“Sit-yap.”
“I’m not—”
And then Jason, who was husky for a three-year-old,
plopped into Jack’s lap, still grinning.
Sit-yap, oh yeah, I get it, Jack thought, feeling the dull ache from his testicles spreading up into the pit of his stomach.
“Jason bad! ” his mother called back in that same indulgent, but-isn’t-he-cute voice . . . and Jason, who knew who ruled the roost, grinned his dopey, sweetly charming grin.
Jack realized that Jason was wet. Very, extremely, indu-
bitably wet.
Welcome back to the Territories, Jack-O.
And sitting there with the child in his arms and warm wet-
ness slowly soaking through his clothes, Jack began to laugh, his face turned up to the blue, blue sky.
3
A few minutes later Henry’s wife worked her way to where
Jack was sitting with the child on his lap and took Jason back.
“Oooh, wet, bad baby,” she said in her indulgent voice.
Doesn’t my Jason wet big! Jack thought, and laughed again.
That made Jason laugh, and Mrs. Henry laughed with them.
As she changed Jason, she asked Jack a number of ques-
tions—ones he had heard often enough in his own world. But
here he would have to be careful. He was a stranger, and there might be hidden trapdoors. He heard his father telling Morgan, . . . a real Stranger, if you see what I mean.
Jack sensed that the woman’s husband was listening
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closely. He answered her questions with a careful variation of the Story—not the one he told when he was applying for a job but the one he told when someone who had picked him up
thumbing got curious.
He said he had come from the village of All-Hands’—
Jason’s mother had a vague recollection of hearing of the
place, but that was all. Had he really come so far? she wanted to know. Jack told her that he had. And where was he going?
He told her (and the silently listening Henry) that he was
bound for the village of California. That one she had not
heard of, even vaguely, in such stories as the occasional peddler told. Jack was not exactly very surprised . . . but he was grateful that neither of them exclaimed “California? Whoever heard of a village named California? Who are you trying to
shuck and jive, boy?” In the Territories there had to be lots of places—whole areas as well as villages—of which people
who lived in their own little areas had never heard. No power poles. No electricity. No movies. No cable TV to tell them
how wonderful things were in Malibu or Sarasota. No Territories version of Ma Bell, advertising that a three-minute call to the Outposts after five p.m. cost only $5.83, plus tax, rates may be higher on God-Pounders’ Eve and some other holi-days. They live in a mystery, he thought. When you live in a mystery, you don’t question a village simply because you never heard of it. California doesn’t sound any wilder than a place named All-Hands’.
Nor did they question. He told them that his father had
died the year before, and that his mother was quite ill (he thought of adding that the Queen’s repossession men had
come in the middle of the night and taken away their donkey, grinned, and decided that maybe he ought to leave that part out). His mother had given him what money she could (except the word that came out in the strange language wasn’t
really money—it was something like sticks) and had sent him off to the village of California, to stay with his Aunt Helen.
“These are hard times,” Mrs. Henry said, holding Jason,
now changed, more closely to her.
“All-Hands’ is near the summer palace, isn’t it, boy?” It
was the first time Henry had spoken since inviting Jack
aboard.
“Yes,” Jack said. “That is, fairly near. I mean—”
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THE TALISMAN
“You never said what your father died of.”
Now he had turned his head. His gaze was narrow and as-
sessing, the former kindness gone; it had been blown out of his eyes like candle-flames in a wind. Yes, there were trapdoors here.
“Was he ill?” Mrs. Henry asked. “So much illness these
days—pox, plague—hard times . . .”
For a wild moment Jack thought of saying, No, he wasn’t ill, Mrs. Henry. He took a lot of volts, my dad. You see he went off one Saturday to do some work, and he left Mrs. Jerry and all the little Jerrys—including me—back at home. This was when we all lived in a hole in the baseboard and nobody lived anywhere else, you see. And do you know what? He stuck his screwdriver into a bunch of wires and Mrs. Feeny, she works over at Richard Sloat’s house, she heard Uncle Morgan talking on the phone and he said the electricity came out, all of the electricity, and it cooked him, it cooked him so bad that his glasses melted all over his nose, only you don’t know about glasses because you don’t have them here. No
glasses . . . no electricity . . . no Midnight Blue . . . no airplanes. Don’t end up like Mrs. Jerry, Mrs. Henry. Don’t—
“Never mind was he ill,” the whiskered farmer said. “Was
he political?”
Jack looked at him. His mouth was working but no sounds
came out. He didn’t know what to say. There were too many
trapdoors.
Henry nodded, as if he had answered. “Jump down, laddie.
Market’s just over the next rise. I reckon you can ankle it from here, can’t you?”
“Yes,” Jack said. “I reckon I can.”
Mrs. Henry looked confused . . . but she was now holding
Jason away from Jack, as if he might have some contagious
disease.
The farmer, still looking back over his shoulder, smiled a
bit ruefully. “I’m sorry. You seem a nice enough lad, but we’re simple people here—whatever’s going on back yonder by the
sea is something for great lords to settle. Either the Queen will die or she won’t . . . and of course, someday she must.
God pounds all His nails sooner or later. And what happens to little people when they meddle into the affairs of the great is that they get hurt.”
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“My father—”
“I don’t want to know about your father!” Henry said
sharply. His wife scrambled away from Jack, still holding Jason to her bosom. “Good man or bad, I don’t know and I don’t want to know—all I know is that he’s a dead man, I don’t think you lied about that, and that his son has been sleeping rough and has all the smell of being on the dodge. The son
doesn’t talk as if he comes from any of these parts. So climb down. I’ve a son of my own, as you see.”
Jack got down, sorry for the fear in the young woman’s
face—fear he had put there. The farmer was right—little people had no business meddling in the affairs of the great. Not if they were smart.
13
The Men in the Sky
1
It was a shock to discover that the money he had worked so
hard to get literally had turned into sticks—they looked like toy snakes made by an inept craftsman. The shock lasted only for a moment, however, and he laughed ruefully at himself.
The sticks were money, of course. When he came over here, everything changed. Silver dollar to gryphon-coin, shirt to jerkin, English to Territories speech, and good old American money to—well, to jointed sticks. He had flipped over with
about twenty-two dollars in all, and he guessed that he had exactly the same amount in Territories money, although he
had counted fourteen joints on one of the money-sticks and
better than twenty on the other.
The problem wasn’t so much money as cost—he had very
little idea of what was cheap and what was dear, and as he
walked through the market, Jack felt like a contestant on The New Price Is Right—only, if he flubbed it here, there wouldn’t be any consolation prize and a clap on the back from Bob
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Barker; if he flubbed it here, they might . . . well, he didn’t know for sure what they might do. Run him out for sure. Hurt him, rough him up? Maybe. Kill him? Probably not, but it
was impossible to be absolutely certain. They were little people. They were not political. And he was a stranger.
Jack walked slowly from one end of the loud and busy
market-day throng to the other, wrestling with the problem. It now centered mostly in his stomach—he was dreadfully hungry. Once he saw Henry, dickering with a man who had goats