Walter Miller: Dark Benediction

“Rod! It isn’t—”

But it was. Without stopping to think, she rushed to the living room, seized Kenny in her arms, began sobbing, then fled upstairs when she realized what she was doing.

Kenny knew he was sick. He knew several specialists had studied his case. He knew that I had gone down to talk with Doc Jules this afternoon. After Cleo’s reaction, there was no keeping the truth from him. He was only fourteen, but within two weeks, he knew he had less than a year to live, unless they found a cure. He pieced it together for himself from conversational fragments, and chance remarks, and medical encyclopedias, and by deftly questioning a playmate’s older brother who was a medical student.

Maybe it was easier on Kenny to know he was dying, easier than seeing our anxiety and being frightened by it without knowing the cause. But a child is blunt in his questioning, and tactless in matters that concern himself, and that made it hell on Cleo.

“If they don’t find a cure, when will I die?”

“Will it hurt?”

“What will you do with my things?”

“Will I see my real father afterwards?”

Cleo stood so much of it, and then one night she broke down and we had to call a doctor to give her a sedative and quiet her down. When she was settled, I took Kenny out behind the house. We walked across the narrow strip of pasture and sat on the old stone fence to talk by the light of the moon. I told him not to talk about it again to Cleo, unless she brought it up, and that he was to bring his questions to me. I put my arm around him, and I knew he was crying inside.

“I don’t want to die.”

There is a difference between tragedy and blind brutal calamity. Tragedy has meaning, and there is dignity in it. Tragedy stands with its shoulders stiff and proud. But there is no meaning, no dignity, no fulfillment, in the death of a child.

“Kenny, I want you to try to have faith. The research institutes are working hard. I want you to try to have faith that they’ll find a cure.”

“Mack says it won’t be for years and years.”

Mack was the medical student. I resolved to call him tomorrow. But his mistake was innocent; he didn’t know what was the matter with Kenny.

“Mack doesn’t know. He’s just a kid himself. Nobody knows—except that they’ll find it sometime. Nobody knows when. It might be next week.”

“I wish I had a time-ship like Captain Chronos.”

“Why?”

He looked at me earnestly in the moonlight. “Because then I could go to some year when they knew how to cure me.”

“I wish it were possible.”

“I’ll bet it is. I’ll bet someday they can do that too. Maybe the government’s working on it now.”

I told him I’d heard nothing of such a project.

“Then they ought to be. Think of the advantages. If you wanted to know something that nobody knew, you could just go to some year when it had already been discovered.”

I told him that it wouldn’t work, because then everybody would try it, and nobody would work on new discoveries, and none would be made.

“Besides, Kenny, nobody can even prove time-travel is possible.”

“Scientists can do anything.”

“Only things that are possible, Kenny. And only with money, and time, and work—and a reason.”

“Would it cost a lot to research for a time-ship, Dad?”

“Quite a lot, I imagine, if you could find somebody to do it.”

“As much as the atom-bomb?”

“Maybe.”

“I bet you could borrow it from banks… if somebody could prove it’s possible.”

“You’d need a lot of money of your own, kid, before the banks would help.”

“I bet my stamp collection will be worth a lot of money someday. And my autograph book.” The conversation had wandered off into fantasy.

“In time, maybe in time. A century maybe. But banks won’t wait that long.”

He stared at me peculiarly. “But Dad, don’t you see? What difference does time make, if you’re working on a time-machine?”

That one stopped me. “Try to have faith in the medical labs, Kenny,” was all I could find to say.

Kenny built a time-ship in the fork of a big maple. He made it from a packing crate, reinforced with plywood, decorated with mysterious coils of copper wire. He filled it with battered clocks and junkyard instruments. He mounted two seats in it, and dual controls. He made a fish-bowl canopy over a hole in the top, and nailed a galvanized bucket on the nose. Broomstick guns protruded from its narrow weapon ports. He painted it silvery gray, and decorated the bucket-nose with the insignia of Captain Chronos and the Guardsmen of Time. He nailed steps on the trunk of the maple; and when he wasn’t in the house, he could usually be found in the maple, piloting the time-ship through imaginary centuries. He took a picture of it with a box camera, and sent a print of it to Captain Chronos with a fan letter.

Then one day he fainted on the ladder, and fell out of the tree.

He wasn’t badly hurt, only bruised, but it ended his career as a time-ship pilot. Kenny was losing color and weight, and the lethargy was coming steadily over him. His fingertips were covered with tiny stab-marks from the constant blood counts, and the hollow of his arm was marked with transfusion needles. Mostly, he stayed inside.

We haunted the research institutes, and the daily mail was full of answers to our flood of pleading inquiries—all kinds of answers.

“We regret to inform you that recent studies have been…”

“Investigations concerning the psychogenic factors show only…”

“Prepare to meet God…”

“For seventy-five dollars, Guru Tahaj Reshvi guarantees…”

“Sickness is only an illusion. Have faith and…”

“We cannot promise anything in the near future, but the Institute is rapidly finding new directions for…”

“Allow us to extend sympathy…”

“The powers of hydromagnetic massage therapy have been established by…”

And so it went. We talked to crackpots, confidence men, respectable scientists, fanatics, lunatics, and a few honest fools. Occasionally we tried some harmless technique, with Jules’ approval, mostly because it felt like we were doing something. But the techniques did more good for Cleo than they did for Kenny, and Kenny’s very gradual change for the worse made it apparent that nothing short of the miraculous could save him.

And then Kenny started working on it himself.

The idea, whatever it was, must have hit him suddenly, and it was strange—because it came at a time when both Cleo and I thought that he had completely and fatalistically accepted the coming of the end.

“The labs aren’t going to find it in time,” he said. “I’ve been reading what they say. I know it’s no good, Dad.” He cried some then; it was good that he had relearned to cry.

But the next day, his spirits soared mysteriously to a new high, and he went around the house singing to himself. He was busy with his stamp collection most of the time, but he also wandered about the house and garage searching for odds and ends, his actions seeming purposeful and determined. He moved slowly, and stopped to rest frequently, but he displayed more energy than we had seen for weeks, and even Jules commented on how bright he was looking, when he came for Kenny’s daily blood sample. Cleo decided that complete resignation had brought cheerfulness with it, and that acceptance of ill-fate obviated the need to worry or hope. But I wasn’t so sure.

“What’ve you been up to, Kenny?” I asked.

He looked innocent and shook his bead.

“Come on, now. You don’t go wandering around muttering to yourself unless you’re cooking something up. What is it, another time-ship? I heard you hammering in the garage before dinner.”