“I’m not so sure this time. King and Martin aren’t coming out.”
Stuffy shuffled a few more paces into the room and dropped into a chair.
“It’s them Sitters,” Stuffy declared. “They’re the cause of it.”
Dean sat upright. “What is that you said!”
“I been watching it for years. You can spot the kids that the Sitters sat with or that went to their nursery school. They done something to them kids.”
“Fairy tale,” said Dean.
“It ain’t a fairy tale,” Stuffy declared stubbornly. “You know I don’t take no stock in superstition. Just because them Sitters are from some other planet… Say, did you ever find out what planet they were from?”
Dean shook his head. “I don’t know that Lamont ever said. He might have, but I never heard it.”
“They’re weird critters,” said Stuffy, stroking his mustaches slowly to lend an air of deliberation to his words, “but I never held their strangeness against them. After all, they ain’t the only aliens on the Earth. The only ones we have in Millville, of course, but there are thousands of other critters from the stars scattered round the Earth.”
Dean nodded in agreement, scarcely knowing what he was agreeing with. He said nothing, however, for there was no need of that. Once Stuffy got off to a running start, he’d go on and on.
“They seem right honest beings,” Stuffy said. ‘They never played on no one’s sympathy. They just settled in, after Lamont went away and left them, and never asked no one to intercede for them. They made an honest living all these years and that is all one could expect of them.”
“And yet,” said Dean, “you think they’ve done something to the kids.”
“They changed them. Ain’t you noticed it?”
Dean shook his head. “I never thought to notice. I’ve known these youngsters for years. I knew their folks before them. How do you think they were changed?”
“They grew them up too fast,” Stuffy said.
“Talk sense,” snapped Dean. “Who grew what too fast?’
“The Sitters grew the kids too fast. That’s what’s wrong with them. Here they are in high school and they’re already grown up.”
From somewhere on one of the floors below came the dismal hooting of a servo-mechanism in distress.
Stuffy sprang to his feet. “That’s the mopper-upper. I’ll bet you it got caught in a door again.”
He swung around and galloped off at a rapid shuffle.
“Stupid machine!” he yelped as he went out the door.
Dean pulled the papers back in front of him again and picked up a pencil. It was getting late and he had to finish.
But he didn’t see the papers. He saw many little faces staring up at him from where the papers lay – solemn, big-eyed little faces with an elusive look about them.
And he knew that elusive look – the look of dawning adulthood staring out of childish faces.
They grew them up too fast!
“No,” said Dean to himself. “No, it couldn’t be!”
And yet there was corroborative evidence: The high averages, the unusual number of scholarships, the disdain for athletics. And, as well, the general attitude. And the lack of juvenile delinquency – for years, Millville had been proud that its juvenile delinquency had been a minor problem. He remembered that several years ago he had been asked to write an article about it for a parent-teacher magazine.
He tried to remember what he had written in that article and slowly bits of it came back to him – the realization of parents that their children were a part of the family and not mere appendages; the role played by the churches of the town; the emphasis placed on the social sciences by the schools.
“And was I wrong?” he asked himself. “Was it none of these, but something else entirely – someone else entirely?”
He tried to work and couldn’t. He was too upset. He could not erase the smiling little faces that were staring up at him.
Finally he shoved the papers in a drawer and got up from the desk. He put on his worn topcoat and sat the battered old black felt hat atop his silver head.
On the ground floor, he found Stuffy herding the last of the servo-mechanisms into their cubby for the night. Stuffy was infuriated.
“It got itself caught in a heating grill,” be raged. “If I hadn’t gotten there in the nick of time, it would have wrecked the works.” He shook his head dolefully. “Them machines are fine when everything goes well. But just let something happen and they panic. It was best the old way, John.”
Stuffy slammed the door on the last of the waddling machines and locked it savagely.
“Stuffy, how well did you know Lamont Stiles?” asked Dean.
Stuffy rubbed his mustaches in fine deliberation. “Knew him well. Lamont and me, we were kids together. You were a little older. You were in the crowd ahead.”
Dean nodded his head slowly. “Yes, I remember, Stuffy. Odd that you and I stayed on in the old home town. So many of the others left.”
“Lamont ran away when he was seventeen. There wasn’t much to stay for. His old lady was dead and his old man was drinking himself to death and Lamont had been in a scrape or two. Everyone was agreed Lamont never would amount to nothing.”
“It’s hard for a boy when a whole town turns against him.”
“That’s a fact,” said the janitor. “There was no one on his side. He told me when he left that someday he’d come back and show them. But I just thought he was talking big. Like a kid will do, you know, to bolster up himself.”
“You were wrong,” said Dean.
“Never wronger, John.”
For Lamont Stiles had come back, more than thirty years after he had run away, back to the old weather-beaten house on Maple Street that had waited empty for him all the lonely years; had come back, an old man when he still was scarcely fifty, big and tough despite the snow-white hair and the skin turned cordovan with the burn of many alien suns; back from far wandering among the distant stars.
But he was a stranger. The town remembered him; he had forgotten it. Years in alien lands had taken the town and twisted it in his brain, and what he remembered of it was more fantasy than truth – the fantasy spawned by years of thinking back and of yearning and of hate.
“I must go,” Dean said. “Carrie will have supper ready. She doesn’t like to have it getting cold.”
“Good night, John,” said the janitor.
The sun was almost down when Dean came out the door and started down the walk. It was later than he’d thought. Carrie would be sore at him and she would bawl him out.
Dean chuckled to himself. There was no one quite like Carrie.
Not wife, for he’d never had a wife. Not mother or sister, for both of those were dead. But housekeeper, faithful all the years – and a bit of wife and sister, and sometimes even mother.
A man’s loyalties are queer, he thought. They blind him and they bind him and they shape the man he is. And, through them, he serves and achieves a kind of greatness, although at times the greatness may be gray and pallid and very, very quiet.
Not like the swaggering and the bitter greatness of Lamont Stiles, who came striding from the stars, bringing with him those three queer creatures who became the Sitters.
Bringing them and installing them in his house on Maple Street and then, in a year or two, going off to the stars again and leaving them in Millville.
Queer, Dean thought, that so provincial a town as this should accept so quietly these exotic beings. Queerer still that the mothers of the town, in time, should entrust their childrhen to the aliens’ care.
As Dean turned the corner into Lincoln Street, he met a woman walking with a knee-high boy.
It was Mildred Anderson, he saw – or had been Mildred Anderson, but she was married now and for the life of him be could not recall the name. Funny, he thought, how fast the young ones grew up. Not more than a couple of years ago, it seemed, that Mildred was in school – although he knew he must be wrong on that; it would be more like ten.
He tipped his hat, “Good evening, Mildred. My, how the boy is growing.”
“I doe to cool,” the child lisped.
His mother interpreted. “He means he goes to school. He is so proud of it.”
“Nursery school, of course.”
“Yes, Mr. Dean. The Sitters. They are such lovely things. And so good with children. And there’s the cost. Or, rather, the lack of it. You just give them a bouquet of flowers or a little bottle of perfume or a pretty picture and they are satisfied. They positively refuse to take any money. I can’t understand that. Can you, Mr. Dean?”