Holding Wonder

Half paralyzed with fright, I crept to the little window that looked out onto the porch. Cautiously I separated two of the slats of the blind and peered out into the thin slice of moonlight. I gasped and let the slats fall.
A flying saucer! With purple lights! On the porch! Then I gave a half grunt of laughter. Flying saucers, in– deed! There was something familiar about that
row of purple lights-unglowing-around its middle. I knew they were purple-even by the dim light-because that was our space capsule! Who was trying to steal our cardboard-tincan-poster-painted capsule? Then I hastily shoved the blind aside and pressed my nose to the dusty screen. The blind retaliated by swinging back and whacking me heavily on the ear, but that wasn't what was dizzying me.
Our capsule was taking off!
"It can't!" I gasped as it slid up past the edge of the porch roof. "Not that storage barrel and all those tin cans! It can't!" And, sure enough, it couldn't. It crash-landed just beyond the flagpole. But it staggered up again, spilling several cans noisily, and skimmed over the swings, only to smash against the boulder at the base of the wall.
I was out of the teacherage, through the dark schoolroom and down the porch steps before the echo of the smash stopped bouncing from surface to surface around the canyon. I was halfway to the capsule before my toes curled and made me conscious of the fact that I was barefooted. Rather delicately I walked the rest of the way to the crumpled wreckage. What on earth had possessed it-?
In the shadows I found what had possessed it. It was Vincent, his arms wrapped tightly over his ears and across his head. He was writhing silently, his face distorted and gasping.
"Good Lord!" I gasped and fell to my knees beside him. "Vincent! What on earth!" I gathered him up as best I could with his body twisting and his legs flailing, and moved him out into the moonlight.
"I have to! I have to! I have to!" he moaned, struggling away from me. "I hear him! I hear him!"
"Hear whom?" I asked. "Vincent!" I shook him. "Make sense! What are you doing here?"
Vincent stilled in my arms for a frozen second. Then his eyes opened and he blinked in astonishment. "Teacher! What are you doing here?"
"I asked first," I said. "What are you doing here, and what is this capsule bit?"
"The capsule?" He peered at the pile of wreckage and tears flooded down his cheeks. "Now I can't go and I have to! I have to!"
"Come on inside," I said. "Let's get this thing straightened out once and for all." He dragged behind me, his feet scuffling, his sobs and sniffles jerking to the jolting movement of his steps. But he dug in at the porch and pulled me to a halt.
"Not inside!" he said. "OH, not inside!"
"Well, okay," I said. "We'll sit here for now"
He sat on the step below me and looked up, his face wet and shining in the moonlight. I fished in the pocket of my robe for a tissue and swabbed his eyes. Then I gave him another. "Blow," I said. He did. "Now, from the beginning."
"I-" He had recourse to the tissue again. "I came to get the capsule. It was
the only way I could think of to get the man."
Silence crept around his flat statement until I said "That's the beginning?"
Tears started again. I handed him another tissue. "Now look, Vincent, something's been bothering you for several days. Have you talked it over with your parents?"
"No," he hiccoughed. "I'm not supp-upposed to listen in on people. It isn't fair. But I didn't really. He came in first and I can't shut him out now because I know he's in trouble, and you can't not help if you know about somebody's need-"
Maybe, I thought hopefully, maybe this is still my nap that I'll soon wake from-but I sighed.
"Who is this man? The one that's orbiting?"
"Yes," he said, and cut the last hope for good solid sense from under my feet. "He's up in a capsule and its retro-rockets won't fire. Even if he could live until the orbital decay dropped him back into the atmosphere, the re-enty would burn him up. And he's so afraid! He's trapped! He can't get out!"
I took hold of both of his shaking shoulders. "Calm down," I said. "You can't help him like this:" He buried his face against the skirt of my robe. I slid one of my hands over to his neck and patted him for a moment.
"How did you make the capsule move?" I asked. "It did move, didn't it?"
"Yes," he said. "I lifted it. We can, you know-lift things. My People can. But I'm not big enough. I'm not supposed to anyway, and I can't sustain the lift. And if I can't even get it out of this canyon, how can I lift clear out of the atmosphere? And he'll die-scared!"
You can make things fly?" I asked.
"Yes, all of us can. And ourselves, too. See?" And there he was, floating! His knees level with my head! His shoe laces drooped forlornly down, and one used tissue tumbled to the steps below him.
"Come down," I said, swallowing a vast lump of some kind. He did. "But you know there's no air in space, and our capsule-Good Lord! Our capsule? In space? –wasn't airtight. How did you expect to breathe?"
"We have a shield," he said. "See?" And there he sat, a glint of something about him. I reached out a hand and drew back my stubbed fingers. The glint was gone. "It keeps out the cold and keeps in the air," he said.
"Let's-let's analyze this a little," I suggested weakly, nursing my fingers unnecessarily. "You say there's a man orbiting in a disabled capsule, and you planned to go up in our capsule with only the air you could take with you and rescue him?" He nodded wordlessly. "Oh, child! Child!" I cried. "You couldn't possibly!"
"Then he'll die." Desolation flattened his voice and he sagged forlornly.
Well, what comfort could I offer him? I sagged, too. Lucky, I thought then, that it's moonlight tonight. People traditionally believe all kinds of arrant nonsense by moonlight. So. I straightened. Let's believe a little-or at least act as if.
"Vincent?" "Yes, ma'am." His face was shadowed by his hunched shoulders.
"If you can lift our capsule this far, how far could your daddy lift it?" "Oh, lots farther!" he cried. "My daddy was studying to be a regular Motiver when he went to the New Home, but he stopped when he came back across space to Earth again because Outsiders don't accept-oh!" His eyes rounded and he pressed his hands to his mouth. "Oh, I forgot!" His voice came muffled. "I forgot! You're an Outsider! We're forbidden to tell-to show-Outsiders don't-"
"Nonsense," I said, "I'm not an Outsider. I'm a teacher. Can you call your mother tonight the way you did the day you and Gene had that fight?"
"A fight? Me and Gene?" The fight was obviously an event of the neolithic period for Vincent. "Oh, yes, I remember. Yes, I guess I could, but she'll be mad because I left-and I told-and-and-" Weeping was close again.
"You'll have to choose," I pointed out, glad to the bone, that it wasn't my choice to make, "between letting the man die or having her mad at you. You should have told then when you first knew about him."
"I didn't want to tell that I'd listened to the man-"
"Is he Russian?" I asked, just for curiosity's sake.
"I don't know," he said. "His words are strange. Now he keeps saying something like Hospodi pomelui. I think he's talking to God."
"Call your mother," I said, no linguist I. "She's probably worried to death by now."
Obediently, he closed his eyes and sat silent for a while on the step below me. Then he opened his eyes. "She'd just found out I wasn't in bed," he said. "They're coming." He shivered a little. "Daddy gets so mad sometimes. He hasn't the most equitable of temperaments!"
"Oh, Vincent!" I laughed. "What an odd mixture you are!"
"No, I'm not," he said. "Both my mother and daddy are of the People. Remy is a mixture 'cause his grampa was of the Earth, but mine came from the Home. You know-when it was destroyed. I wish I could have seen the ship our People came to Earth in. Daddy says when he was little, they used to dig up pieces of it from the walls and floors of the canyon where it crashed. But they still had a life ship in a shed behind their house and they'd play they were escaping again from the big ship." Vincent shivered. "But some didn't escape. Some died in the sky and some died because Earth people were scared of them."