Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

“Thunk!” went the clock.

The door clattered, creaked and opened, and in came Joyce leading Jerome. Joyce carefully closed the door behind her and led Jerome to where I was standing in front of the blackboard.

What now?

Gerald had his hand up, swelling out of his desk with eagerness. Poor Gerald so seldom knew anything at all that whenever his hand was one of the raised ones, I called on him. “Yes, Gerald?”

“An autocrat,” he said, triumphantly remembering from the morning spelling lesson, “is a man who is king all by himself instead of having a president and senators.”

Jerome just stood there. Wondering, no doubt, what forgotten misdemeanor on the playground I might want to scold him about

I wondered what it was I had expected him to do about Mr. Mines.

“Jerome,” I said, taking him by the shoulders and turning him to face the back of the room, “this is David’s daddy, Mr. Mines.”

Puzzled, Jerome looked.

Mr. Mines was at the door, his hand on the knob, his face pale and frightened.

“Thunk!” went the clock.

Suddenly I could feel Jerome’s little body grow taut under my hands, and he looked around at me with bottomless eyes.

“It’s going to blow up,” he said, “when the hands are like that.” And he made two-thirty with his arms.

I swallowed and looked around at the clock.

“Thunk!”

Two twenty-five.

“Bang!” went the door. It was Mr. Mines, gone.

And Jerome and I were alone with it. We were the only ones who really knew.

“Monitor!” I said, and Gerard marched up and came to the front of the class.

“Messenger!” I said, and Delia marched up. “Get Mr. Buras immediately.

I brought Jerome outside the room and closed the door behind me. It was too late to try to catch Mr. Mines. It was too late for almost anything. It was all up to Jerome, now.

Through the glass-topped door I could see David with his head down on his desk, quietly sobbing. He didn’t know about the bomb. But he knew about his daddy. And now everyone else did, too.

“Thunk!” went the clock in the hall.

“Where is it, Jerome?”

“A dark place,” he said. “A little place.”

I ran down the hall to the broom closet.

Mr. Buras came out of his office with Delia.

“Go back into the room, Delia,” I said. “Run.”

She ran.

“There’s a bomb in the school,” I said. “I’m finding it now. We have four minutes.”

“I’ll fill a washtub with water,” he said, “while I get the kids out and call the police.”

There was no time to find out how I knew or if I was crazy.

He looked into the seventh-grade room and called out three of the big boys.

He rang the bell for fire drill. But there wouldn’t be time. Time. I hoped my class would know enough to follow Miss Fremen’s and get out safely without me.

Jerome and I ran to the little room where old books and the movie projector are kept. He shook his head.

“Which way?” I asked.

He didn’t know. Only he would know the room if he saw it.

I waved my class toward Miss Fremen’s room as they came filing out. One look and she took them over.

Small, dark room. Jerome and I ran down the stairs to the boys’ lavatory. He shook his head.

Girls’ lavatory.

No.

Dear God!

We rushed in and out of cloak rooms.

No.

No.

No.

“Jerome,” I said. “You’ve got to. What else besides small, dark room?”

“Scared. Very scared.”

“Of course. What else?”

“No. Scared of a whipping. Scared of God.”

“Scared of...” I dragged Jerome into Mr. Buras’s office. “Surely not here? And it isn’t small and dark.”

“Almost,” said Jerome, “This is how it feels, but this isn’t where it is.”

I looked around the office. So bare and clean. No big, empty boxes with small, dark places in them. ‘

“The john!” I cried, for there is a little men’s room attached to the principal’s office. I yanked open the door.

“Yes!” said Jerome. “Oh, quickly!”

Yes, but where? Such a bare, clean little room. He must have slipped in during lunch hour, probably even before I saw him hanging around the playground.

Where? Just walls, the wash basin—the radiator! It was too warm a day for the heat to be on and perhaps there was room behind—there it was!

“Run, Jerome,” I cried, and I edged the thing out carefully. It was a briefcase affair, with one broken handle. A sad, forgotten briefcase.

But Jerome didn’t run. He hung on to the back of my skirt and followed me into the teachers’ washroom where I could hear the washtub filling up.

I threw the briefcase into the washtub, and splashed water all over Jerome and me, and I pulled him out of the room and closed the door behind me and sat down in the middle of the hall and had hysterics.

Mr. Buras was there and it was a while before I realized he had two aspirin tablets and a glass of water for me.

“Thank you,” I said. “Oh, dear God.”

“Come in my office and sit down,” Mr. Buras said. “The police will be here any minute. Maybe they can catch him. If you can describe him.”

I stood up as best I could, ashamed of having broken down in front of Jerome. Children are terribly frightened when grown people lose control.

We walked through the hollow school, so strange with all the children outside. I looked down at Jerome. Those eyes! I thought of the things he must know, with that reaching mind of his. He knew. He knew the most frightful thing there is to know in the whole world. That there is nobody, nobody at all who is sure about anything. Children should not have to know this thing.

“Can you describe him? Do you know who it was?”

I paused, passing the door of my room, for something caught my eye through the glass.

It was David, his head still in his arms, all alone, waiting for the fire to come. So many things were worse than death.

“It was...” Why did I have to be the one to tell? Why was this responsibility mine?

I looked at Jerome. His, too. So many responsibilities would be his.

“It was David’s father,” I said, and I went in to David.

Maybe there would be some assurance I could give David.

But not Jerome.

For he would know assurance was not mine to give.

Nor anyone else’s.

Readers of those earlier S-F annuals in which Miss Henderson’s chronicles of The People appeared (“Pottage” in 1956; “Wilderness” in 1958) will be happy to know that the long-delayed publication of the complete series is at last a fact (“Pilgrimage: The Book of the People,” Doubleday, 1961).

Miss Henderson is, in private life, a schoolteacher in the primary grades, and most of her stories about children have been from the viewpoint of the sympathetic adult. This time she tells it through the child’s own mind and eyes.

Do you remember the Depression? The black shadow across time? That hurting place in the consciousness of the world? Maybe not. Maybe it’s like asking do you remember the Dark Ages. Except what would I know about the price of eggs in the Dark Ages? I knew plenty about prices in the Depression.