“Here, also,” Dean reminded him, “we have the makings of men and women that Millville in the future may very well be proud of.”
The coach got up angrily. “We won’t win a game,” he warned. “Even Bagley will beat us.”
“That is something,” Dean observed philosophically, “that shan’t worry me too much.”
He sat quietly at his desk and listened to the hollow ringing of the coach’s footsteps going down the corridor, dimming out with distance.
And he heard the swish and rumble of a janitorial servo-mechanism wiping down the stairs. He wondered where Stuffy was. Fiddling around somewhere, no doubt. With all the scrubbers and the washers and wipers and other mechanical contraptions, there wasn’t too much to take up Stuffy’s time. Although Stuffy, in his day, had done a lot of work—he’d been on the go from dark to dark, a top-notch janitor.
If it weren’t for the labor shortage, Stuffy would have been retired several years ago. But they didn’t retire men any more the way they had at one time. With Man going to the stars, there now was more than the human race could do. If they had been retiring men, Dean thought, he himself would be without a job.
And there was nothing he would have hated more than that. For Millville High was his. He had made it his. For more than fifty years, he’d lived for Millville High, first as a young and eager teacher, then as principal, and now, the last fifteen years or so, as its superintendent.
He had given everything he had. And it had given back. It had been wife and child and family, a beginning and an end. And he was satisfied, he told himself—satisfied on this Friday of a new school year, with Stuffy puttering somewhere in the building and no football team--or, at least, next to none.
He rose from the desk and stood looking out the window. A student, late in going home, was walking across the lawn. Dean thought he knew her, although of late his eyes had not been so good for distance.
He squinted at her harder, almost certain it was Judy Charleson. He’d known her grandfather back in the early days and the girl, he thought, had old Henry Charleson’s gait. He chuckled, thinking back. Old Charleson, he recalled, had been a slippery one in a business deal. There had been that time he had gotten tangled up in the deal for tube-liners to be used by a starship outfit …
He jerked his mind away, tried to wipe out his thinking of the old days. It was a sign of advancing age, the dawn of second childhood.
But however that might be, old Henry Charleson was the only man in Millville who had ever had a thing to do with starships—except Lamont Stiles.
Dean grinned a little, remembering Lamont Stiles and the grimness in him and how he’d amounted to something after many years, to the horrified exasperation of many people who had confidently prophesied he’d come to no good end.
And there was no one now, of course, who knew, or perhaps would ever know, what kind of end Lamont Stiles had finally come to. Or if, in fact, he’d come to an end as yet.
Lamont Stiles, Dean thought, might this very moment be striding down the street of some fantastic city on some distant world.
And if that were so, and if he came home again, what would he bring this time?
The last time he’d come home—the only time he ever had come home—he had brought the Sitters, and they were a funny lot.
Dean turned from the window and walked back to the desk. He sat down and pulled the papers back in front of him. But he couldn’t get down to work. That was the way it often was. He’d start thinking of the old days, when there were many friends and many things to do, and get so involved in thinking that he couldn’t settle down to work.
He heard the shuffle coming along the hall and shoved the papers to one side. He could tell that it was Stuffy, from the familiar shuffle, coming by to pass the time of day.
Dean wondered at the quiet anticipation he felt within himself. Although it was not so strange, once one considered it. There weren’t many left like Stuffy, not many he could talk with.
It was odd with the old, he thought. Age dissolved or loosened the ties of other days. The old died or moved away or were bound by infirmities. Or they drew within themselves, into a world of their own, where they sought a comfort they could find no longer in the outer world.
Stuffy shuffled to the doorway, stopped and leaned against the jamb. He wiped his drooping yellow mustaches with a greasy hand.
“What’s ailing the coach?” he asked. “He went busting out of here like he was turpentined.”
“He has no football team,” said Dean. “Or he tells me that he hasn’t any.”
“He cries early every season,” Stuffy said. “It’s just an act.”
“I’m not so sure this time. King and Martin aren’t coming out.”
Stuffy shuffled a few more paces into the room and dropped into a chair.
“It’s them Sitters,” Stuffy declared. “They’re the cause of it.”
Dean sat upright. “What is that you said!”
“I been watching it for years. You can spot the kids that the Sitters sat with or that went to their nursery school. They done something to them kids.”
“Fairy tale,” said Dean.
“It ain’t a fairy tale,” Stuffy declared stubbornly. “You know I don’t take no stock in superstition. Just because them Sitters are from some other planet … Say, did you ever find out what planet they were from?”
Dean shook his head. “I don’t know that Lamont ever said. He might have, but I never heard it.”
“They’re weird critters,” said Stuffy, stroking his mustaches slowly to lend an air of deliberation to his words, “but I never held their strangeness against them. After all, they ain’t the only aliens on the Earth. The only ones we have in Millville, of course, but there are thousands of other critters from the stars scattered round the Earth.”
Dean nodded in agreement, scarcely knowing what he was agreeing with. He said nothing, however, for there was no need of that. Once Stuffy got off to a running start, he’d go on and on.
“They seem right honest beings,” Stuffy said. “They never played on no one’s sympathy. They just settled in, after Lamont went away and left them, and never asked no one to intercede for them. They made an honest living all these years and that is all one could expect of them.”
“And yet,” said Dean, “you think they’ve done something to the kids.”
“They changed them. Ain’t you noticed it?”
Dean shook his head. “I never thought to notice. I’ve known these youngsters for years. I knew their folks before them. How do you think they were changed?”
“They grew them up too fast,” Stuffy said.
“Talk sense,” snapped Dean. “Who grew what too fast?”
“The Sitters grew the kids too fast. That’s what’s wrong with them. Here they are in high school and they’re already grown up.”
From somewhere on one of the floors below came the dismal hooting of a servo-mechanism in distress.
Stuffy sprang to his feet. “That’s the mopper-upper. I’ll bet you it got caught in a door again.”
He swung around and galloped off at a rapid shuffle.
“Stupid machine!” he yelped as he went out the door.
Dean pulled the papers back in front of him again and picked up a pencil. It was getting late and he had to finish.
But he didn’t see the papers. He saw many little faces staring up at him from where the papers lay—solemn, big-eyed little faces with an elusive look about them.