The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7

A PASSAGE FROM THE STARS by Kaatje Hurlbut

Loosen the rainbow, Mr. Aiken says… or splinter the light. They are the same thing seen from different sides of any prism. It is this function precisely, and uniquely, that defines the scope of what I mean by the derived initials of my title. “S-F” means all the ways of filtering feelings and Ideas through imagination so as to project them in another form — no less “true,” but a great deal less expected.

Kaatje Hurlbut has been writing for eighteen years, and is a fairly regular reader of science fiction, but this is her first s-f story. In telling me how it came about, she described graphically the working of this “prism effect”:

“I went out before dawn one cold morning in October ‘57 to see the first Sputnik…. It must have uprooted me, because I began to see how beautiful the earth is in approach… and these two things impressed me tremendously: first, how precious it is — a flourishing globe of life in the lifeless dark of space; and second, that it is ours, it is home….”

This story was published, she adds, on “the day Shepard made his space flight. I was delighted. I fell launched too.” Actually, she was well launched some time before that. Since her first appearance in Mademoiselle, six years ago. Miss Hurlbut’s stories have been published in a cross-section of leading national magazines, both slick and literary, and two before this have been reprinted in “best” anthologies: a collection from Mademoiselle, and The Best American Short Stories, 1961.

The people of Pomeroy’s Cove gave Mr. Paradee the sky. They gave it all to him, from dawn to dawn — with thunderheads and flights of geese and the red moon rising. At first it was a joke, one of those non-sympathetic jokes reserved for the newcomer by members of a small village, a defensive measure designed to hold him in place while being inspected for acceptability. For, one fall when the cove had just settled down to a long snug winter — summer visitors gone for the year — Mr. Paradee turned up, purchased land from Miss Pomeroy and built his house on a point beside the marsh. His manner was one of extreme reserve couched in the punctilious deference of his old-fashioned way — with one astonishing exception: he would rap on doors at night and call them out to see the northern lights; he would stop them in the lane in the morning to ask if they had seen the crimson of the dawn; in the evening he would call to them and point over the marsh at a sundog’s mocking glow. They cocked their heads and wondered about him.

The truth was, Mr. Paradee had lived his entire life in the deep streets of the city. When he came to Pomeroy’s Cove to live, he couldn’t get over how big the sky was, how changing it was and how magnificent. It was as simple as that.

A retired bookkeeper, he was a small, quiet man, stooped a little by nearly fifty years of bending over the ledgers he kept for a button factory; when he spoke, it was with the earnestness of one unaccustomed to casual small talk; a chronic squint rendered his expression gently quizzical. Until he came to Pomeroy’s Cove — he had no family — the years of his life had been much like the factory’s books, meticulously correct and hopelessly predictable.

When Mr. Paradee retired he invested his life’s savings to bring about two supreme ambitions. One was to have a home — his own house with a yard and a white picket fence. The other was to have a great many friends. But his shyness made him compromise in this by setting himself up as a ham radio operator. Through his short-wave he could roam the earth that throbbed with sound, and discover friendly voices which spoke across the night into the morning and pass along a scrap of gossip or a good story from Reykjavik to Singapore, from Johannesburg to Sydney.

But he found, to his happiness, that he hadn’t time for his short-wave adventures during the days — though often in the night he switched it on — for Pomeroy’s Cove soon gave him the sky in earnest. Not only the sky but also tulip bulbs to start a garden and birthday cakes and advice about his gutters. Their dogs walked beside him down the lane, their children sat on his steps in the sun and held serious talks with him, and on summer evenings he sat on their porches with them, rocking, swatting mosquitoes and murmuring comfortably.

The dim long tunnel of his loneliness seemed far behind him now. For as yet no echo had come from the tunnel to haunt him, to chill his heart and make him tremble, as if with cold.

Besides Mr. Paradee there were only six other families on the cove, if Miss Pomeroy could be counted as a family. An elderly maiden who lived alone, she had inherited the cove and its land from her family, which had settled there in the 1600’s. The Pomeroy estate had been intact for almost 300 years.

To the indignation of her contemporaries in the neighborhood, Miss Pomeroy had shattered the precedent of generations of family by selling, in recent years, parcels of land here and there — the land on which Mr. Paradee and the others had built their homes. “For company,” she snapped with a none-of-your-business inflection to those who demanded to know why, and who knew it was not for money.

She herself lived in a Victorian house on a knoll overlooking the point. But the original Pomeroy house, by now called the Settler’s Cottage, was built in 1690 and stood back from the water at the head of the cove. It was out of sight, hidden among the trees.

A massive stone structure, deep-roofed with great chimneys at either end, it had been neglected for almost 100 years. But recently Miss Pomeroy had given in to years of pestering by the local Historical Society and had assumed the expense of having the Settler’s Cottage restored to the last candlestick and kettle. During the summers a caretaker, whom she engaged, received the trickle of visitors who roamed the old rooms, admiring trestle table, spinning wheel and little, bubbly windowpanes.

But now that the cottage was livable again, it became a source of irritation to Miss Pomeroy. One evening, as she and Mr. Paradee sat on his porch and rocked, she unburdened herself to him. They were the only two people on the cove without families, and they found that in having this in common they had much.

“It’s a mockery,” she said bitterly, “to keep that wonderful old house as a museum with visitors tiptoeing about, pointing and whispering. Somebody ought to live there.”

“You must have had handsome offers for it.”

“Offers!” she snorted. “From people who could afford anything, anywhere — who want a private museum to hold forth in. Something quaint,” she grimaced, “for a summer place. Well, they’ll not have it,” she went on grimly. “That old cottage was a home to my people when they built it, a place to live, because they weren’t just playing at living. They knew what mattered, and they went all the way.”

As they rocked in silence for a moment or two, Mr. Paradee wondered what those people of hers had been like — people who knew what mattered and went all the way. They don’t seem real any more, he thought sadly. They’re only a legend.

“As far as that goes—” she began again presently.

“As far as what goes?”

“Things that matter. It’s my opinion that people matter. And Historical Society or no, that’s still my house. And one of these days the Settler’s Cottage”—here she quoted from the society’s pamphlet—” ‘an authentic seventeenth-century dwelling, a chapter in the history of our great heritage,’ is going to get a taste of corned-beef hash and yelling children! Ha!”

“I wonder,” Mr. Paradee chuckled, “what the society will say?”

“Say? They’ll be speechless!” She became sober then and said, “It has to be; I’m not going to back down. The cottage has to go as the rest of the cove has gone: to young families with their lives to live. Of course, you were an exception.” Her penetration disconcerted Mr. Paradee when she added, “You looked to me like a man born away from home who had spent his life trying to get back. Well, all of you are home now. And after a while somebody will turn up — just as you and the others did — and the cottage will be waiting.”

Sensing an undercurrent in her words, Mr. Paradee asked shyly, “Did you ever want a family?”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Very much once. But after all, what is a family for? Something to give yourself to; something that matters, so that you can give. At night, when I see all your lights down on the point, I feel as if I almost had a family. One of these days I’ll look over at the woods and see smoke rising from the chimneys of the Settler’s Cottage.” After a reflective pause she added dryly, “I expect we’ll see a little smoke rising from the Historical Society too.”

“I’ve spent a lifetime,” Mr. Paradee said after they rocked for a moment in silence, “thinking I knew what mattered. To be home, just to be home.” He shook his head and said slowly, “But I’m not so sure — I’m not so sure there isn’t more to it than that.”

As time went on, Mr. Paradee’s sky flourished, his garden flowered and his picket fence sported a yearly coat of dazzling white; the path which led from the lane to his gate widened, as he and his friends and their children and dogs passed back and forth; his short-wave crackled with friendly voices from New Zealand, Scotland, Australia and Alaska — and with other voices, deep in the night, which at first he could not identify. He often said to himself, cautiously at first, but after a while with confidence, “I’m happy.”

But then one spring — as the winds of March roared over the cove — Mr. Paradee began to wake at night. He would lie in the dark, listening and wondering what it was that would not let him sleep. When for a moment the wind held its breath, he could hear the distant pounding of the surf and, now and then, the herald sound of an early flight of geese. These were the sounds he loved; they would no more wake him than the swinging pendulum of his clock on the mantel. It wouldn’t come to him until he was dropping off to sleep again; just for a moment he would know what had waked him: an unaccountable space within him, a curious emptiness.

In time it waked him often, and it frightened him, for it was too much like the old emptiness, the old ache he had lived with for so long back in the days when all that mattered to him was to be home. Well, he was home. Why did it keep coming back to him, like an echo?

Night after night the ghostly echo woke him and, when he could not go back to sleep, he would find himself sitting in a rocker beside his short-wave where he would listen and listen. When at last there was silence, he often would go out on the porch and look up into the night, not thinking, as he used to, how beautiful it was, but how vast and how cold.

Summer came and passed. In September all the visitors — house guests and a few boarders — went home, leaving a trail of footprints and sand castles along the beach.

Every year — after they had left and the caretaker from the Settler’s Cottage had locked up and gone for the winter — Pomeroy’s Cove celebrated the end of the season with a picnic on the ocean. They would all decide on a day, having first consulted Mr. Paradee on the likely behavior of his sky — who in turn consulted the Coast Guard weather report. With baskets of lunch they would cross the cove and walk over the dunes to the sea. They usually left about noon and returned at dusk.

Just before noon on the day of the picnic Mr. Paradee glanced out his window and saw a billow of clouds low in the east. They didn’t look like much, but nevertheless he snapped on the short-wave to wait for twelve sharp and the weather report.

Waiting, he checked the picnic basket and found that he had forgotten the salt. As he reached to open a cupboard to get the shaker, static from the radio receiver was interrupted by a high-pitched musical tone. Startled, Mr. Paradee went quickly and shut the door to the yard and hurried back to the radio. He adjusted the volume, turning it low, and listened with his ear close to the set. In a moment he heard a quiet, familiar voice.

“Paradee?”

He snapped on the transmitter and spoke barely above a whisper. “This is Paradee. Hello, out there!”

“Hello, Paradee. It’s good to hear your voice again.”

“How are you?” asked Mr. Paradee. “Everything all right? I haven’t heard from you folks in weeks. I was beginning to think you’d moved on.”

“No. We are still standing by. Our situation is very grave.”

“Oh?” Mr. Paradee was silent for a moment, his face clouded with concern. “But, see here. Didn’t you get in touch with Cook in New Zealand? What about MacIntyre in Scotland and Burns in Alaska?”

“We were in touch with them, Paradee. But we weren’t able to convince them. One can hardly blame them.”

“Oh, wouldn’t you know it!” Mr. Paradee snorted with impatience. “I suppose they thought it was some other ham trying to pull off the hoax of the century! Why, those fellows have miles of land, away off from anywhere. I know they could help you.”

“Yes, but only if they could be convinced without being frightened. But that would take time — as it did with you, Paradee, and we have run out of time now. To maintain a fuel reserve for reconnaissance and a landing, we’ve had to jettison supply units. We are reduced to one craft. Provisions are severely low.”

“Provisions?” Mr. Paradee anxiously hunched his shoulders. “What kind of provisions? How long can you hold out?”

“Two days — possibly three.” There was a pause before the quiet voice continued. “Only days now, after all this time. But there was so much we couldn’t calculate. We knew only the course. We couldn’t know how long we would be out here listening and learning, trying to make ourselves understood. Now it’s the end, and all depends on one more calculation we cannot make.”

Mr. Paradee’s palms were sweating. “What? What is it?”

“Whether you will help us, Paradee. Whether you will allow us a place to live. We need little more than shelter— but immediately.”

“But I don’t know — I don’t know—”

“There are only seven of us, and three are children.”

Mr. Paradee drew a deep breath to relieve a heaviness in his chest, the weight of his realization. This voice was no longer a marvelous curiosity, he had picked up months ago on the latter side of night, to which in his long hours of sleeplessness he had listened, musing and wondering — a voice belonging to a dream image lost among the stars; a voice that was sensible, humorous, gentle and yet, because of what it had told him, too incredible except to be confined in a private chamber of fancy. Well — it had broken from the chamber, and it had stepped out of the night. This was midday; this voice, for all its accustomed quietness, was human and tired.

“Very well.” Mr. Paradee leaned close to the set and spoke rapidly, as if another thought were racing to overtake the one he was putting into words. “Very well. But let me think a minute. This house of mine is so small it wouldn’t even— Wait! I know. Now listen, can you determine my location exactly?”

“Exactly.”

“At the head of this cove I’m on, there’s a wooded area, very dense. But there’s a clearing in the woods and—” Mr. Paradee halted abruptly, astonished at himself. Why, what would Miss Pomeroy say? And anyway, what in heaven’s name was he doing?

“Now see here!” he said tightly into the transmitter. “Just you hold on a minute! You people could land anywhere. All over the earth there are huge uninhabited areas where you’d never be discovered. There are mountain ranges and islands where you could live—”

The voice interrupted gently, “Where we could live as fugitives? We might as well live as captives — it would be all the same. My dear Paradee, we are not looking for a hiding place. We only want a home among people. Is that hard for you to understand?”

“No.”

“Isolated, friendless, we had far rather remain out here.”

“No!” Paradee said.

“In this clearing in the woods is there a dwelling?”

Mr. Paradee was unable to answer at once, for something cold and heavy battered at the walls of his mind. Presently, forcing himself to speak, he said, “Yes. An old stone cottage. No one is there now.”

“You sound troubled, Paradee. Please believe we will not be conspicuous in any way. Now, to avoid disturbance, we will land at night and destroy the craft. But first we will have to see the area in the daylight — just before dark perhaps. I’ll contact you later tonight, at the usual time.”

The thing that was heavy and cold broke through the wall of Mr. Paradee’s mind. It was fear. It rolled like a boulder crushing every thought, every sensibility which rose before it.

He let out his breath and whispered harshly, “Now, see here, you people! You say you’re in a bad way out there; you’re at the end of your rope. And yet — and yet you’re asking to be allowed some kind of a home. What kind of game is this? Why, after what you’ve done, you could do anything you wanted here. You could—you could control the earth.”

In the silence following his outburst, he heard waves lapping at the jetty, a gull crying over the cove, a child laughing down in the lane. He clasped his hands to keep from shaking, as if with cold.

Presently from the receiver came a sigh and the voice spoke with weariness and regret. “We probably could.”

At a sound from the porch Mr. Paradee snapped off the receiver and jumped to his feet. He opened the door to find Miss Pomeroy.

“Ready?” she asked, looking quizzically at him.

“Ready?” he repeated blankly.

“The picnic, Mr. Paradee.” Her eyes searched his face.

“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.”

“Were you talking to yourself when I came up on the porch — or to a ghost? You look as if you’d seen one.”

Her voice was dry, but her eyes held kindly concern. Mr. Paradee found that the effort to make a light reply was too much. He shook his head and turned away to pick up the picnic basket, forgetting the salt again.

It took but twenty minutes to cross the cove and walk over the dunes to the sea. When they first arrived, they always stood a moment in silent detachment and gazed over the water to the edge of the world. As if, Mr. Paradee thought, they were trying to remind themselves that they knew what lay beyond the horizon, patiently trying to rid themselves of an ancient memory crouched in the dark of their minds: that the rim of the world is no less an awful mystery than the incredible reach of night. Presently someone would pick up a shell or point to a gull skimming the waves, and they would emerge from the spell and go down to the water.

Miss Pomeroy and Mr. Paradee sat side by side beyond the reach of the breakers and watched the children race the whispering wash like sandpipers, nimbly dodging the big breaker which stretched up the sand, grabbed at them and fled back again, tumbling golden flecks of mica in its wake. Down in the surf the older children and their parents hurled themselves into the waves like javelins. Mr. Paradee’s sky was sapphire.

“Aren’t we a collection!” Miss Pomeroy remarked. “From two”—she nodded toward a fat baby recklessly flinging sand in the air and shutting his eyes as it showered his bright hair —”from two to what? You’re older than I. Seventy?”

Mr. Paradee squinted reflectively and shook his head.

“Oh, not that old, not I. My life began here at the cove, you know, because here — and only recently — I’ve found out what really matters to me. I’ve found that all I have is worthless unless I can give it in some way, or share it. But—” He let out his breath in a sigh.

“Something is troubling you, Mr. Paradee.”

He shook his head and shrugged helplessly. “I’m trapped.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you remember the time we talked about things that matter? And you said your people, who settled here, knew what mattered, and they went all the way?”

“I remember.”

“What else could they do? What else? Once you know what matters, once you care, it’s too late to turn back. You must go all the way. You’ve no choice. It’s a terrible kind of trap.”

“It’s a wonderful kind of trap,” she said.

“But suppose,” he said softly, “you don’t dare go all the way?”

“I wish,” she said, “that I knew what is troubling you. Because I’d help you if I could.”

He turned toward her and with an effort he smiled. “I know you would.”

Mr. Paradee poured the last of the wine and waited for dusk. The picnic fire was banked with sand, and everyone lay stretched out around it, comfortable and drowsy. Everyone, that is, except Mr. Paradee, who sat with his hands locked about his knees. Lulled by the murmur of talk, some of the children slept.

Mr. Paradee watched the sky. It is possible, he thought, entirely possible: a world dies of old age, peacefully, slowly, and the few who survive it cannot bear to leave. Except a handful with children who set out, not on a mad race for food and shelter, not on a search for paradise, but simply to find another home, among people. Possible. Of course, it’s possible.

Turning to look at the east, where the rim of the sea was tinged with dark, he sent his imaginary vision over the edge and around and circled the earth, so that he knew it visually for what it was — a great globe turning slowly in space, as other great globes were turning slowly in space.

How beautiful, he thought suddenly, must the earth be in approach! If you roamed the paths of satellites, you’d see it all, the whole round earth, immense — immense in haze. Oceans sprawling, rivers fingering, wandering continents, green and shadowy, clinging to the mother curve. And there, too small to see, infinitely small and tender-boned, were people. The little valiant, vulnerable people, ardent and self-aware. Strip them of their many surface differences, and you would find, he thought, a single likeness, a common majesty: their unfathomable capacity to care, to gain the point where life, as such, becomes a minor thing compared to that for which they live.

And at that point, he thought, there is no turning back. But where does it take us? Where are we going?

He sighed so deeply that everyone glanced at him and stirred. Miss Pomeroy got to her feet and brushed the sand from her clothes with a brisk motion.

“Time to pack up,” she said cheerfully. “Be dark soon. Wake up, sleepyheads.” She bent down and ruffled the drowsy children.

When they were ready to leave, baskets packed, children yawning, they all stood a moment, taking a last look out over the water. Then they saw it.

It appeared above the horizon, oblong and silent, reflecting the geranium glow of the setting sun and bathing them in its light. Speechless, they watched it approach and slow its speed. Just overhead, it veered northward, slowly circled the cove, and then returned to its point of origin, where it shot upward with such incredible swiftness that their eyes lost it and, a split second later, searching the sky could not find it again.

During the flurry of astonished exclamations which followed — pointing, comparing notes, questioning, surmising— Mr. Paradee turned his head and Miss Pomeroy caught his eye. Gazing at him, her expression slowly changed from amazement to startled inquiry. He quickly looked away.

Presently someone found the words to release them from their incredulity.

“You know what that thing was, don’t you? One of those big weather balloons.”

“Yes, but the shape—”

“Illusion. The way the light was reflecting, you see—”

“Yes, undoubtedly.”

“How about it, Mr. Paradee? It’s your sky.”

“Well, I have my secrets, you know,” he said hollowly, and they laughed a little, all but Miss Pomeroy, whose inquiring eyes were still upon him, grave now, and steady.

As they all began their way back over the dunes, Mr. Paradee walked slowly and fell behind. Miss Pomeroy glanced back at him and stopped to wait.

“We’re getting old, you and I, poking along behind like this.” Her voice was light, but her glance was keenly watchful.

Mr. Paradee’s steps became slower, and finally he stopped altogether, as if he couldn’t go on. After a moment she put her hand on his arm.

“Well?” she said.

“You told me back there on the beach that you’d help me if you could.” He looked at her directly, searching her face.

“I will.”

“How far,” he asked slowly and deliberately, “are you willing to go?”

“All the way, Mr. Paradee.”

He considered her for a long moment. “You’d better listen first.”

Up ahead the others turned and called to them. Miss Pomeroy waved them on. She and Mr. Paradee sat down on the dune. Before he began to speak, he drew a deep uneven breath.

Pomeroy’s Cove went to bed early that night. Doors closed, lights blinked out and a night of stars held forth.

As he had done so many times in the past months, during long sleepless nights, Mr. Paradee sat in a rocking chair beside his short-wave. With the receiver turned on and the volume low, he waited and rocked, listening to the tick of the clock on the mantel and the creak of the rocker. He wondered musingly if any sound on earth lulled so gently. The curving motion of rocker and pendulum — the creak-creak, tick-tock — called forth a singing of words, a scrap of poetry. “Great wide, beautiful, wonderful world, with the wonderful waters round you curled…”

“No, no,” he said, to himself; “no,” and he shook his head as the cold hard fear, like a boulder, rolled suddenly into his mind. “No, no!” But it persisted, rolling out of control. “They could take it away from us. They could. They admitted that much. They said they could.”

The radio receiver issued a sharp crackle of static, and the high-pitched musical tone beeped and ceased. The voice came through, quiet as always. “Paradee?”

He snapped on the transmitter and leaned forward.

“Listen,” he said, whispering fiercely. “You listen to me. If you think you’re going to take our world away from us, you out there, you’d better guess again! What do you think you’re doing, cutting down here in that glorified tin can of yours? Do you think for one minute that we—”

“Paradee, Paradee,” the voice interrupted, “my dear man! No one wants to take your world away from you. What an unthinkable notion! You can’t really believe that, can you?”

Mr. Paradee slumped as he let out his breath, the surprising rush of fright and anger receding as quickly as it had risen. He shook his head and said tiredly, “You said you could.”

“We probably could — we haven’t thought about it. But does it not occur to you that those who are capable of taking worlds are far, far beyond that sort of behavior? Taking is a practice for brutes and naughty children.”

It seemed to Mr. Paradee, as he sighed, that he had sighed a thousand times that day.

“I know, I know. Forgive me. But for a moment I was afraid again. You know how it is. Once you find out what matters to you, you’re willing to go all the way, and then suddenly you’re afraid of where it’s going to take you.”

Just at that moment it occurred to Mr. Paradee that he would not be afraid again. All at once he knew beyond doubt, as surely as if he had always known it.

When you know what matters, you have already arrived. That thought held him in peaceful contemplation, and he wondered absently if it had come from the quiet voice or from the quiet of his own heart.

Presently then, “You have come a long way, Paradee.”

He roused and smiled, and then he chuckled. “You’ve come a pretty long way yourselves.” He turned on a light and looked at the clock on the mantel. “Well, Miss Pomeroy is waiting for you up there at the Settler’s Cottage. She has the key.”