The spiral was a piece of jagged-ended scrap that had been cast into the factory aisle by a careless workman. The manager scratched his ankle and tore his pants before he got free of the spiral. He thereupon put on the first really comprehensible demonstration that the children had seen that day. Comprehensibly, he blew up at the spiral.
He stamped on it.
Then, when it nipped him again, he snatched it up and chopped it into four-inch lengths with great shears.
The children were edified, thrilled, and satisfied. And, as they were leaving the packaging department, young Chrono picked up one of the four-inch pieces and slipped it into his pocket. The piece he picked up differed from all the rest in having two holes drilled in it.
This was Chrono’s goodluck piece. It became as much a part of him as his right hand. His nervous system, so to speak, extended itself into the metal strap. Touch it and you touched Chrono.
Unk, the deserter, stood up behind his turquoise boulder, walked vigorously and officiously into the school yard. He had stripped his uniform of all insignia. This gave him a rather official, warlike look, without binding him to any particular enterprise. Of all the equipment he had been carrying before he deserted, he retained only a jungle knife, his single-shot Mauser, and one grenade. These three weapons he left cached behind the boulder, along with the stolen bicycle.
Unk marched up to Miss Fenstermaker. He told her that he wished to interview young Chrono on official business at once – privately. He did not tell her that he was the boy’s father. Being the boy’s father entitled him to nothing. Being an official investigator entitled him to anything he might care to ask for.
Poor Miss Fenstermaker was easily fooled. She agreed to let Unk interview the boy in her own office.
Her office was crammed with ungraded school papers, some of them dating back five years. She was far behind in her work – so far behind that she had declared a moratorium on school work until she could catch up on her grading. Some of the stacks of papers had tumbled, forming glaciers that sent fingers under her desk, into the hallway, and into her private lavatory.
There was an open, two-drawer filing cabinet filled with her rock collection.
Nobody ever checked up on Miss Fenstermaker. Nobody cared. She had a teaching certificate from the State of Minnesota, U.S.A., Earth, Solar System, Milky Way. and that was all that mattered.
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 goodluck piece from his pocket, and rubbed it between his palms.
The imagined strength he got from the goodluck 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.”
“You want to stay here?” said Unk.
“I’m all right here,” said Chrono. “Can I go out and play batball now?”
Unk wept.
His weeping appalled the boy. He had never seen a man weep before. He never wept himself. “I’m going out to play!” he cried wildly, and he ran out of the office.
Unk went to the window of the office. He looked out at the iron playground. Young Chrono’s team was in the field now. Young Chrono joined his teammates, faced a batter whose back was to Unk.
Chrono kissed his goodluck piece, put it in his pocket. “Easy out, you guys,” he yelled hoarsely. “Come on, you guys – let’s kill him!”
Unk’s mate, the mother of young Chrono, was an instructress in the Schliemann Breathing School for Recruits. Schliemann breathing, of course, is a technique that enables human beings to survive in a vacuum or in an inhospitable atmosphere without the use of helmets or other cumbersome respiratory gear.
It consists, essentially, of taking a pill rich in oxygen. The bloodstream takes on this oxygen through the wall of the small intestine rather than through the lungs. On Mars, the pills were known officially as Combat Respiratory Rations, in popular parlance as goofballs.
Schliemann Breathing is at its simplest in a benign but useless atmosphere like that of Mars. The breather goes on breathing and talking in a normal manner, though there is no oxygen for his lungs to take in from the atmosphere. All he has to remember is to take his goofballs regularly.
The school in which Unk’s mate was an instructress taught recruits the more difficult techniques necessary in a vacuum or in a harmful atmosphere. This involves not only pill-taking, but plugging one’s ears and nostrils, and keeping one’s mouth shut as well. Any effort to speak or to breathe would result in hemorrhages and probably death.
Unk’s mate was one of six instructresses at the Schliemann Breathing School for Recruits. Her classroom was a bare, windowless, whitewashed room, thirty feet square. Ranged around the walls were benches.
On a table in the middle was a bowl of goofballs, a bowl of nose and ear plugs, a roll of adhesive plaster, scissors, and a small tape recorder. Purpose of the tape recorder was to play music during the long periods in which there was nothing to do but sit and wait patiently for nature to take its course.