S Is for Space

  Fortnum felt his eyelids twitch, his iris flex, as if he were snapping a picture of something he wanted to remember.

  Joe pulled the cellar door wide, stepped down out of sight, gone. The door tapped shut.

  Fortnum opened his mouth to speak, but Dorothy’s hand was taking his now, he had to look at her.

  “Please,” she said. “Find him for me.”

  He kissed her cheek. “If it’s humanly possible …”

  If it’s humanly possible. Good Lord, why had he picked those words?

  He walked off into the summer night.

  A gasp, an exhalation, a gasp, an exhalation, an asthmatic in-suck, a vaporing sneeze. Someone dying in the dark? No.

  Just Mrs. Goodbody, unseen beyond the hedge, working late, her hand pump aimed, her bony elbow thrusting. The sick-sweet smell of bug spray enveloped Fortnum heavily as he reached his house.

  “Mrs. Goodbody? Still at it?!”

  From the black hedge, her voice leapt:

  “Blast it, yes! Aphids, waterbugs, woodworms, and now the marasmius oreades. Lord, it grows fast!”

  “What does?”

  “The marasmius oreades, of course! It’s me against them, and I intend to win. There! There! There!”

  He left the hedge, the gasping pump, the wheezing voice, and found his wife waiting for him on the porch almost as if she were going to take up where Dorothy had left off at her door a few minutes ago.

  Fortnum was about to speak, when a shadow moved inside. There was a creaking noise. A knob rattled.

  Tom vanished into the basement.

  Fortnum felt as if someone had set off an explosion in his face. He reeled. Everything had the numbed familiarity of those waking dreams where all motions are remembered before they occur, all dialogue known before it fell from the lips.

  He found himself staring at the shut basement door. Cynthia took him inside, amused.

  “What? Tom? Oh, I relented. The darn mushrooms meant so much to him. Besides, when he threw them into the cellar, they did nicely, just lying in the dirt.”

  “Did they?” Fortnum heard himself say.

  Cynthia took his arm. “What about Roger?”

  “He’s gone, yes.”

  “Men, men, men,” she said.

  “No, you’re wrong,” he said. “I saw Roger every day for the last ten years. When you know a man that well, you can tell how things are at home, whether things are in the oven or the mixmaster. Death hadn’t breathed down his neck yet. He wasn’t running scared after his immortal youth, picking peaches in someone else’s orchards. No, no, I swear, I’d bet my last dollar on it, Roger—”

  The doorbell rang behind him. The delivery boy had come up quietly onto the porch and was standing there with a telegram in his hand.

  “Fortnum?”

  Cynthia snapped on the hall light as he ripped the envelope open and smoothed it out for reading.

  TRAVELING NEW ORLEANS. THIS TELEGRAM POSSIBLE OFF-GUARD MOMENT. YOU MUST REFUSE, REPEAT REFUSE, ALL SPECIAL DELIVERY PACKAGES! ROGER.

  Cynthia glanced up from the paper.

  “I don’t understand. What does he mean?”

  But Fortnum was already at the telephone, dialing swiftly, once. “Operator? The police, and hurry!”

  At ten-fifteen that night, the phone rang for the sixth time during the evening. Fortnum got it, and immediately gasped. “Roger! Where are you?”

  “Where am I?” said Roger lightly, almost amused. “You know very well where I am. You’re responsible for this. I should be angry!”

  Cynthia, at his nod, had hurried to take the extension phone in the kitchen. When he heard the soft click, he went on.

  “Roger, I swear I don’t know. I got that telegram from you—”

  “What telegram?” said Roger, jovially. “I sent no telegram. Now, of a sudden, the police come pouring onto the southbound train, pull me off in some jerkwater, and I’m calling you to get them off my neck. Hugh, if this is some joke—”

  “But, Roger, you just vanished!”

  “On a business trip. If you can call that vanishing. I told Dorothy about this, and Joe.”

  “This is all very confusing, Roger. You’re in no danger? Nobody’s blackmailing you, forcing you into this speech?”

  “I’m fine, healthy, free, and unafraid.”

  “But, Roger, your premonitions …?”

  “Poppycock! Now, look, I’m being very good about this, aren’t I?”

  “Sure, Roger.”

  “Then play the good father and give me permission to go. Call Dorothy and tell her I’ll be back in five days. How could she have forgotten?”

  “She did, Roger. See you in five days, then?”

  “Five days, I swear.”

  The voice was indeed winning and warm, the old Roger again. Fortnum shook his head, more bewildered than before.

  “Roger,” he said, “this is the craziest day I’ve ever spent. You’re not running off from Dorothy? Good Lord, you can tell me.”

  “I love her with all my heart. Now, here’s Lieutenant Parker of the Ridgetown police. Good-by, Hugh.”

  “Good—”

  But the lieutenant was on the line, talking angrily. What had Fortnum meant putting them to this trouble? What was going on? Who did he think he was? Did or didn’t he want this so-called friend held or released?

  “Released,” Fortnum managed to say somewhere along the way, and hung up the phone and imagined he heard a voice call all aboard and the massive thunder of the train leaving the station two hundred miles south in the somehow increasingly dark night.

  Cynthia walked very slowly into the parlor.

  “I feel so foolish,” she said.

  “How do you think I feel?”

  “Who could have sent that telegram? And why?”

  He poured himself some Scotch and stood in the middle of the room looking at it.

  “I’m glad Roger is all right,” his wife said, at last.

  “He isn’t,” said Fortnum.

  “But you just said—”

  “I said nothing. After all, we couldn’t very well drag him off that train and truss him up and send him home, could we, if he insisted he was okay? No. He sent that telegram, but he changed his mind after sending it. Why, why, why?” Fortnum paced the room, sipping the drink. “Why warn us against special delivery packages? The only package we’ve got this year which fits that description is the one Tom got this morning—” His voice trailed off.

  Before he could move, Cynthia was at the wastepaper basket taking out the crumpled wrapping paper with the special-delivery stamps on it.

  The postmark read: NEW ORLEANS, LA.

  Cynthia looked up from it. “New Orleans. Isn’t that where Roger is heading right now?”

  A doorknob rattled, a door opened and closed in Fortnum’s mind. Another doorknob rattled, another door swung wide and then shut. There was a smell of damp earth.

  He found his hand dialing the phone. After a long while, Dorothy Willis answered at the other end. He could imagine her sitting alone in a house with too many lights on. He talked quietly with her awhile, then cleared his throat and said, “Dorothy, look. I know it sounds silly. Did any special delivery air mail packages arrive at your house the last few days?”

  Her voice was faint. “No.” Then: “No, wait. Three days ago. But I thought you knew! All the boys on the block are going in for it.”

  Fortnum measured his words carefully.

  “Going in for what?”

  “But why ask?” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with raising mushrooms, is there?”

  Fortnum closed his eyes.

  “Hugh? Are you still there?” asked Dorothy. “I said: there’s nothing wrong with—”

  “—raising mushrooms?” said Fortnum, at last. “No. Nothing wrong. Nothing wrong.”

  And slowly he put down the phone.

  The curtains blew like veils of moonlight. The clock ticked. The after-midnight world flowed into and filled the bedr
oom. He heard Mrs. Goodbody’s clear voice on this morning’s air, a million years gone now. He heard Roger putting a cloud over the sun at noon. He heard the police cursing him by phone from downstate. Then Roger’s voice again, with the locomotive thunder hurrying him away and away, fading. And finally, Mrs. Goodbody’s voice behind the hedge:

  “Lord, it grows fast!”

  “What does?”

  “Marasmius oreades!”

  He snapped his eyes open. He sat up.

  Downstairs, a moment later, he flicked through the unabridged dictionary.

  His forefinger underlined the words:

  “Marasmius oreades: a mushroom commonly found on lawns in summer and early autumn.”

  He let the book fall shut.

  Outside, in the deep summer night, he lit a cigarette and smoked quietly.

  A meteor fell across space, burning itself out quickly. The trees rustled softly.

  The front door tapped shut.

  Cynthia moved toward him in her robe.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “Too warm, I guess.”

  “It’s not warm.”

  “No,” he said, feeling his arms. “In fact, it’s cold.” He sucked on the cigarette twice, then, not looking at her, said, “Cynthia … What if … ?” He snorted and had to stop. “Well, what if Roger was right this morning? Mrs. Goodbody, what if she’s right, too? Something terrible is happening. Like—well—” he nodded at the sky and the million stars—“Earth being invaded by things from other worlds, maybe.”

  “Hugh!”

  “No, let me run wild.”

  “It’s quite obvious we’re not being invaded or we’d notice.”

  “Let’s say we’ve only half-noticed, become uneasy about something. What? How could we be invaded? By what means would creatures invade?”

  Cynthia looked at the sky and was about to try something when he interrupted.

  “No, not meteors or flying saucers. Not things we can see. What about bacteria? That comes from outer space, too, doesn’t it?”

  “I read once, yes—”

  “Spores, seeds, pollens, viruses probably bombard our atmosphere by the billions every second and have done so for millions of years. Right now we’re sitting out under an invisible rain. It falls all over the country, the cities, the towns, and right now … our lawn.”

  “Our lawn?”

  “And Mrs. Goodbody’s. But people like her are always pulling weeds, spraying poison, kicking toadstools off their grass. It would be hard for any strange life form to survive in cities. Weather’s a problem, too. Best climate might be South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana. Back in the damp bayous, they could grow to a fine size.”

  But Cynthia was beginning to laugh now.

  “Oh, really, you don’t believe, do you, that this Great Bayou or whatever Greenhouse Novelty Company that sent Tom his package is owned and operated by six-foot-tall mushrooms from another planet?”

  “If you put it that way, it sounds funny,” he admitted.

  “Funny! It’s hilarious!” She threw her head back deliciously.

  “Good grief!” he cried, suddenly irritated. “Something’s going on! Mrs. Goodbody is rooting out and killing marasmius oreades. What is marasmius oreades? A certain kind of mushroom. Simultaneously, and I suppose you’ll call it coincidence, by special delivery, what arrives the same day? Mushrooms for Tom! What else happens? Roger fears he may soon cease to be! Within hours, he vanishes, then telegraphs us, warning us not to accept what? The special delivery mushrooms for Tom! Has Roger’s son got a similar package in the last few days? He has! Where do the packages come from? New Orleans! And where is Roger going when he vanishes? New Orleans! Do you see, Cynthia, do you see? I wouldn’t be upset if all these separate things didn’t lock together! Roger, Tom, Joe, mushrooms, Mrs. Goodbody, packages, destinations, everything in one pattern!”

  She was watching his face now, quieter, but still amused. “Don’t get angry.”

  “I’m not!” Fortnum almost shouted. And then he simply could not go on. He was afraid that if he did, he would find himself shouting with laughter, too, and somehow he did not want that. He stared at the surrounding houses up and down the block and thought of the dark cellars and the neighbor boys who read Popular Mechanics and sent their money in by the millions to raise the mushrooms hidden away. Just as he, when a boy, had mailed off for chemicals, seeds, turtles, numberless salves and sickish ointments. In how many million American homes tonight were billions of mushrooms rousing up under the ministrations of the innocent?

  “Hugh?” His wife was touching his arm now. “Mushrooms, even big ones, can’t think. They can’t move. They don’t have arms and legs. How could they run a mail-order service and ‘take over’ the world? Come on, now. Let’s look at your terrible fiends and monsters!”

  She pulled him toward the door. Inside, she headed for the cellar, but he stopped, shaking his head, a foolish smile shaping itself somehow to his mouth. “No, no, I know what we’ll find. You win. The whole thing’s silly. Roger will be back next week and we’ll all get drunk together. Go on up to bed now and I’ll drink a glass of warm milk and be with you in a minute … well, a couple of minutes …”

  “That’s better!” She kissed him on both cheeks, squeezed him, and went away up the stairs.

  In the kitchen, he took out a glass, opened the refrigerator, and was pouring the milk when he stopped suddenly.

  Near the front of the top shelf was a small yellow dish. It was not the dish that held his attention, however. It was what lay in the dish.

  The fresh-cut mushrooms.

  He must have stood there for half a minute, his breath frosting the refrigerated air, before he reached out, took hold of the dish, sniffed it, felt the mushrooms, then at last, carrying the dish, went out into the hall. He looked up the stairs, hearing Cynthia moving about in the bedroom, and was about to call up to her, “Cynthia, did you put these in the refrigerator!?”

  Then he stopped. He knew her answer. She had not.

  He put the dish of mushrooms on the newel at the bottom of the stairs and stood looking at them. He imagined himself, in bed later, looking at the walls, the open windows, watching the moonlight sift patterns on the ceiling. He heard himself saying, Cynthia? And her answering, yes? And him saying, there is a way for mushrooms to grow arms and legs … What? she would say, silly, silly man, what? And he would gather courage against her hilarious reaction and go on, what if a man wandered through the swamp, picked the mushrooms, and ate them…?

  No response from Cynthia.

  Once inside the man, would the mushrooms spread through his blood, take over every cell, and change the man from a man to a—Martian? Given this theory, would the mushroom need its own arms and legs? No, not when it could borrow people, live inside and become them. Roger ate mushrooms given him by his son. Roger became “something else.” He kidnaped himself. And in one last flash of sanity, of being “himself,” he telegraphed us, warning us not to accept the special delivery mushrooms. The “Roger” that telephoned later was no longer Roger but a captive of what he had eaten! Doesn’t that figure, Cynthia? Doesn’t it, doesn’t it?

  No, said the imagined Cynthia, no, it doesn’t figure, no, no, no …

  There was the faintest whisper, rustle, stir from the cellar. Taking his eyes from the bowl, Fortnum walked to the cellar door and put his ear to it.

  “Tom?”

  No answer.

  “Tom, are you down there?”

  No answer.

  “Tom?”

  After a long while, Tom’s voice came up from below.

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “It’s after midnight,” said Fortnum, fighting to keep his voice from going high. “What are you doing down there?”

  No answer.

  “I said—”

  “Tending to my crop,” said the boy at last, his voice cold and faint.

  “Well, get up out of there! You hear me?!”

  Silence.
br />   “Tom? Listen! Did you put some mushrooms in the refrigerator tonight? If so, why?”

  Ten seconds must have ticked by before the boy replied from below. “For you and Mom to eat, of course.”

  Fortnum heard his heart moving swiftly, and had to take three deep breaths before he could go on.

  “Tom? You didn’t … that is … you haven’t by any chance eaten some of the mushrooms yourself, have you?”

  “Funny you ask that,” said Tom. “Yes. Tonight. On a sandwich after supper. Why?”

  Fortnum held to the doorknob. Now it was his turn not to answer. He felt his knees beginning to melt and he fought the whole silly senseless fool thing. No reason, he tried to say, but his lips wouldn’t move.

  “Dad?” called Tom softly from the cellar. “Come on down.” Another pause. “I want you to see the harvest.”

  Fortnum felt the knob slip in his sweaty hand. The knob rattled. He gasped.

  “Dad?” called Tom softly.

  Fortnum opened the door.

  The cellar was completely black below.

  He stretched his hand in toward the light switch. As if sensing this intrusion, from somewhere Tom said:

  “Don’t. Light’s bad for the mushrooms.”

  Fortnum took his hand off the switch.

  He swallowed. He looked back at the stair leading up to his wife. I suppose, he thought, I should go say good-by to Cynthia. But why should I think that! Why should I think that at all? No reason, is there?

  None.

  “Tom?” he said, affecting a jaunty air. “Ready or not, here I come!”

  And stepping down in darkness, he shut the door.

  The Million-Year Picnic

  Somehow the idea was brought up by Mom that perhaps the whole family would enjoy a fishing trip. But they weren’t Mom’s words; Timothy knew that. They were Dad’s words, and Mom used them for him somehow.

  Dad shuffled his feet in a clutter of Martian pebbles and agreed. So immediately there was a tumult and a shouting, and very quickly the camp was tucked into capsules and containers, Mom slipped into traveling jumpers and blouse, Dad stuffed his pipe full with trembling hands, his eyes on the Martian sky, and the three boys piled yelling into the motorboat, none of them really keeping an eye on Mom and Dad, except Timothy.