Edgar Pangborn - A Mirror for Observers

Certainly it would be difficult to convince him that I was not talking down, not making secret fun of his precocity. I tried to be idly conversational: “Poor Crito! He really tried. But I think Socrates wanted to die. In the reasoning to prove he should remain, don’t you think he was talking to himself more than to Crito?”

No relaxation. Strained youthful courtesy: “Maybe.”

“He could have argued he owed Athens nothing; that an unjust law may be violated to serve a greater. But he didn’t. He was tired.”

“Why?” said Angelo. “Why would anyone want to die?”

“Oh, tired. Past seventy.” (What should I have said?) It was enough for the moment, I thought, or too much. At least it was an attempt to let him know I honored his intelligence, and it might help me later. It would have been easier if I had been required to hold a soap bubble in my clumsy hands, since a soap bubble is only a pearl of illusion and if it bursts that’s no great matter. More like snuffy Mr. Miles, I said: “Wonder if my typing will bother the other tenants? It’s a noisy old machine.”

“Nope.” Angelo was plainly relieved at the prosaic turn. “Mr. Feuermann’s bath and closet are between the rooms. Room over you is vacant, and the folks upstairs — the old ladies and Jack McGuire — they won’t hear it. We won’t downstairs. This is above the kitchen. Don’t give it a thought.”

“Not even if I split an infinitive?”

He stuck a finger in his mouth and snapped it to make a pop like a cork out of a bottle. “Not even if you treat a spondee as an iambus.”

“Ouch! Wait till I get educated, can’t you?” He grinned sweetly and fled. And that, I thought, is the child whom Namir wants to corrupt. This was the moment, Drozma, when the enigma of Namir himself truly began to torment me, as it still does. I must accept fact: it is possible for a being, human or Martian, to see something beautiful, recognize it as beautiful, and immediately desire to destroy it. I know it’s so, but I don’t, I never shall, understand it. One would think the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too.

I fussed about, as a human creature should in a new nest. I reviewed Observers’ Rules. The risk that has always worried me worst is that some trifling injury might reveal the orange tint of our blood. I am prone to bark shins and bruise hands. Our one-to-the-minute heartbeat is not only a risk but a source of regret. It annoys me that I must be cautious in all physical contact, and it’s too bad having to avoid doctors — they could be interesting. Observers’ work must have been more entertaining as well as safer (except for the horse problem) in the old days when magic and superstition were cruder and more crudely accepted. And I turned the package of the bronze mirror over and over in my hands, wondering at some of your meanings, Drozma. I did not unwrap it. I wish that I had, or that I had examined it in Northern City. Doubtless you supposed I would, but there were many last-minute errands, and I have studied so many human antiquities that my curiosity was dulled. I did not learn its nature until a time when it caught me unprepared. That evening I put the package in the bureau under some clothes, and wandered out to explore the city.

And I met Sharon Brand.

My immediate objective was butter, bread, and sliced ham, though I had it in mind to do any Observer’s work that might turn up as a by-product of my mission. A delicatessen on Saturday evening can be a listening post. People lounge, linger, cuss the weather, and talk politics. I found one at once, by drifting toward the grimier end of Calumet Street. It was a tiny corner shop three blocks from No. 21, and the sign said EL CAT SEN.

No one was in it but a girl about ten years old, sitting almost hidden behind the counter with a comic book. Her left foot was on another chair. Her right leg was wrapped around her left in a sort of boneless abandon that might have been experimental or just comfortable. I examined the cases, waiting for signs of life, but she was far away. The wooden shaft of a lollipop protruded from her mouth with a sophistication that went well with a pug nose and dark shoulder-length hair. “All by yourself?”

Without looking up she nodded and said: “Uh. Oo i owioffsh oo?”

“Yes, I do rather.” It wasn’t baby talk. She just didn’t find an immediate need to take out the all-day sucker, but wanted to know if I liked lollipops too.

But then she glanced at me — startling ocean-blue eyes, inescapably appraising — and waved at a box, and gradually got her wide mouth unstuck, and said: “Well, pick one. Heck, they’re only a penny, heck.” She reversed legs, wrapping the left around the right. “You couldn’t do that.”

“Who says I can’t?” There was a third chair behind the counter, so I got into it and showed her. With our more elastic bones, I had an unfair advantage, but I was careful not to exceed human possibility. Even so she looked slightly sandbagged.

“You’re pretty good,” she admitted. “Inja-rubber man. You forgot your lollipop.” She tossed me one from the box, lemon variety. I got busy on it and we have been friends ever since. “Look,” she said. “Heck, could this autothentically happen, I mean for true?” She showed me the comic book. There was a spaceman with a beautiful but unfortunate dame. The dame had been strapped to a meteor — by the Forces of Evil, I shouldn’t wonder — and the spaceman was saving her from demolition by other meteors. He did it by blasting them with a ray-gun. It looked like a lot of work.

“I wouldn’t want to be quoted.”

“Oh, you. I’m Sharon Brand. Who are you?”

“Benedict Miles. Just rented a room up the street. With the Pontevecchios, maybe you know ’em?”

“Heck.” She took on a solemn glow. She threw away the comic, and unwound and readjusted her skinny smallness. Now she was sitting on both her feet, and had her elbows hung over the back of the chair, and watched me for a time with eyes ten thousand years old. “Angelo happens to be my best boy friend, but you better not mention it. It would be most unadvisable. I would be furious.”

“I never would.”

“I’d probably cut your leg off and beat you over the head with it. If you detonated.”

“Detonated?”

“Aren’t you educated? It means shoot off. Your mouth. Some people call him stuck-up on account he’s always reading books. You don’t think he’s stuck-up, do you?” Her face said urgently: Better not detonate.

“No, I don’t think he is at all. He’s just very bright.”

“I’d probably turn a ray-gun on you. Tatatata-taah. He happens to’ve been my boy friend for years and years, but don’t forget you promised. Heck, I hate a rat…. You know what?”

“No, what?”

“I started piano lessons yesterday. Mrs. Wilks showed me the scale. She’s blind. Right away she showed me the scale. They’ve fixed up to let me practice on the school piano for the summer.”

“Scale already, huh? That’s terrific.”

“Everything is terrific,” said Sharon Brand. “Only some things are terrificker than others.”

Later (I hoped my friend Sharon was asleep, but somehow I had an image of both those children turning on furtive night lights, Sharon with her spacemen, Angelo wandering critically through the intricacy of Plato’s dreams) I went out to taste the city’s middle evening again, going through the railroad underpass to the “right” side of the tracks, drifting with other masks past shop-windows, poolrooms, dance halls. I played the watching game with myself: “One I’d like to know, a gleam of intelligence…. Ah, the Face that Foreclosed the Mortgage!… A face of bitterness, member of the weasel totem…. A genuine dish…. Gracious with age…. Savage with age…. A schoolmarm (?) — a pickpocket — a plainclothes cop — a salesman — a possible bank teller…” In that game you have their voices too, never finished: “So he gets his gun on this other guy, see, only the Ranger’s behind the bush—” “I told her, I said, if I don’t know my own size in girdles by this time—” “I wouldn’t believe him if he had brass knucks—”