Damon Knight - Orbit 17

“Is that Timmy?” said Thayer.

“Timmy’s a good boy,” said Mrs. Brown apologetically, “and we’ve tried to raise him right, but ever since he was a little boy, he’s always been so . . . intelligent, and he will have his way. . . .”

“How old is he? Thirteen?”

“Timmy is thirty-two,” said Mr. Brown apologetically. “In nineteen fifty-five, when he was thirteen, he decided he didn’t want to be any older than that and he ... built this machine, from parts he wrote off for in the mail, that kind of. . . uh . . .” Mr. Brown was looking more apologetic than ever.

“Good lord,” said Thayer.

“It keeps time from passing,” said Mrs. Brown. “It just looks like a lot of funny wires to me, and lots of flashing lights, but Timmy’s still thirteen, and I don’t mind telling you it has us very upset.”

“We’ve had to move around a bit,” said Mr. Brown. “We couldn’t live in one place very long because people would start to notice, you know, that Timmy wasn’t... growing any older.”

“It wouldn’t do any good at all to scold him,” said Mrs. Brown. “He would have his own way, and he’d put together these machines that would . . . change the way people looked. Every time my husband and I would scold him, we would look in the mirror the next morning and see that we suddenly looked like—”

“Arnold Stang and Marion Lome and John Foster Dulles, people like that,” said Mr. Brown.

“It just didn’t do any good to scold him ...” said Mrs. Brown as she led Thayer and Sam up the stairs. . . .

It was a moment until either Sam or Thayer could speak after Mrs. Brown opened the door to Timmy’s room. Not a square inch of it was unoccupied, and it contained, among other things: balsa-wood models of F-86s, wheel covers off a ’53 Pontiac, pictures from Life magazine, taped to the walls, of Ted Kluszewski and Minnie Minoso, Adlai Stevenson, Charles Van Doren, backyard bomb shelters . . . there was a Revell kit model of the USS Missouri, boxes of Tinkertoys, a Slinky spring, a Mr. Potato Man, a klutzy Philco radio made of Impact-Resistant Plastic, a stack of 45-rpm LaVeme Baker singles, a Sylvania Halo-lite TV, a Davy Crockett lunch pail, Lash LaRue comics, Unca Scrooge comics, Captain Marvel comics, Astounding Science Fiction magazines, three copies of Winston’s SF juveniles obviously stolen from libraries, a Kodak Pony camera, a Milwaukee Braves pennant and one of the high-speed-camera photographs of an A-bomb blowing apart one of those test houses on Frenchman’s Flat. Sam was sure that Mr. Peepers was on the television.

In the corner was the device which appeared to be making the hum and producing the emanations. It was constructed mostly of prisms and what Sam recognized as Lincoln Logs.

“Isn’t it keen?” said Timmy. “Every bit of it you can buy from Edmund Scientific Corp, of Barrington, N.J.”

“Timmy,” said Chief Peck as sternly as one can say anything to someone who is eating a banana Fudgesicle, “your note said that you can explain—”

“Say,” said Timmy mischievously, “did anyone ever tell you you looked like Peter Graves?”

“Okay, that’s it, kid,” said Sam. “I’m gonna beat your butt so bad—”

“What you’re going to do,” said Timmy, “is exactly what I’m going to tell you to do.”

“Sam!” Thayer cried. “On the television. Look.”

Sam saw that Mr. Peepers had been replaced by a dinosaur very much like the one on the rampage in Bert’s Funland. The picture cut to a huge tarantula climbing up a building that was a ringer for the Des Moines City Hall and, intermittently, to Mala Powers looking up and screaming and being clutched to Peter Graves’ chest.

“Good God, Sam,” said Thayer. “It is a bad movie.”

“Right,” said Timmy with a snotty smile. “Il Came from Beyond the Sky (1956), Peter Graves, Mala Powers, Gerald Mohr. You, Chief Peck, and Miss Braddock and all Des Moines ... you’re all trapped in it, and you stay trapped in it until I get what I want.”

“Timmy Brown!” said Mrs. Brown sharply from the doorway. “Where did you learn to talk like that?”

“And I say there’s a logical explanation for all this,” said Sam, “and I say that there is no way for some fruitcake thirteen-year-old kid to be responsible for it and I say we get out of this fruitcake house.” He grabbed Thayer by the arm and left.

He felt there was a logical explanation to all this even after the pterodactyl swept down from the sky and plucked Thayer Braddock from the Browns’ front yard and swooped away with her in its claws.

“You can’t do this,” said Thayer, pummeling at the beast with her tiny fists. “I’m president of the Ames chapter of the National Organization of Women. ”

Sam noticed as the pterodactyl flew into some clouds with Thayer that it was wearing a muffler and . . . well, spats.

Efforts continued being made in search of a logical explanation as Sam stared disconsolately out the police headquarters at Thayer. The pterodactyl had deposited her on the top of City Hall (Gorg, the tarantula, had given up trying to climb it and was spinning a web around the high-school football stadium), and was treating her decently, foraging for Mr. Goodbars and R.C. Colas for her to eat.

Logical explanations were searched for right up until 6:37 that evening when suddenly everyone in Des Moines began to look like Audrey Meadows, G. David Schine, Bert Parks, Richard Denning, Sid Melton, Roger Bannister, Bambi Lynn or Rod Alexander, Teddy Nader, Maureen “Little Mo” Connolly, Hal March, Teresa Brewer, Averell Harriman, Dorothy Kilgallen, Fred Clark, Jack Lescoulie, Buddy Blattner, Guy Madison, Richie Valens, Phyllis Thaxter, Warren Hull, or Gogi Grant.

Needless to say, it caused the entire population to go dancing-apeshit out of its mind crazy, raping, killing, looting, overparking. Sam felt grateful that all that happened to him was just Peter Graves. When the first shops were put to the torch, Sam decided it was time for some good old-fashioned capitulation. He called the Brown house.

“Robert A. Heinlein,” said Sam to the strained-forward-waiting crowd in his office as he hung up the phone. “The kid said he’d turn off the machine if we brought Robert A. Heinlein to him.”

“That sounds easy enough,” said the NG commander.

“Let’s go get him,” said Sam, reaching for his police chief hat. They were well out of the building when it was realized that no one knew who Robert A. Heinlein was.

Turned out, several precious hours later, that a clerk in the fingerprint office, the freaky one whom they always suspected of smoking seized-as-evidence marijuana in the john, knew who R.A.H. was. A science-fiction writer. Another three hours of desperate phone calling produced not the slightest idea of where R.A.H. could be located, and Des Moines was only a few hours away from the deadline: when Timmy said he would release Des Moines from being trapped in It Came from Beyond the Sky and trap it instead—permanently—in I Led Three Lives.

“Richard Carlson,” someone whimpered.

The fingerprint file clerk returned from the john and said:

“You have one chance left. Clyde the Clown.”

Sam knew that Clyde the Clown was, in addition to being a kiddie-show personality on local television, Des Moines’ première homosexual and holder of the Iowa arrest record for indecent exposure. But what did that have to do with Robert A. Heinlein?

“Clyde is the single biggest Heinlein freak in the United States,” said the film clerk. “He might be able to impersonate him.”