”