“How did you get in here? What are you doing out of your section?”
“Did you get fired? Are you going away too? If you do I’ll kill myself!”
Looking at the frail boy who had learned to sneak from his room almost as soon as he had learned to walk, who had learned to lie with the facility of a veteran diplomat, who had learned to trust no one at all, probably including her, who had learned, God only knew how, that he was the world’s most lavishly housed and protected-guarded prisoner, and had yet to learn why, she knew that she couldn’t leave him. She told him so. She asked him how he had managed to get to the upper floor without being stopped, and he, wiser than she, put a finger to his lips and smiled.
“Johnny, I do want to talk to you sometime soon. Not now, not here. Outside, under the tree where we saw the squirrel fight. Remember?” He nodded and she added, “The first sunny day.”
When they had their talk Winifred told the boy that she had been fired as his doctor, but that she would remain so that he would have a friend there, someone he could talk to when he wanted to talk. And she told him, after taking a deep breath and hoping the trees weren’t bugged, that she wouldn’t tell anyone what he had to say to her, if he didn’t want her to. She told him that no one else was likely to keep his secrets, and he nodded in agreement. Winifred stood up then to return to the house. Johnny stopped her.
“They don’t like me, do they? They don’t like you either. Everyone’s afraid all the time. They wish I’d get sick and die. But I won’t. And when I know they’re afraid, when they see me looking at them, I make them more afraid. I’m a mirror. Nobody can see me, they just see themselves when they look.”
Winifred sat down again and pulled him down at her side. “What do you mean? Why do you say they’re afraid?”
“Look at them. Always sneaking around listening to me, watching what I do, even when I go to the bathroom. And when I eat. And when I had a cold last month I heard Dr. Clephorn say maybe this time. And I knew what he meant. They could all go away and do something else…. They don’t like it here. It’s too quiet and dull.”
Oh, Lordy, Winifred thought, Lordy, Lordy.
Johnny jumped up. “He’s coming,” he said. He stared at Winifred hard. “Some day will you tell me who I am and why I have to stay here?”
Wakeman came into sight around the trees and Winifred also stood, up, brushing her skirt, waving to him. “Yes,” she said under her breath to Johnny, who wasn’t even looking at her now, but was throwing stones at birds in a meadow off to their left. “I’ll tell you everything,” she said, promising, knowing her promise to be reckless, but knowing that he needed it.
She was told later that day not to take the boy away from the house to talk to him, and she realized what Johnny seemed already to know: the entire house was bugged. Meekly she agreed, and reported what conversation had taken place between them out in the open. It was a truncated report of their talk.
During the summer when she had her three weeks’ vacation she told most of it to Matt, who did record it. Matt and Lisa were the only two people she felt at all certain about any more, just as she was the only person Johnny felt certain about. And Matt and Lisa had each other. So it worked out.
Matt and Lisa had a shadow over them now, where there had been none. They seldom mentioned Blake, and, his dog had vanished so there wasn’t even that reminder. They had moved again, this time to a subdivision that had escaped urban renewal by incorporating itself into a village and passing a law against the renewal act. They had a large, slightly dilapidated frame house with a big yard that was fragrant with lilacs and peonies.
Winifred spent a week with them and they talked openly, the only place where she permitted herself this luxury.
Obie had clamped down on Blake’s public appearances, she learned. The boy had not been exploited for the past six weeks or longer. Maybe Obie had him in a school somewhere; no one knew, and Obie turned away all questions, saying only that Blake would return to take his proper place among men.
Matt exclaimed over the Star Child’s precocious grasp of the conditions at the estate, and Winifred shrugged it away. “He was bound to realize what was going on sooner or later. He’s not stupid, and he has something that isn’t bound by intelligence. He can sense much more than he can logically understand. And he trusts his intuition more than his logic. Most of the time he’s right, incidentally. He has no reason to trust or believe anyone around him. When I called him paranoid, it was a description of fact, but if the paranoiac is being watched and hounded, isn’t his paranoia reasonable?”
“But why?” Lisa asked. “Why can’t they simply let him grow up like other children? Why are they so afraid of him?”
“Are you kidding?” Winifred said. “So the aliens return and find that their kid has been allowed to run the streets and get himself hit by a truck and has had his neck broken? They turn on the big guns and that’s it. Or what if he is taken by the Chinese. They’re still screaming over him from time to time, you know. What if he is indoctrinated in some kookie philosophy that the aliens detest? What if he learns that the little bit of paradise he has come to expect doesn’t represent the rest of the world and reports slum conditions, poverty, pandemic malnutrition on three-fourths of Earth, wars in Africa, and Asia, and South America, near slave conditions that exist in most areas of the world so that the U.N. space programs can proceed in all due haste? You see? If and when they come back, they will see that we treat him like a prince.”
Matt was watching her closely and Winifred stopped.
“You think they’ll ease you out anyway?” Matt asked a bit later.
“Sure. They’ll find that they aren’t getting enough from me to pay for my keep. And the kid will be growing up, you know. A young teenager soon, he’ll turn from a woman confidant, and they’ll supply an understanding male who will worm his way into the kid’s life. They’ve been trying, just haven’t found the right one, but in time they will. And then I’ll go.”
Winifred couldn’t sleep that night, but sat on the Daniel’s porch and listened to the crickets and the night birds, and when Matt joined her and offered a drink, she accepted it with a sigh. “I have to tell him, Matt. When they give me my papers, there won’t be any good-byes. That isn’t how they operate, and God only knows when that time will come. I’ll have to pick my own time and tell him everything.”
Matt nodded, a blurry white shadow that moved slightly on the darkened porch.
Winifred continued, as if to herself, “He has to have an identity he can hang onto. He’s got nothing.
Chapter Seven
BLAKE watched the kids playing ball for ten or fifteen minutes, then walked casually to the stand of bicycles and worked one out of the middle. A nondescript red standard bike. That’s what he had decided on. He eased the bike out and pushed it a few feet, then got on and rode away slowly, not drawing any attention to himself. The ball game went on.
No one his age walked. All the kids under fourteen had bikes, and a boy walking drew glances. Lesson one. The other boys wore sneakers and jeans, and he was still dressed in the white shirt that Obie insisted on for the meetings. He stole proper clothes from a swimming pool locker room. Money was going to be one of the biggest problems, however. He scanned a newspaper left on a bench at a bus stop. At least Obie hadn’t put his picture in the papers yet. Blake tossed the paper down and got back on the stolen bike. He had to go somewhere. He was tired, more tired than he’d ever been before. He had walked four days and most of four nights, sleeping only when he knew he couldn’t take another step. What he wanted most was a bed with clean sheets and a blanket and something hot to eat and a bath with soap and hot water. He blinked hard and started to pedal.